Lots of people are now saying that the king is a fink*. A friend kindly offers some useful update links on the subject:
Neuroscientist Debra Soh defends Damore. No surprise, she is also not a fan of the marchin’, marchin’ pussyhats for science and has warned about the danger of fad post-modern concepts like intersectionality invading science and just plain stompin’ down hard on fact.
Updated: Breitbart News’ interview series, Rebels of Google, has revealed an atmosphere of profound fear at the company, in which employees who challenge Google’s hyper-progressive narratives face bullying and ostracization from co-workers, and frequently find themselves added to blacklists aimed at destroying peoples’ careers both inside and outside Google.
Our last interviewee even described an incident in which someone was punched for expressing a contrary viewpoint.
…
“The worst part isn’t the ‘diversity.’” says Gordon “It’s the “inclusion” – the banner under which they justify dangerous pseudosciences like unconscious bias and microaggressions, and try to make them company policy.”
Google is likened to a religious cult in the update above. That’s too kind.
Upperdated: 14 search engines that are not Google. From Milo Yiannopoulos, Dangerous: ““Some might consider conservatives fortunate that tech companies didn’t use all the powers at their disposal to influence the election. Google could, if they wanted to, ban all links to Breitbart, as could Twitter and Facebook. Ultimately, such a bold move would be a bad business decision—in the current climate, conservatives feel just safe enough on social media not to flock to competing platforms.” (p. 70)” That was then.
Upperdated 2: From Investors’ Business Daily:
But while the focus of all the hand-wringing has been on Damore’s views on diversity and women in engineering jobs, one important thing Damore said has been overlooked.
Near the end of his memo, Damore warns the company to “stop alienating conservatives.”
“Alienating conservatives is both noninclusive and generally bad business,” he says.
Damore is clearly on to something there.
Google’s decision to fire Damore for expressing his non-liberal views has infuriated conservatives and sparked stories about the company’s left-leaning agenda. The problem for Google (parent company, Alphabet (GOOGL)) is that it apparently has a very large base of conservative users.
That’s at least the indication based on a sampling of Google’s “autocomplete” results of politically charged searches.
Check the autocomplete for yourself. Again from Investors’ Business Daily:
Conservatives might very well start looking for other search engines, email accounts, etc., built by firms that don’t treat them as if they were unworthy of breathing air. Other companies have found out the hard way that playing politics is risky, since it will invariably upset a good chunk of your customer base, no matter which side a company takes. (Just ask Target.)
This is the beauty of the free market. It offers choices. And that’s good, despite what Google’s autocomplete might lead to you to believe ….
Upperdatest latest:
Many Google employees do not think Damore should have been fired: “Over half of Google employees polled say the web giant shouldn’t have fired the engineer behind the controversial memo.” Well, of course they don’t. Who the heck would want to work in a place like that even if there are funky kid slides and a free cult to belong to? No matter what your age, it all works if you are a child or an idiot. Otherwise…?
Prof. Jordan B. Peterson of the University of Toronto interviewed James Damore:
Peterson is controversial in Canada because he has an aversion to publicly funded oppression and insanity.
Then there is “Google Memo: Four scientists respond,” more or less supporting Damore’s right to think about the question of biological differences. Right or wrong, they sound like they are free of PC diversity yap-yap.
Damore had internal support from many employees, it turns out, who must now keep clear of house snitches. From Wired: “But the internal discussions that followed Damore’s memo and its fallout show Google employees both embracing and advancing its views. Damore himself indicated that his former coworkers had reached out privately to express ‘their gratitude for bringing up these very important issues.’” Wired also did oppo research on Damore.
An earlier stage of the controversy involved massive misrepresentation in dying traditional media of what engineer Damore actually said. That, of course, tells us why so many traditional media of record are suffering so much. They cannot imagine getting the story right anymore, as opposed to getting it Correct.
Tia Ghose’s piece at LiveScience, Google Manifesto: Does Biology Explain Gender Disparities in Tech? is a masterpiece of misdirection, as she tries to chip away at some pretty obvious facts about differences, on average, between men and women.
By the way, why do people who find the similarities and differences between life forms so informative for interpreting evolution join the witch hunt when differences between males and females come up?
At Slate, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein dumps on evolutionary psychology:
Stop Equating “Science” With Truth: Evolutionary psychology is just the most obvious example of science’s flaws.
Most saliently in the context of the Google memo, our scientific educations almost never talk about the invention of whiteness and the invention of race in tandem with the early scientific method which placed a high value on taxonomies—which unsurprisingly and almost certainly not coincidentally supported prevailing social views. The standard history of science that is taught to budding scientists is that during the Enlightenment, Europe went from the dark ages to, well, being enlightened by a more progressive mindset characterized by objective “science.” It is the rare scientific education that includes a simultaneous conversation about the rise of violent, imperialist globalization during the same time period. Very few curricula acknowledge that some European scientific “discoveries” were in fact collations of borrowed indigenous knowledge. And far too many universally call technology progress while failing to acknowledge that it has left us in a dangerously warmed climate.
Much of the science that resulted from this system, conducted primarily by white men, is what helped teach us that women were the inferior sex.
Prescod-Weinstein must have been educated in a system where teaching literal history is forbidden. Otherwise, she would know that from time immemorial, women were considered the inferior sex. It would not have been possible for white European colonialists to better the widespread oppression, which was—as a matter of fact—usually worse than what was happening in Europe at the same time. You know, foot-binding, female genital mutilation, widow-burning, etc. Oh, but wait, we don’t study history anymore, do we?
Yes, evolutionary psychology is bunk. But not because it tries to study actual differences between men and women today, rather because it invents untraceable palaeolithic tales to explain modern trends. That distinction would be lost on a post-modern, of course.
We don’t quarrel with Prescod-Weinstein saying this: “Science’s greatest myth is that it doesn’t encode bias and is always self-correcting.” But we somehow doubt she would be very interested in following that train of thought very far.
Anyway, they are all missing the point: People want an honest discussion of differences between men and women that isn’t promptly shut down by Jackboot Enterprises or We’ll Fix U — with help in both cases from their assorted flunkies and lackeys, paid, freelance, or volunteer.
If the rest of us must finally choose between them and honest, witch hunt-free discussions, maybe they should look to their options.
Added: Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: “I love particle physics and cosmology and my research spans cosmological scales from cosmic acceleration to dark matter. I also have a strong interest in feminist philosophies of science.”
See also: Delicious Irony at Google, or Do We Need to Bring Some Swooning Couches in Here? (Barry Arrington)
* See the Wizard of Id cartoons.