I fail to see the progression in logic here. Someone had to win the election. The degree of toxicity cannot be measured by whether or not someone won the election, because someone must win the election.
What I will grant you is that, despite his demagoguery, Trump was in fact talking about actual issues (as were Jill Stein and Gary Johnson). He didn't simply beat up on Mexicans and Muslims, he also had a positive message "Make America Great Again" - and he spoke a lot about bringing back jobs and ending people's despair. Hillary gave people nothing to grasp on to, diverting any question into a negative comment about how terrible Trump was. She also personified the establishment in an election cycle when people hated the establishment.
But having said that, even Trump's positive messages were full-on bullshit - and the discussion surrounding them was simply people shouting past one another.
do realize Congress is still slowly pushing the Republican agenda.
They've been remarkably ineffective thus far. They'd better hurry up or their own base is going to punish them in the midterms.
what has the left done lately?
Haha, well, nothing. They can't even decide what they all stand for in unison. Actually, now the Republicans are headed down that same road. Obamacare seemed to be a unifying theme, but they can't even agree on repealing that. Anyway, the left chose to follow Republicans down the "chase the money" rabbit hole, and so they lost any ability to stand out from Republicans on any issue that requires moral high ground on the relationship between big money and government. They decided to pursue an identity politics strategy, and so they lost moral high ground on what used to be something that happened mostly with extremist groups like the KKK or the Black Panthers. They have been slaughtered on the grass roots level, losing control of a majority of state houses and governorships. They lost the US legislature, Supreme Court, and now Presidency. Some of this stuff is pendulum swinging, and the right is currently melting down as well so it will be interesting to see what comes out of the midterms. I'd love to see a third party, but I think that is not happening.
This is, again, Fox News style "fair and balanced".
No, it's pointing out that there is no bad guy/good guy. Both sides have an extreme wing that is drowning out any real discussion. Both sides call each other (and even themselves) names. You'll hear "RINO" on the right just like on the left they'll force out a liberal university professor who doesn't jump on the identity politics bandwagon. I'm anti-extremist far more than I am anti-left or anti-right. I think the more moderate left and moderate right have very similar goals, just very different ideas of how to implement these goals.
Now where I'll agree with you is that the extreme right tends to still be focused on goals. The goals might be retarded, but they are at least goals. Wishy washy as they might be, the Tea Party at least has a common set of goals listed on their website. The mirror Occupy movement has nothing, just meaningless platitudes. This is a common problem on the extreme left, where they seem a lot more focused on protesting and shaming themselves and other than on any coherent endgame. As long as this is the case, the right will win the elections as people need to know what they are voting for. Masked people breaking stuff, assaulting people, and burning shit is not it an issue that can be voted for. And that's what I mean by drowning out. The left is being portrayed by violent extremists and PC run amok. The right is being portrayed by mouth-breathing Trump supporters, Milo supporters, and people protesting the tearing down of Confederate statues. The truth is that most people aren't like that. Except at Google, apparently.
I agree with you if you substitute "affirmative action" with "quotas". Affirmative action is just a system where you measure your hiring and employee mix vs. the available pool of candidates to make sure you don't have bias in your system. Sometimes you need to take concrete steps to counter this bias, but only foolish companies use quotas. More often it would be focused recruiting to improve the candidate pool.
“The doc asserted that Google has a lower bar for diversity candidates,” reads one question ranked highly by employees in an internal voting system. “This is hurting minority Googlers because it creates the perception that they are less qualified. What can we do to combat that perception?”
“I am a moderately conservative Googler, and I am and have been scared to share my beliefs,” the question reads. “The loud voice here is the liberal one. Conservative voices are hushed. What is leadership doing to ensure Googlers like me feel invited and accepted, not just tolerated or safe from angry mobs?”
Of course, the same article has such gems as:
The document cited purported principles of evolutionary psychology to argue that women are not well-suited to be good engineers.
Which is of course not at all what the document said.
one of the references is a sociology paper that does not back his conclusion, and the other references are cites to Wikipedia. give me a break.
OK, you don't like his references. That's fine, and is an appropriate discussion to have. I don't know why you say the sociology paper doesn't support his statement when he says "Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men" and the paper says "In contrast, gender differences on the people–things dimension of interests are ‘very large’ (d = 1.18), with women more people-oriented and less thing-oriented than men."
I actually agree that his jump to "These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas" is a reach. But that's a good discussion, not grounds for Amish-style shunning.
this rant called women "neurotic" and "anxious"
Where? He says that the population of women is more neurotic than the population of men. He links to the Wikipedia article which has links to two studies backing his claim. Are you arguing that he shouldn't discuss scientific findings because it might disturb the lady folk? That's fucked up.
So the first line has two references in it, and you say "backed by nothing". The last line again contains a reference. Discuss the references, don't pretend he's basing it on nothing.
The extraversion part has no references, true. But this is not a research paper - it is an internal memo that is more full of citations than I've ever seen in a memo. If you worked at Google, it would be totally reasonable to ask where the hell he got that part from (though to be honest I found it right away Googling for it).
And if the Google climate can't handle the debunking of a young man's memo, then it is all he is accusing it of being. He didn't drink the Kool-Aid.
They find it ironic, too. That's why they are rejoicing. They are watching the left get burned by their own tools.
If this is not an example of conservative white male privilege, I don't know what is.
This is what you get when you force people into an identity that they don't want. Love how you added "conservative" in there, as if liberal males are magically free of the advantages that white males generally enjoy.
To be clear, it is a moral failure on the part of society that a black man is forced to adopt the identity of a black man, no matter what position he has in life. No matter if he has anything at all in common with any other black man, he's forced into that identity. This is not a choice, and it's a shame, and people should not be surprised when black men then choose to band together to fight their common oppression. Except for white supremacists and extremists, white men do not typically feel a conscious "white male" affinity toward other white males. Irish? Sure. Italain? Sure. German? Sure. But white? No. But if you repeat the error that we've done with black males, they will eventually adopt identity politics, band together, and generally this country will be worse for it. So cut it out.
Yes, despite his memo's rather awkward inclusion of female vs. male traits, it was actually a memo about Google's intolerant culture - and they did a wonderful job of proving his point for him.
While I agree with your assessment of what passes for the "left" today, I think you are ignoring the same tendencies on the right. You have a similar schism between the establishment and the Tea Party types. You have name calling and demonization rather than discussion (e.g. libtard, snowflake, feminazi, SJW, socialist, etc.)
None of those things are good, and both left and right really need to check their behavior if we want to make any claim to be upholding America's founding ideals.
There is a slight difference. SJW is basically a slur, like "racist" or "sexist". You label a person with that in order to shut down discussion. You can politely point out that someone's "Hate Has No Home" sign is really just a form of "virtue signalling" and then still have a reasonable discussion about whether or not this is a reasonable viewpoint.
It certainly is a problem at college campuses, and eventually those people do graduate so this seems plausible. It hasn't hit my company on the East Coast.
It's a great phrase, and perfectly describes what is happening. It's so great that people are already misusing it, just like Susan Wojcicki is misusing "anti-diversity" and "sexism".
"Women have: Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness."
OK, so without going on a Google hunt, lets say for the sake of this discussion that this position is unsupported. So he got a fact wrong - dispute the fact and make him back it up.
And "Women have more neuroticism." this is supported only by a link to the wikipedia page on neuroticism. That page does say that women average moderately higher than men... and nothing else. One sentence. Then he goes on to speculate that this may be the reason why women get paid less, without supporting that statement.
So it IS a supported statement, but you dispute his conjecture that neuroticism has anything to do with pay. Fair enough, but I think it is at least as shaky to definitively declare that all female-male pay imbalance is 100% due to discriminatory practices. Where is the science there? It's fine to have these discussions - we shouldn't be shaming people into silence, we should be discussing the facts that we know and our interpretation of these facts.
If you're going to do it, you need to be super rigorous in backing up your claims
I have no problem with that, so long as you hold up the other side to the same scrutiny. For the purposes of a company memo - as opposed to a scientific paper - I think it has a lot of citations. It's completely reasonable to ask him for sources on the un-cited "facts". It's unreasonable to fire him for not citing his facts.
Most of this shit is totally irrelevant to his suggested actions, he could have omitted this section entirely.
I actually agree. The thrust of the memo is the close-minded culture at Google. If I were critiquing his argument style, I'd say that his focus on women vs. men distracts from his main point. On the other hand, him being fired made his point for him in a way far superior to anything he could have typed - though I'm certain he did not want to be fired.
despite all of his protestations of bias he certainly seems to be exhibiting a great deal of it himself.
Everyone is biased. You are, I am. It's not about whether you are biased but how you measure and manage it. Sometimes we even hold biases up as moral virtue.
The problem was that he had basically made himself useless as an employee - he can no longer be put into a team without creating a hostile work environment, just by his presence.
The fact that Google is an environment where someone who you disagree with on some political issue is not an acceptable co-worker is very damning. That rep is digging the hole deeper. Maybe this guy is a complete PITA that is impossible to work with. Maybe he never shuts up about this stuff, and the memo gave them an excuse to get rid of him. I have no idea. But if they really fired him just for this memo, they have the same problem that colleges do - a very closed-minded culture where liberals beat the shit out of each other as a form of virtue signalling.
Maybe it would have been better sourced if he knew that it was going to a broader audience? Or maybe he would have taken out the ranting bits? I don't know.
Yeah, it was an internal memo meant as internal discussion to a small-ish (for Google) group. It was not meant as a standalone document, and from the lead-in is clearly a response to an ongoing discussion.
His entire argument is that ability to do certain things is based on genetics with the implication that females can't do certain things.
Did you read the same thing I did? Please quote the part where he makes that implication. He specifically says this is not the case:
Note, I’m not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.” I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.
Did you read the paper? AmiMoJo's response is the proper one - point out counter-examples and provide links to alternate research. Demonizing people is not an effective way to win an argument and it is sad to see progressive-minded people resort to such tactics. The main casualties have been other progressives, university professors and presidents and such - because conservatives on the whole would wear an insult from a progressive as a badge of honor. This guy isn't even a conservative, he's a Libertarian.
Slashdot Mirror
If they did, Trump wouldn't have won the election
I fail to see the progression in logic here. Someone had to win the election. The degree of toxicity cannot be measured by whether or not someone won the election, because someone must win the election.
What I will grant you is that, despite his demagoguery, Trump was in fact talking about actual issues (as were Jill Stein and Gary Johnson). He didn't simply beat up on Mexicans and Muslims, he also had a positive message "Make America Great Again" - and he spoke a lot about bringing back jobs and ending people's despair. Hillary gave people nothing to grasp on to, diverting any question into a negative comment about how terrible Trump was. She also personified the establishment in an election cycle when people hated the establishment.
But having said that, even Trump's positive messages were full-on bullshit - and the discussion surrounding them was simply people shouting past one another.
do realize Congress is still slowly pushing the Republican agenda.
They've been remarkably ineffective thus far. They'd better hurry up or their own base is going to punish them in the midterms.
what has the left done lately?
Haha, well, nothing. They can't even decide what they all stand for in unison. Actually, now the Republicans are headed down that same road. Obamacare seemed to be a unifying theme, but they can't even agree on repealing that. Anyway, the left chose to follow Republicans down the "chase the money" rabbit hole, and so they lost any ability to stand out from Republicans on any issue that requires moral high ground on the relationship between big money and government. They decided to pursue an identity politics strategy, and so they lost moral high ground on what used to be something that happened mostly with extremist groups like the KKK or the Black Panthers. They have been slaughtered on the grass roots level, losing control of a majority of state houses and governorships. They lost the US legislature, Supreme Court, and now Presidency. Some of this stuff is pendulum swinging, and the right is currently melting down as well so it will be interesting to see what comes out of the midterms. I'd love to see a third party, but I think that is not happening.
This is, again, Fox News style "fair and balanced".
No, it's pointing out that there is no bad guy/good guy. Both sides have an extreme wing that is drowning out any real discussion. Both sides call each other (and even themselves) names. You'll hear "RINO" on the right just like on the left they'll force out a liberal university professor who doesn't jump on the identity politics bandwagon. I'm anti-extremist far more than I am anti-left or anti-right. I think the more moderate left and moderate right have very similar goals, just very different ideas of how to implement these goals.
Now where I'll agree with you is that the extreme right tends to still be focused on goals. The goals might be retarded, but they are at least goals. Wishy washy as they might be, the Tea Party at least has a common set of goals listed on their website. The mirror Occupy movement has nothing, just meaningless platitudes. This is a common problem on the extreme left, where they seem a lot more focused on protesting and shaming themselves and other than on any coherent endgame. As long as this is the case, the right will win the elections as people need to know what they are voting for. Masked people breaking stuff, assaulting people, and burning shit is not it an issue that can be voted for. And that's what I mean by drowning out. The left is being portrayed by violent extremists and PC run amok. The right is being portrayed by mouth-breathing Trump supporters, Milo supporters, and people protesting the tearing down of Confederate statues. The truth is that most people aren't like that. Except at Google, apparently.
I agree with you if you substitute "affirmative action" with "quotas". Affirmative action is just a system where you measure your hiring and employee mix vs. the available pool of candidates to make sure you don't have bias in your system. Sometimes you need to take concrete steps to counter this bias, but only foolish companies use quotas. More often it would be focused recruiting to improve the candidate pool.
Wired has a writeup
Some upvoted questions:
Of course, the same article has such gems as:
Which is of course not at all what the document said.
Yes, that is basically Google's response as well. Maybe a good job prospect for you?
one of the references is a sociology paper that does not back his conclusion, and the other references are cites to Wikipedia. give me a break.
OK, you don't like his references. That's fine, and is an appropriate discussion to have. I don't know why you say the sociology paper doesn't support his statement when he says "Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men" and the paper says "In contrast, gender differences on the people–things dimension of interests are ‘very large’ (d = 1.18), with women more people-oriented and less thing-oriented than men."
I actually agree that his jump to "These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas" is a reach. But that's a good discussion, not grounds for Amish-style shunning.
this rant called women "neurotic" and "anxious"
Where? He says that the population of women is more neurotic than the population of men. He links to the Wikipedia article which has links to two studies backing his claim. Are you arguing that he shouldn't discuss scientific findings because it might disturb the lady folk? That's fucked up.
Who am I to rewrite Dr. Seuss? :)
So the first line has two references in it, and you say "backed by nothing". The last line again contains a reference. Discuss the references, don't pretend he's basing it on nothing.
The extraversion part has no references, true. But this is not a research paper - it is an internal memo that is more full of citations than I've ever seen in a memo. If you worked at Google, it would be totally reasonable to ask where the hell he got that part from (though to be honest I found it right away Googling for it).
And if the Google climate can't handle the debunking of a young man's memo, then it is all he is accusing it of being. He didn't drink the Kool-Aid.
he outright asserted, based on no proof or bad science, that women have "more anxiety" and are somehow biologically not suited to be engineers.
Congratulations, you revealed yourself to have not read the paper. Citation please.
what woman would be willing to work with such a toolbox?
Any woman willing to discuss facts and science.
And sorry if not wanting to keep employing someone who thinks women are biologically inferior and unsuited to working at Google is a bad thing.
Quote me where he makes that claim in the memo. Because I think you didn't it, even it it's widely-distributed, heavily edited form.
Are there times when the right don't have discussions. Sure, but again, it's a much less severe degree than on the left.
Maybe. But whether or not its worse or better on one side or the other, the loud, toxic discussion overwhelms all else.
And to better to do that, we should honestly judge each side on its own. and not falsely equate the two, pretending that is "fair and balanced"
Yeah, my left-leaning friends accuse me of false equivalency all the time. Getting it from both sides is how I know I'm on the right track.
And with one comment I have a rabid Apple fan calling me a hater and an anti-Apple nutjob suggesting that I suck off Tim Cook. That's awesome.
seem to be rejoicing at pushing a NLRB complaint.
They find it ironic, too. That's why they are rejoicing. They are watching the left get burned by their own tools.
If this is not an example of conservative white male privilege, I don't know what is.
This is what you get when you force people into an identity that they don't want. Love how you added "conservative" in there, as if liberal males are magically free of the advantages that white males generally enjoy.
To be clear, it is a moral failure on the part of society that a black man is forced to adopt the identity of a black man, no matter what position he has in life. No matter if he has anything at all in common with any other black man, he's forced into that identity. This is not a choice, and it's a shame, and people should not be surprised when black men then choose to band together to fight their common oppression. Except for white supremacists and extremists, white men do not typically feel a conscious "white male" affinity toward other white males. Irish? Sure. Italain? Sure. German? Sure. But white? No. But if you repeat the error that we've done with black males, they will eventually adopt identity politics, band together, and generally this country will be worse for it. So cut it out.
Google was foolish to fire him.
Yes, despite his memo's rather awkward inclusion of female vs. male traits, it was actually a memo about Google's intolerant culture - and they did a wonderful job of proving his point for him.
A lot has changed since you went to prison.
Huh? They forced Apple to fix the issue, even though it only occurred when you had the cache turned off in Safari. They obviously have some pull.
While I agree with your assessment of what passes for the "left" today, I think you are ignoring the same tendencies on the right. You have a similar schism between the establishment and the Tea Party types. You have name calling and demonization rather than discussion (e.g. libtard, snowflake, feminazi, SJW, socialist, etc.)
None of those things are good, and both left and right really need to check their behavior if we want to make any claim to be upholding America's founding ideals.
There is a slight difference. SJW is basically a slur, like "racist" or "sexist". You label a person with that in order to shut down discussion. You can politely point out that someone's "Hate Has No Home" sign is really just a form of "virtue signalling" and then still have a reasonable discussion about whether or not this is a reasonable viewpoint.
It certainly is a problem at college campuses, and eventually those people do graduate so this seems plausible. It hasn't hit my company on the East Coast.
It's a great phrase, and perfectly describes what is happening. It's so great that people are already misusing it, just like Susan Wojcicki is misusing "anti-diversity" and "sexism".
And oh, the irony of an alt-rightist resorting to government regulations in order to keep his job in an at-will state!
That's like saying it's ironic that a pro-tax politician doesn't pay more than he needs to.
You use the tools available to you, even if you wish they weren't there.
"Women have: Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness."
OK, so without going on a Google hunt, lets say for the sake of this discussion that this position is unsupported. So he got a fact wrong - dispute the fact and make him back it up.
And "Women have more neuroticism." this is supported only by a link to the wikipedia page on neuroticism. That page does say that women average moderately higher than men... and nothing else. One sentence. Then he goes on to speculate that this may be the reason why women get paid less, without supporting that statement.
So it IS a supported statement, but you dispute his conjecture that neuroticism has anything to do with pay. Fair enough, but I think it is at least as shaky to definitively declare that all female-male pay imbalance is 100% due to discriminatory practices. Where is the science there? It's fine to have these discussions - we shouldn't be shaming people into silence, we should be discussing the facts that we know and our interpretation of these facts.
If you're going to do it, you need to be super rigorous in backing up your claims
I have no problem with that, so long as you hold up the other side to the same scrutiny. For the purposes of a company memo - as opposed to a scientific paper - I think it has a lot of citations. It's completely reasonable to ask him for sources on the un-cited "facts". It's unreasonable to fire him for not citing his facts.
Most of this shit is totally irrelevant to his suggested actions, he could have omitted this section entirely.
I actually agree. The thrust of the memo is the close-minded culture at Google. If I were critiquing his argument style, I'd say that his focus on women vs. men distracts from his main point. On the other hand, him being fired made his point for him in a way far superior to anything he could have typed - though I'm certain he did not want to be fired.
despite all of his protestations of bias he certainly seems to be exhibiting a great deal of it himself.
Everyone is biased. You are, I am. It's not about whether you are biased but how you measure and manage it. Sometimes we even hold biases up as moral virtue.
The problem was that he had basically made himself useless as an employee - he can no longer be put into a team without creating a hostile work environment, just by his presence.
The fact that Google is an environment where someone who you disagree with on some political issue is not an acceptable co-worker is very damning. That rep is digging the hole deeper. Maybe this guy is a complete PITA that is impossible to work with. Maybe he never shuts up about this stuff, and the memo gave them an excuse to get rid of him. I have no idea. But if they really fired him just for this memo, they have the same problem that colleges do - a very closed-minded culture where liberals beat the shit out of each other as a form of virtue signalling.
Maybe it would have been better sourced if he knew that it was going to a broader audience? Or maybe he would have taken out the ranting bits? I don't know.
Yeah, it was an internal memo meant as internal discussion to a small-ish (for Google) group. It was not meant as a standalone document, and from the lead-in is clearly a response to an ongoing discussion.
His entire argument is that ability to do certain things is based on genetics with the implication that females can't do certain things.
Did you read the same thing I did? Please quote the part where he makes that implication. He specifically says this is not the case:
The easiest explanation is that he didn't read the paper and instead is parroting what he read in his internet bubble. Occam.
But the idea of treating the individual based on generalities of that group is wrong.
And the guy specifically addresses that in his paper, and he agrees with you. So we'll need to find some other reason he was fired.
Did you read the paper? AmiMoJo's response is the proper one - point out counter-examples and provide links to alternate research. Demonizing people is not an effective way to win an argument and it is sad to see progressive-minded people resort to such tactics. The main casualties have been other progressives, university professors and presidents and such - because conservatives on the whole would wear an insult from a progressive as a badge of honor. This guy isn't even a conservative, he's a Libertarian.