Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

So we should all take a lesson from how people in the Bible belt treat those who are agnostic or atheist, right? <rolls eyes>

If the Valley is such a "liberal echo chamber", why is it that women, homosexual, transsexuals, etc. are the ones still receiving the death threats.

When I see rich, conservative, white men shivering in fear from getting death threats for expressing their religious or political beliefs, I'll worry about your "echo chamber" my precious fragile little snowflakes.

Didn't Damore receive threats of physical violence? And he's no Thiel by any stretch of imagination.

I don't see anything obvious with a quick Google search, and anybody complaining about that seems to start throwing around words like "antifa" so my skepticism and troll alerts are on maximum.

HOWEVER, Damore is a REALLY good example of the kind nitwit snowflake that deserves all the approbation he is receiving.

If you are sitting in a corporation and are about to do something that is going to cause political shockwaves, you need to make sure that your position and stance is absolutely rock solid and airtight.

This is true whether you are talking about technology or social behavior. If you're going to political war, you had better have incontrovertible facts and arguments and they had best be overwhelming. You need to run your presentation past a couple of friends and colleagues to solidify it. If you half-ass it, you're going to get your head handed to you on a platter.

Well, guess what? He half-assed it with a bunch of unsupported conjecture and weak arguments that people destroyed almost immediately with real evidence and research and then whined about the fact that people handed him his head.

Which probably STILL would have been okay if he actually admitted to being wrong and put his head back down. But, no, nitwits like him feel that not simply accepting everything he says as correct is terribly, horribly unfair. As such, he doubled down on stuff that everybody already showed was wrong and basically just tried to shout louder.

And then was shocked when he got canned.

The worst part is, there ARE lots of outstanding questions and issues about diversity programs and initiatives. What should that actual goal of such a program be? How do you measure whether it is succeeding? Is success for the company the same as success for the group? Is success for the group the same as success for the individual? What are the downsides of such programs?

Evidence in Damore's lawsuit has some rather interesting tidbits about antifa, but while they are not very nice people at all, they are not really relevant to this discussion, I think. It also has evidence of physicasl threats. Those made it to the recently dropped/dismissed NLRB complaint, and it seems (was mentioned in a thread on HM, for sure) that peple involved had received very stern slaps on their wrists.

Now, Damore may not be a very nice person himself (he did go to work for Google of his own free will, after all), but he did a) what Google asked him to do -- provided feedback on some corporate training that he was forced to attend. He backed it with some arguments that while not necessarily water-tight and incontroversible, were stronger than any debunkings of his memo that I have seen, which mostly amounted to calling it "pathetic bleatings" and claiming that it is wrong because it could not possibly be right.

Saying "you are a terrible person and I will hound you until one of us gets fired" or somesuch is not quite "handing him his head". If anything, it conmfirms that Damore is probably more right than his detractors. So while it certainly might have made sense for him to shut up, make a Cultural Revoluition style confession and keep his job. But faulting him for being fireed over a memo that he didn't leak and that is, if anything, far more reasonable than many an action that seems to be accepted at Google (viz. the story of Corey Altheide).

I just don't see how he is a big snowflake here.

> It also has evidence of physicasl threats. Those made it to the recently dropped/dismissed NLRB complaint, and it seems (was mentioned in a thread on HM, for sure) that peple involved had received very stern slaps on their wrists.

Please do put a link if you can find it easily. Wading through the history on HN is non-trivial. I will certainly accept legally filed complaints as evidence.

And, they damn sure should have gotten more than slaps on the wrist for threats of physical violence.

> he did a) what Google asked him to do -- provided feedback

And even if I were doing this on a technical issue, I'm going to make sure my arguments are solid before I send it into the ether if the issue is going to cause political grief. That's just common sense.

> stronger than any debunkings of his memo

This one from the Economist is a good general start (I chose the Economist because it doesn't really fall in the "liberal rag" category that most people would place things like Salon, Wired, etc.) https://www.economist.com/news/international/21726276-last-w...

There are lots of other problems with his memo that the whole "social science" field that he is quoting has come under strong dispute in the last decade or so.

The most significant point is that Damore ignores any evidence that doesn't support his point. If you're going to be controversial, you have to explain the stuff that doesn't agree with you as well.

> But faulting him for being fired over a memo that he didn't leak

I thought he explicitly posted it to internal Google circulation. I really hate how it moved to the press (people who did THAT should be fired as well), but I do not believe that he simply gave a confidential memo to HR and then it got leaked. Please do correct me if I am wrong.

Should Damore have lost his job? In my opinion, no.

However, only an idiot goes looking for bear without a really big gun and being surprised when he gets mauled.

There is some discussion here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16396554

You won't actually find an argument from me that Damore didn't behave stupidly, assuming he wanted to keep his job. However, whatever debunkings might there be to Damore's memo, neither Google, nor rags like Verge, nor even Economist provided any. Economist went as low as referencing Zunger's "pathetic bleatings" that make Damore's memo look like a Nobel material. And "social science"s wounds are mostly self-inflicted -- those few arguments that were presented against The Memo came mostly from departments of "womyn's studies" where results are determined long before research starts. Just look at what happens to Peterson (his scientific bona fides seem to be beyond reproach) when he tries to speak.

Google's internal discussion groups are quite weird, but apparently inciting street violence is perfectly fine. I think it would have been reasonable for Damore to expect that a memo that at least pretends to be objective, and does not call for any illegal activity would be acceptable as well.

Shold Google have a right to fire anyone over anything? I believe so. But if they fire Damore for reasons they give, which really are complete bunk, and do not fire the "I'll punch you in the face" crowd, they are hypocrites, and might get mauled themselves in the end.