Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

There are many, many reasonable criticisms of the memo that do not focus on writing style. Here are a few examples -

https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/13/james-dam...

https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-bio...

That wired article was excellent. And it proves one thing to my mind. Regardless of everything else, Damore's memo has lead me to vastly expand my knowledge of the debates in this domain, through just being a curious observer watching it all unfold. It's been wonderful, if extremely provocative, in generating proper debate on the subject, focussed on all possible angles, from writing style, to science, to hiring policies.

Amidst all this, Google firing him is the biggest shame.

The wired article truly is fantastic. And IMO it should be on the front page of HN, not this thread.

What? The Wired article basically says "the social sciences of gender are still up for grabs/worthless, unlike nuclear physics".

This one at The Economist is also very good.

"The e-mail Larry Page should have written to James Damore"

https://www.economist.com/news/21726276-last-week-paper-said...

'Page' argues that because Damore didn't mention that men score higher on aggression and lower on cooperation, this is evidence of motivated reasoning.

Counterpoint: Damore only lists personality traits that lead to interest in engineering, thus leading to an imbalance in the talent pool from which Google hires. Rarely is an extremely high propensity for agreeableness a motivating factor for getting an engineering degree at Stanford.

Different strokes I guess. I liked that the authors took great pains to stick to highlighting the nuanced nature of the debate. They agreed with Damore where pertinent, but also disagreed with a lot of the conclusions that he derived.

I.e. the authors had to concede to Damore on the science, but proceeded to claim the conclusions where worthless because the science sucks. Note that the Slate Star Codex articles that have addressed the science in detail point out these are actually strong, large N studies and not just nitpicking. (They are, besides, echoed by studies in other fields showing that _gibbon and chimpanzees_ already present similar gender-behavioral differences re: which toys very young individuals prefer.)

Wired even feels the need to add a parenthetical reinforcing climate change is true because this is the general strategy of climate deniers: they have to accept the laws of physics and the general mechanism of GHG warming and hold on to the nonsequitur conclusion of "huh uh but this isn't the consensus/established science/it's just a theory" and come up with their own conclusions.

(Edit: GHG warming, not GHC. GHC is actually getting cooler all the time.)

The Wired article gets quotes from researchers cited by Damore and their interpretations vis-à-vis Damore's presentation of their work. In my opinion they remained respectful throughout but firm in their assessment that Damore really didn't go about using scientific research in a responsible way and drew rather specific conclusions from broad research.

On the flip side, his memo wasn't meant for wide release and he had to act as sole writer, editor, and fact-checker. So I can forgive his mishandling of facts to an extent. But he's been stirring the pot a lot since his firing and I don't think this will end well for him.

In what relates to winning the respectability game, he's already lost. He could have definitive algebraic proof; it wouldn't matter.

I haven't seen a single thing that Damore has said after the firing (I haven't seen the memo either; I don't care much for the subject, it's the reaction that bothers me) -- but I'd bet a burger with fries that he's going the Milo Yanopopopopoulos route: a provocateur that's admired for being a provocateur.

It's a living. How long has Ann Coulter been around?