Could you point out that specific passage? As I read it he specifically went out of his way to say that all of the women he worked with were qualified.
- In the "personality differences" section, Damore repeats broad stereotypes about behavior that might make women less interested or less effective in tech jobs. He admits these are small effects and shouldn't be used to judge individuals, but goes on to propose policy changes that would impact individuals based on the stereotypes. Institutionalizing assumptions about womens' interests and capabilities is exactly what labor laws are designed to avoid.
- His section about discriminatory practices specifically suggests that there has been a lower bar for "diversity candidates", implying some of his more diverse co-workers shouldn't be there.
1. There's another way to interpret this which is that masculine interests and capabilities are already institutionalized (patriarchy). The changes he suggests create a more gender neutral environment where everyone is capable of maximal success. I'm less interested in how labor laws are currently interpreted than I am in trying to find a system that maximally benefits the most people.
2. Yes, his section about discriminatory practices does accuse Google of being guilty of the bigotry of lowered expectations. But that doesn't make Damore or the memo bigoted. Context is important here, he just came out of diversity training classes and was asked his opinion. This memo is in direct response to presumably having been trained to hire in a discriminatory way. It's possible Damore misinterpreted his training, but that's different than making him a bigot.
And further, even if you take the most egregious interpretation of these writings, take everything out of context, and try to paint it in the worst light possible, the reaction is still unreasonable. I'm not talking about him getting fired. That's fine, Google can fire him for wearing the wrong tie as far as I'm concerned, so they can surely fire him for potentially questionable opinions. The position in my original post is about the national media and general public. Fire him sure, but is this really so bad that the entire nation needed to be brought in to witness his public flogging? This is a socially awkward nobody with no power who might have some bad ideas about diversity policy, not David Duke on some white nationalist crusade.
He literally says that those hiring practices can lower the bar.
Sure, maybe he's saying that the bar for white/Asian men is higher than intended rather than that the bar for women and minorities is lower than intended, but you can't honestly argue that he isn't saying that women and minorities could be clearing a lower bar than white/Asian men.
Precisely! So that is your argument for why prohibiting him from saying that was legitimate (firing somebody for behaviour X is pretty much the definition of a company prohibiting behaviour X, I mean, what else can a company do?).
I'm sorry, but you sound like you're using double-speak. If Google has indeed lowered the bar for some minorities then it's Google who is exhibiting the soft bigotry of lowered expectations, not Damore for simply pointing it out. If Damore has simply incorrectly interpreted Google's hiring policy, then Damore is still not a bigot based on this statement. Damore went out of his way to specify that all of his coworkers were qualified and offered suggested policies which would attract more women without the bigotry he interpreted in the current hiring practices.
Damore did not specify that all his coworkers were qualified.
Damore believed Google lowered the bar, hence the statements I've made explaining how he offended his coworkers.
It is reasonable to believe Google _hasn't_ lowered the bar, and if you did, you would be offended by a long document warning about gender-biased consequences of lowering the bar.
I'm not sure how productive this thread is. I'm very surprised by your repeated assertions that there's direct textual evidence I'm mistaken, yet you're willing to accuse me of bad faith repeatedly, instead of just correcting me.
So I'm not afraid to eat crow when it's due. I've re-read the memo and you're right, in the memo he did not specifically state that everyone was qualified. I must have been thinking about an interview I saw of him.
I agree with you that it's reasonable to believe that Google _hasn't_ lowered the bar, but I don't see what difference that makes. There is a very applicable quote here by Albert Maysles, "Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance." With that in mind, I would like to plainly state my position here. I personally don't find Damore's memo to be unsettling, even though I disagree with some of it. If it were my company, I might have stopped at a firm one-on-one in HR with him. But I don't have all the details available internally and it's not my company. I fully support Google's right to fire him over the memo.
The problem I have is that a nobody with no power was publicly destroyed for cheap political points by the national media and general public. None of us here should even be having this discussion because a random nobody at Google with some incorrect ideas about diversity should never make national headlines with phrases like, "anti-diversity manifesto." This is a random socially awkward super-nerd, not David Duke.
The letter does bother me and I would have fired him, but I share some sympathy for having this blow up on a world stage. Is there any good timeline on how that happened? I'm pretty sure the leak (not the firing) is what made it national news... Do we know yet how that happened or how it circulated internally before that?
I think the thing that makes me more sympathetic is that the memo was written in response to him being asked his opinion on the diversity hire training he'd just received. Rightly or wrongly he clearly felt the diversity training was bigoted against him. I feel it's unfair to go out of your way to ask someone's opinion and then fire them for having the "wrong" one. I'm willing to grant someone a lot of leeway if they're genuinely trying to respond to a direct query. Conversely, it's also possible he went on a mini-crusade, in which case I'd definitely have fired him.
With regard to national news, I believe you are correct that the leak is what got it into the national news, not the firing. But that doesn't change the equation. The 4th estate is powerful and I believe it grossly misused its power here.
Yeah, once this got out to the news, it was pretty much guaranteed that this memo was the first thing anyone would know about this guy. I agree that's not "fair" in an objective sense -- everyone should get to learn from their mistakes, especially if they were made in a "safe" space where feedback was encouraged.
That's why I'm very curious exactly how this got distributed early on. Did someone take private feedback and socialize it?
Or was feedback always a public bulletin board, where there's some shared responsibility on both readers and writers to think about the context? Or did Damore socialize it independently to prove support for his ideas?
If feedback was private, I think HR could take a firm line about what policies and principles Damore needs to adopt (at least at the workplace) to participate in his employment community, without helping his name get published with this memo (and possibly even without firing him). But the moment it got published changed the stakes for everyone involved, and not just due to PR. It's fair to ask: "can I require my female and minority employees to work with someone who has asserted that biological differences make them less likely to succeed?"
As far as the media goes, they've done what they're paid to do and socialize the most extreme opinions (most rejecting but some supporting Damore). I think that sucks for society but is a much bigger problem than this case.
From a statistics point of view, this statement is dispositive: "...decrease the false negative rate, not increase the false positive rate."
The interaction between type I and type II errors virtually always have an inverse relationship. You cannot decrease one without increasing the other. It is, for example, one of the difficulties in making good medical diagnostic tests.
P.S. snarky commentary such as 'read the memo yourself', implying I'm lying about having read it, doesn't contribute to civil discussion.
> The interaction between type I and type II errors virtually always have an inverse relationship.
If you're adjusting a dial, yes. But hiring is complex, and having more time to evaluate candidates means you can do a better job. Spending more effort is a simple way to improve false negatives and false positives. It's entirely plausible that a company might have extra time budgeted for double-checking resumes from certain groups.
There was a confusingly-written part that I've seen a lot of people misinterpret in that particular way. My understanding of what he was trying to argue was this:
Imagine you have a skill-based RPG, where you gain skill in some task only by doing it and men and women are completely identical in every single way. Now imagine that more women enjoy alchemy, but more men prefer to spend their time mining. In this game, because of how skill gain works, if you look for really talented alchemists, most of your candidates will be women, even though the sexes are every bit as good as each other.
From a statistics point of view, this statement is dispositive:
"...decrease the false negative rate, not increase the false positive rate."
The interaction between type I and type II errors virtually always have an inverse relationship. You cannot decrease one without increasing the other. It is, for example, one of the difficulties in making good medical diagnostic tests.
I am reasonably mathy and I don't understand the statement. That plus the topic -- sexism in tech generally, especially Damore -- makes me think the motivation for down voting it is probably "political." ie it sounds like it could be supporting Damore's position, much of the world has decided he is an evil sexist pig etc.
I was reasonably mathy too, but stats was pretty different and I only took a couple semesters of it. It wasn't until I was forced to interact with it in a job setting that the inverse relationship between type I & II errors became really apparent to me. Any time I would crank up settings to reduce type I error, keeping all other things the same, type II error would invariably creep up... and v. versa
Then when looking in to it, I saw a lot of the examples given from the medical industry as GP alludes to, where this is a real big problem (e.g. if your test is 99.999% accurate, but has a 0.001% false positive rate, then if your disease actually only affects 1/1000000 people then the overwhelming majority of people who your test select are actually healthy).
And then I went back and actually read the relevant sections on the stats textbooks for my courses and learned that
(a) it was actually in there, and
(b) evidently my stats courses were way, way too easy to pass
As for the reply, I think I figured out why it was downvoted. It was a double-post, and the intended GGP was here:
There was a heavy bias to down voting all of my comments for the first 4-6 hours, which evened out to the opposite over time. I usually see this pattern in gender-related threads
If I believe my employer is discriminating against women, or against black people, that requires that some of my male or non-black coworkers were hired over more capable women or black people.
Should anyone alleging that kind of discrimination be fired? Because they tend not to be.
You have a right to free speech, not to alienate your coworkers.