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Ex-Google Employee's Memo Says Executives Shut Down Pro-Diversity Discussions (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: A memo written by a former Google engineer claims that the company's human resources department and a senior vice president pressured him to stop discussing diversity initiatives on company forums, interactions that ultimately motivated him to leave the company. The document, which was written in 2016 and shared publicly this week, provides a striking counterpoint to allegations made by former Google employees James Damore and David Gudeman in a discrimination lawsuit filed against their former employer. Cory Altheide, the former employee who wrote the memo, began work as a security engineer at Google in 2010 and departed the company in January 2016. He recently published his account in a public Google document. Altheide posted several articles and comments to internal discussion groups that promoted diversity in the workplace and was chastised for doing so, he wrote.
This isn't exactly a "counter-point". From an article about Damore's case:
“We want to be inclusive of people not ideas” one employee identified as Alon Altman wrote in a message included in the lawsuit. Damore says that sentiment was backed up at an Inclusion and Diversity Summit he attended in June, when he was told by Google employees the company does not value “viewpoint diversity,” but actively strives for “demographic diversity.”
This new memo seems to reinforce this perspective. It might not be illegal or anything, but this memo definately doesn't "counter" the claims included in damore's suit.
This whole diversity/gender debate thing is getting and more into an absurd territory of epic proportions. It's quite some time ago that I've been able to take larger parts of mainstream contributions to this debate seriously.
To me a very welcome addition of reason and level-headedness was the open letter of ~100 women of influence and fame in France speaking out against #MeToo, it's totalitarianism and a false pretense of feminism published two days ago in Le Monde (basically the French nyt) that went largely unnoticed/uncovered by mainstream media. These ladies deserve a medal or something and they deserve to be heard, despite mainstream media trying to ignore them.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
FTFA:
Over the course of several months, employees engaged in a debate about gender representation at Google in an internal thread titled “If you think women in tech is just a pipeline problem, you haven’t been paying attention.” The debate became contentious, Altheide said in his memo, and had to be shut down by Sridhar Ramaswamy, Google’s senior vice president of ads and commerce, and Urs Holzle, Google’s senior vice president of technical infrastructure. . . .
Ramaswamy wrote: “Google is not a debate club or a philosophy class. We are a workplace and we have an obligation to make sure our discussions remain respectful. Debates around topics like product excellence can support a wide variety of viewpoints and are great to have. I don’t think the same can be said for debates around sensitive issues such as gender, religion, race, or sexual orientation.”
So well researched and reasoned that the authors of the two papers he relies on the most have publicly stated that he didn't understand them, and that his conclusions are wrong.
The basic mistake he makes repeatedly is to assume that the variations the papers discuss have vastly more effect and influence than they actually do.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I was referring to Damore with that part.
He wrote one on-topic memo. This guy kept posting off-topic even after being asked to stop. And in the Damore situation, the people who brought attention to it in that case were the SJWs who leaked the memo, not Damore. So your OP was just plain off topic. Maybe you just haven't had your morning coffee yet.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
So well researched and reasoned that the authors of the two papers he relies on the most have publicly stated that he didn't understand them, and that his conclusions are wrong.
Really? As far as I know they distanced themselves from Damore (nobody likes to be lynched in a witch hunt) and not from what he wrote. The article "The Google Memo: Four Scientists Respond" features the comments of four scientists (including scientists cited by Damore) about the Google Memo. Here are some excerpts:
"The author of the Google essay on issues related to diversity gets nearly all of the science and its implications exactly right. "
L. Jussim
"A Google employee recently shared a memo that referenced some of my scholarly research on psychological sex differences[...]. Alongside other evidence, the employee argued, in part, that this research indicates affirmative action policies based on biological sex are misguided. Maybe, maybe not. "
D. Schmitt
"[...]this memo unleashed a firestorm of negative commentary, most of which ignored the memo’s evidence-based arguments. Among commentators who claim the memo’s empirical facts are wrong, I haven’t read a single one who understand sexual selection theory, animal behavior, and sex differences research."
G. Milller
"As a woman who’s worked in academia and within STEM, I didn’t find the memo offensive or sexist in the least. I found it to be a well thought out document, asking for greater tolerance for differences in opinion, and treating people as individuals instead of based on group membership."
D. Soh
It is interesting to note that while Schmitt (who is extensively cited in Damore's memo) seems a bit critical of Damore, he basically confirms what Damore says: he keeps saying that treating sexes as dichotomous is wrong, which is exactly what Damore said. In fact Schmitt writes: "treating people as dichotomous sexes is exactly what many affirmative action policies do" (that is what Damore was rebutting).
Many tried to misrepresent the Google Memo, including Wired, where you can read things like:
“It is unclear to me that this sex difference would play a role in success within the Google workplace (in particular, not being able to handle stresses of leadership in the workplace. That’s a huge stretch to me),” writes Schmitt. So, yes, that’s the researcher Damore cites disagreeing with Damore.
That seems a rebuttal of Damore's claim, by the same author he cited. Except for the fact that Damore never said something like: "women can't handle the stresses of leadership in the workplace". Nor he implied that. When you resort to straw man arguments, you probably lack a strong point.
And here is the actual document, so you don't have to scroll thru the Gizmodo clickbait. https://www.documentcloud.org/...
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
The right have controlled America since Clinton took office by moving the Democratic party right to forge the alliance that won him the election. They own the State legislatures, the House, Senate and Presidency. Even Obama was pretty right of center. I think you're mistaking "Seeing a lot of left wing social issues on TV and in movies" with real political power. The only thing the left hasn't lost ground on in the last 30 years is gay rights. Every other issue (Abortion, Gun Control, Healthcare, minimum wage, the Wars, economic regulation, etc) they've been beaten back. Even the ACA was a desperate and lousy compromise and the left giving up on Single Payer once again.
Part of the trouble is when Clinton moved the Democratic party right the Republicans had to follow suit in order to maintain their brand. That's a big part of where the hard right shift came from. It's why you see folks like Roy Moore winning primaries and only losing the election because of a sex scandal (and even then only by 1.5 points).
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The Damore memo itself is so full of caveats that anyone who still frames it as some extremist document, nearly half a year out, must be a lazy mofo.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll