(recently saw a post claiming that Damore’s firing was an indication of closed minds at Google, so it seemed important to repost this – vy)
The Google manifesto is a crackpot political argument combined with basic scientific ignorance, not a scientific argument. The people claiming otherwise are either lying or terrible at reading. Damore’s essay is packed full of paraphrases of Jordan Peterson’s body of work, right wing political slogans, and resentment against women. Damore claims that any program to encourage hiring and promotion of women and minorities constitutes discrimination against white men. According to him a company mentoring program to encourage women programmers would be both wrong and illegal. He says that there is no gender wage gap and women get lower wages because they don’t want to work as hard or take risks like men do. He claims that feminism is a ploy by “Marxist intellectuals” to replace their old class struggle pitch. He says that Google management are left-wing extremists, motivated by a “veiled left ideology”, whose diversity initiatives are “encroaching extremist and authoritarian policies”. He says that he is in favor of diversity, but against actually doing anything to encourage diversity because:
Discriminating just to increase the representation of women in tech is as misguided and biased as mandating increases for women’s representation in the homeless, work-related and violent deaths, prisons, and school dropouts.”
Damore’s deplorable basket of crackpot resentments is not science. Period. The defenses of Damore by people like University of Texas Computer Science Professor Scott Aaronson and UW’s Stuart Reges and Peter Singer are either grossly dishonest or complete failures of scholarship. Aaronson writes to say that all Damore was doing was ” mooting the hypothesis of an evolutionary reason for average differences in cognitive styles between men and women,” and that “the basic thesis being discussed […] that natural selection doesn’t stop at the neck, and that it’s perfectly plausible that it acted differently on women and men in ways that might help explain many of the population-level differences that we see today“. He laments the “clickbait narrative” of Damore’s critics (although he doesn’t cite or quote any of them because that would ruin his baseless temper tantrum). But Damore is not saying anything is “perfectly plausible”. He is insisting that Google should abandon any attempt to hire or advance women or minorities. Stuart Reges wrings his hands in anguish:
For the last ten months I have been discussing this issue at the Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering where I work. I have tried to understand why Damore’s opinions generated such anger and have struggled to decide what I want to do in response.
He tried, so sincerely, to understand why people would get angry reading stuff like:
Yes, in a national aggregate, women have lower salaries than men for a variety of reasons. For the same work though, women get paid just as much as men. Considering women spend more money than men and that salary represents how much the employee sacrifices (e.g. more hours, stress, and danger), we really need to rethink our stereotypes around power. – Damore
Really Stuart? Ten months of sincere effort and you can’t figure out what about Damore’s memo would make people mad?
As it became clear that the working class of the liberal democracies wasn’t going to overthrow their “capitalist oppressors,” the Marxist intellectuals transitioned from class warfare to gender and race politics. The core oppressor-oppressed dynamics remained, but now the oppressor is the “white, straight, cis-gendered patriarchy.” – Damore
Although Aaronson won’t cite any of the critics of Damore, he lists a number of “courageous” defenders. For example, here is Peter Singer with more of this nonsense:
James Damore, a software engineer at Google, wrote a memo in which he argued that there are differences between men and women that may explain, in part, why there are fewer women than men in his field of work. For this, Google fired him.
Reges has a similar claim:
In this case, suggesting that men and women are different either in interests or abilities is considered blasphemy. – Reges
Obviously what Reges, Singer, and Aaronson wrote is not true. Insisting that there is no wage gap or that any diversity program at all constitutes discrimination against white guys or that Google management is on some left-wing crusade, is not evolutionary biology and it’s not arguing that “there are differences between men and women” – a totally uncontroversial claim. It’s not acceptable for these academics to misrepresent Damore’s resentful tract as some musings about evolutionary biology.
But what about all the scientific citations in Damore’s memo? Giving those all benefit of the doubt, if Aaronson and Singer and all the other handwringing apologists had tried to characterize Damore’s memo more more honestly as, say: “a combination of a political rant and an argument about evolutionary biology”, all of their indignant claims to be defending free scientific inquiry would have been a lot harder. They would have had to let go of the strawman and come up with arguments less dependent on emotion and name-calling. Here’s Aaronson
Let that be the measure of just how terrifyingly efficient the social-media outrage machine has become at twisting its victims’ words to fit a clickbait narrative—a phenomenon with which I happen to be personally acquainted. Strikingly, it seems not to make the slightest difference if (as in this case) the original source text is easily available to everyone.
This is to defend someone who wrote that one problem with Google’s efforts to hire women is that:
“We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration. Unfortunately, there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles at Google can be and we shouldn’t deceive ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get female students into coding might be doing this).”
Or here’s Singer:
So on an issue that matters, Damore put forward a view that has reasonable scientific support, and on which it is important to know what the facts are.
Really? There’s “reasonable scientific support for “For the same work though, women get paid just as much as men”? No there is not. How about “political correctness is a phenomenon of the Left and a tool of authoritarians.” Some nice double blind studies on that one? What about:
I’ve heard several calls for increased empathy on diversity issues. While I strongly support trying to understand how and why people think the way they do, relying on affective empathy—feeling another’s pain—causes us to focus on anecdotes, favor individuals similar to us, and harbor other irrational and dangerous biases. Being emotionally unengaged helps us better reason about the facts.
Reasonable scientific support for that? Reges wants pity
When I tried to discuss Damore at my school, I found it almost impossible. As a thought experiment, I asked how we could make someone like Damore feel welcome in our community. The pushback was intense. My question was labeled an “inflammatory example” and my comments were described as “hurtful” to women. – Reges.
No kidding. The head of undergraduate instruction asks how to make a misogynist feel welcome in the community and people push back. Shocking. The entire basis of Reges, Aaronson’s and Singer’s defenses of Damore depends on whitewashing away all the ideology in his essay, taking his variant of “I’m not a racist but ... ” at face value, and then pretending that his wacky “biology” is respectable. Only if you do all that can you denounce the irrational anti-scientific anti-free speech mob from your claimed position as an Olympian Scientist and Defender of Free Speech. How original: to defend a sexist rant by claiming its critics are hysterical.
“Biological males that were castrated at birth and raised as females often still identify and act like males – James Damore”
Wow, imagine not being struck by how weird that is. There is a biological argument in Damore’s essay, but it’s ridiculous. Nobody argues that there are no biological differences between men and women. Nobody. Damore comes up with: “Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership.” Well, who said that those differences definitely did not explain any differences in representation? Nobody, that’s who. Google engineering is 19% female. Google’s management is 22% female. The issue is not why Google doesn’t have 50% representation, but why it has 19% representation.
Damore cites a number of studies that show or claim to show that certain traits are weakly correlated with gender. The gender based differences in those studies are in single digits so even if we accepted them as authoritative (they are not) they would not begin to explain the gender differences at Google. More striking, not one of those studies concerns programming ability or performance. When people claim Damore’s cited studies represent the scientific consensus (which is not true) they leave out that those studies have absolutely nothing to say about either programmers or diversity programs. Let me just stress that, because Damore is repeatedly claimed to have been relying on science: Not a single one of the studies that Damore cites claims to show a relationship between gender and ability to code.
Not one. Traits like which toys rhesus monkeys pick by gender may be related to human performance writing Java code but there is no evidence of that and it’s pretty implausible. Why being “more thing oriented” would make men more likely to be managers of people at Google or more interested in distributed consensus algorithms is also not addressed. But even if we were as naive as Professors Aaronson, Reges, and Singer, and accepted this collection of studies as meaning what Damore claims they mean, it takes a stupendous level of mathematical ignorance to agree that such studies would explain Google’s gender imbalance.
There are 52 cards in a deck of cards, so a blind pick from a shuffled deck produces an ace with probability 4/52. Yet, I can guarantee you I can pick 4 aces in a row out of the deck every time if I look at the faces of the cards. Google and other companies don’t hire based on random sampling from the population. They recruit, interview and test and, because they are a highly profitable company, they can pay more and offer better benefits to attract employees they want. They look at the cards. If they want aces, they can get them. Most of the programmers in the world are average or worse. Does Google have to accept that half of its programmers will be below average? This is obvious, but in a rush to take Mr. Damore’s rant as a serious contribution, Damore’s defenders, who claim to be speaking the name of science, apparently can’t do basic statistical reasoning.
The really interesting question is why this document has any defenders at all and, particularly, why all the concerned hand wringing from academics.
“Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently.
“I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read
‘The Rise of the Coloured Empires’ by this man Goddard?”
“Why, no,” I answered, rather surprised by his tone.
“Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if
we don’t look out the white race will be–will be utterly submerged.
It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”
“Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy with an expression of
unthoughtful sadness. “He reads deep books with long words in them.
What was that word we—-“
“Well, these books are all scientific,” insisted Tom, glancing at her
impatiently. “This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us
who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have
control of things.”
“We’ve got to beat them down,” whispered Daisy, winking ferociously
toward the fervent sun. – F. Scott Fitzgerald, Great Gatsby.
(h/t to vp at Lobste.rs for reminding me of this )
