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Critics Debate Autism's Role in James Damore's Google Memo (themarysue.com)
James Damore "wants you to know he isn't using autism as an excuse," reports a Silicon Valley newspaper, commenting on the fired Google engineer's new interview with the Guardian. But they also note that "he says being on the spectrum means he 'sees things differently'," and the weekend editor at the entertainment and "geek culture" site The Mary Sue sees a problem in the way that interview was framed.
It's the author of this Guardian article, not James Damore himself, who makes the harmful suggestion that Damore's infamous Google memo and subsequent doubling-down are somehow caused by his autism... It frames autism as some sort of basic decency deficiency, rather than a neurological condition shared by millions of people.... This whole article is peppered with weird suggestions like this, suggestions which detract from an otherwise interesting piece.. All these weird suggestions that autism and misogyny/bigotry are somehow tied (as if autistic feminists didn't exist) do unfortunately detract from one of the article's great points.
Having worked at a number of companies large and small, I can at least anecdotally confirm that their diversity training rarely includes a discussion of neurodiversity, and when it does, it's not particularly empathetic or helpful... Many corporate cultures are plainly designed for neurotypical extroverts and no one else -- and that should change. I really do think Lewis meant well in pointing that out. But the other thing that should change? The way the media scapegoats autism as a source of anti-social behavior.
Having worked at a number of companies large and small, I can at least anecdotally confirm that their diversity training rarely includes a discussion of neurodiversity, and when it does, it's not particularly empathetic or helpful... Many corporate cultures are plainly designed for neurotypical extroverts and no one else -- and that should change. I really do think Lewis meant well in pointing that out. But the other thing that should change? The way the media scapegoats autism as a source of anti-social behavior.
that is all.
They call for tolerance on all views on life except when it doesn't suit their own agenda. I call BS.
The point of the (well written) original article was that Damore had handled things poorly due to his condition, not that his opinions arose due to his condition. E.g. he describes how he was associated with people he had never supported following the media backlash, and his poor social skills prevented him from being able to properly articulate his true position. Also he described how aspects of the wording in his memo could have been improved if he had been able to better predict the reactions of those around him.
It seems to me that this Mary Sue article has an axe to grind, perhaps not surprising given the source.
The media "broke coverage" of Autism with Rain Man in 1988, and other than a few brief echos on Oprah and such it didn't say much again until the new millennium.
Would you think that with 17 years of practice, they'd have it down to a graceful sensitive socially correct science by now? I wouldn't. There was 10 years of "AWARENESS" beating the drum as loudly as possible while the "diagnosed" rates climbed from 1:10,000 through 1:150 and settled down around 1:68. Now that everybody is AWARE, there's been scant attempt to teach the nuance between Aspergers' and the various levels of dysfunctionality.
Give it another generation, when people who were AWARE in elementary school start framing the message it might take on a more human tone. For now, we're still getting our stories from the barely clued in.
... because I read Damore's memo and found it to be perfectly reasonable.
James Damore was asked to provide feedback after attending a diversity event at Google; he provided feedback, and then like the crazy nutcases of the Communist Revolution in China, the "feminist" SJWs used that feedback to identify Damore as a prime candidate for destruction in their Cultural Revolution.
Seriously. If you've spent any time reading about the timeline of Damore's internal document, or listening to Damore speak, you'd realize that he was very badly mistreated by an insidious group of harpies who have zero interest in improving our world.
Damore's arguments are exactly the same ones Google is going to use to defend itself from sexual discrimination claims levied against it by women working there who don't get paid as much as men.
Google really stepped in it when they claimed Damore was full of shit, and then doubled down on the SJW bullshit that all pay differences between men and women are the result of discrimination.
Well, now Google has to defend itself from the women who work at Google and get paid less than the men there.
Google is screwed either way. If Damore is wrong, Google owes a lot of women a shitload of back pay. And if Google uses anything like Damore's arguments to defend themselves from sexual discrimination claims, they wrongfully fired Damore and owe him both money and likely some serious punitive damages.
Couldn't happen to a better bunch of SJWs.
His mistake was to speak up. Autism doesn't turn people into idiots, often quite the opposite, but it makes it difficult to predict how other people will react. Social customs are highly illogical and usually not codified, but they govern everyday life to a high degree. Autists often speak their mind and offend without intent to offend. It is difficult to understand that it could be wrong to say what you truly believe and can corroborate with facts. It's not a "basic decency" deficiency. Autists are typically honest people, simply because they are bad at deceiving other people. An honest person who doesn't know when to shut up can be quite exhausting however.
Damore's memo is the only thing in this whole debacle that is explicitly based on well established research.
What is wrong with you people? Have you even read his memo, or did you just take some "properly" interpreted version from leftist rags like Salon?
Boy, it's really telling that our reaction is, "They asked that man for his honest opinion about how they could get better, and DAMN he was an idiot to answer honestly! What was he thinking!?"
You can tell who is really in charge these days by saying "women are good X, men are good at Y, women are bad at Z, men are bad at Q" and the only part people care about is that you said women are bad at something.
He said many women were not as drawn to the current work environment that tends to exist around software engineering. He even suggested changing that environment to better suit women so more would be more interested in working there. You can argue against the science, but you cannot say that that is a misogynistic viewpoint. But that's exactly what he was fired for. It's sad, Google used to be such an awesome company before they went evil. I used to really cheer for them when they succeeded. Now, Google just like all the rest of the corporate bastards, I just want them to lose.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Autists usually believe you when you tell them something and they will respond honestly. So if you tell them that you want an "open and frank discussion", they will give you one. And they will of course not understand when you react in a hostile way because all they did was to give you what you wanted.
In other words, never ask an Autist for something you don't want because you WILL get it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You realize that people have been saying the same thing about you and deliberately trying to misdirect people. In all of the stories related to this, I've seen you or other posters dismiss Damore's memo as nonsense, state that it makes claims that aren't backed up by the research he cited, or claim that the studies are basically pseudoscience, but I think I've only seen one person actually post something that even began citing scientific literature to refute something in Damore's memo.
If there's this 100 years of research on the subject that shows everything that he said was utter nonsense, please start telling us where to find it. Even climate change skeptics around here have a better record of citing something. All you've done is to try to bury your head in the sand and try to convince everyone else that none of this can possibly be true because you don't like the conclusion. I don't really expect anyone here to change your mind because it already seems quite made up, but I'd ask you to actually try to back up some of your assertions.
He was probably told the "this is an open environment encouraging frank discussion of points of view" bullshit. And if he's a HFA he probably believed it, considered it and wrote his statement accordingly, honestly believing that there is actual interest in creating a "better" working environment instead of pushing an agenda.
It's a bit like Luther and his 95 theses. That man, too, believed that he could have an academic discussion with the Pope over his main income source...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
First, let's spin the time-o-meter back a bit and remember that Damore's original premise was impaired based on technical factors ALONE. This was a deficit of analysis, nothing psychological. He tried to mis-apply population and sub-group statistics without quantifying any null hypothesis or larger context.
Technical issues aside, the specific wording and tone used in his note is a separate issue. I'm no linguist or lit-crit person, but he seemed to be very abstract, as if he had no direct, personal involvement with the subject aside from investigating it and writing about it. Yet he was clearly trying to write a persuasion piece, which is what made the language disconnect apparent to me in the first place.
I read this as an effort to put forth and justify an opinion clad in flimsy technical garb, without the spine to clearly label it as a personal opinion. Weasel-words in the nether-world between a solid technical discussion and an opinion piece.
Then we get to when, how and why the piece was distributed. He had shared at least one earlier draft with several others within Google, with apparently no significant push-back. I've seen similar things happen in other organizations, when fringe opinions are shared within a small group with minimal reaction. Most often, it's "Oh, there he goes again.", and nobody takes it seriously, and may not even bother to read it. Or it is taken as a thought experiment, with no concerns about wider distribution. I have heard nothing about what any of the folks though about Damore's screed before it was widely shared.
We can see how Damore could have made bad assumptions about his general audience: First, he may have interpreted the earlier lack of push-back as approval. Second, he may have assumed the earlier readers were representative of the wider audience. Neither of these have anything to do with "the Autism Spectrum". These are common mistakes any of us can make with our generalizations and assumptions.
However, claiming involvement of "the Spectrum" in these errors without first showing that other factors weren't involved smells to me like excuse-making rather than a serious explanation, much less a mea culpa.
I'm starting to think the same thing as well. He seems unaware of both the last 100 years of research on the subject and that people would assume that not addressing it is a deliberate attempt to misdirect the reader, in the way that anti-diversity activists have also been doing for the last 100 years.
The initial assumption was that he must have done it deliberately, but perhaps it is possible that he really didn't mean to.
You constantly call all the egalitarians "anti-diversity", "racist", "misogynist", etc.
It doesn't take much for an idea to take off. People read something that makes sense and they repeat it - my constant assertions that there is a correlation between weak rights for women and high female CS enrollment is getting repeated everywhere (saw it repeatedly on Quora, for example). Another thought that got repeated a lot was the list of objective "privileges" enjoyed by western women (higher avg salary, better health, etc)
Here's another idea that I wish to gain traction: there are two separate concepts -
1. We must treat everyone equally
2. We must fix the injustices of the past (affirmative action)
You, and people like you, are trying to convince the rest of the world that those two separate concepts are the same. That is not true. For example, most people will get behind the concept of "Lets treat everyone equally", but not support affirmative action.
What you are doing, and what you (and the rest of the peanut gallery) always do is try to convince us that ignoring injustices of the past is the same as not treating everyone equally.. That is not true.
We all agree to treat everyone equally. We do not agree with affirmative action.
Disagreeing with affirmative action is not agreement with bigotry!
Disagreeing with affirmative action is not support for racism!
Disagreeing with affirmative action is not support for sexism!
We disagree with your methods because they are discriminatory.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
I can't speak for other posters, only myself. Please try not to lump us together.
There are two issues here, and I have been consistent about this. Firstly, while the studies he cites do have some interesting and valid results, he interprets them in a way that isn't justified in order to make his argument. For example, David Schmitt, the author of the "Why Canâ(TM)t a Man Be More Like a Woman? Sex Difference in Big Five Personality Traits Across 55 Cultures" paper that Damore cites, states that the biological differences account for 10% of the variance, and the other 90% is due to non-biological. Damore greatly over-values the biological component here.
The other issue is that he ignores the successes of attempts to address non-biological factors, except to complain that they make conservatives uncomfortable and to state that they should end (without real explanation of why, other than the implication that he thinks the issue is entirely biological).
He has had opportunities to expand on this and clarify, but instead stuck to his original biological essentialism. For example, in an interview he repeated the claim that pre-natal testosterone exposure has a big influence on career choice, but there is no scientific consensus for that at all. In fact, scientists had largely moved on from the entire nature vs. nurture argument 15+ years ago.
Please stop mis-characterising my arguments and instead make some of your own. We have an opportunity to discuss the details of the memo, rather than fling accusations of bad faith around.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
You constantly call all the egalitarians "anti-diversity", "racist", "misogynist", etc.
I do not. I am an egalitarian.
1. We must treat everyone equally
2. We must fix the injustices of the past (affirmative action)
You, and people like you, are trying to convince the rest of the world that those two separate concepts are the same. That is not true. For example, most people will get behind the concept of "Lets treat everyone equally", but not support affirmative action.
Simply treating everyone equally has been tried, in fact it has been law for decades in many places, but it hasn't addressed the inequalities. That's because the issues are often entrenched in systems and in the starting positions of all the players. It's like saying that a game of chess treats both players equally because the rules are the same for everyone, even though white doesn't start with a queen.
Having said that, I fully appreciate that affirmative action is highly controversial. To be absolutely clear I don't think everyone who opposes it is a bigot, that's silly. And sometimes affirmative action can be wrong, it can have unintended negative consequences, or even be malicious. But blanket rejection of it is also wrong, because it ignores reality and evidence in pursuit of some pure philosophical ideal.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
A tiny majority? 50.01%, then?
Or did you really mean "tiny minority"?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
When the left talks about inequality, they specifically talk about inequality in outcomes, not inequality in opportunity. For them, it's axiomatic that an unequal outcome can only be due to an unequal opportunity and/or a discriminatory process.
For example, the EEOC will look at hiring aptitude tests and if the distribution curve for black or female candidates is different than white or male candidates, it's presumed to be discriminatory. Additionally, even though the Affirmative Action law is proscriptive against hiring quotas, the EEOC specifically enforces the law like there is a quota. For example, if you have a large enough employee pool, and have only 6% blacks in technology vs. their 13% representation in the population as a whole, that's often treated as being indicative of a pattern of discrimination regardless of what the pool of candidates looks like (and blacks account for 6% of computer science majors).
so they're terrified of a work environment that's not conducive to women. Every single HR rep and tech CEO is salivating over the prospect of getting women into tech in mass. I'm not going to debate if they're better or worse than men taking as a statistical whole, but there's plenty of them that are superb at it and staying out because the work environment stinks. Getting them in would cause wages to plummet as the workforce increases by anywhere from 10-50%.
Anything that upsets that growing apple cart is going to be brushed aside. It's not SJWism, it's good 'ole capitalism.
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