[matchu]

It's important to distinguish between what the memo's author says, and what effect his words actually have. It is an anti-diversity memo, even if it isn't intended as one.

The author makes shaky statements about gender, reinforcing sexist stereotypes. The author applies rationalist disclaimers, which enables already-sexist readers to feel that their sexism is rational. And, most distressingly, the author asserts that Google made a mistake hiring many of the women who work there. Actively making your minority coworkers feel unwelcome is an anti-diversity behavior, and it was an obvious and predictable consequence of how he chose to communicate.

I don't claim to know the author's intent, or how he truly feels about the women he works with. But, regardless of whether he's actually opposed to diversity, we judge words by their consequences. These words are thoroughly anti-diversity in consequence, and judging them in a vacuum is dangerously naive.

[pdkl95]

> I don't claim to know the author's intent

What so many comments about this memo don't seem to understand is that it it isn't possible to derive the author's intent from the text of their work. The intent of the author isn't included when the reader interprets their work, because the author isn't there[1] to explain their intent. The reader only sees the work.

As you said, intent doesn't matter. When authoring a work, it's important to consider how the work might be interpreted.

[1] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeathOfTheAuthor (apologies for using a tvtropes link. It was better than Google's other suggestions)

[zbyte64]

One of his recommendations was to emphasize intent over unintended offenses.

[Danihan]

Define sexism...

Is believing men and women on average have different hormone levels and generally speaking, this leads to different behaviors and proclivities, sexist?

Is admitting there is any difference between the two sexes, sexist?

Is using different pronouns for men and women sexist?

I honestly don't know where someone draws the line who finds this memo "sexist."

[matchu]

I haven't decided yet whether I think the memo is sexist. But I'm confident that, because of how it's written, sexist people who read it will feel validated in their sexism.

It uses the same core argument as sexism: women are less suited to certain tasks, perhaps biologically. And it reaches the same conclusion: we should roll back our pro-diversity and pro-empathy programs. A sexist person who reads this will therefore feel that it supports their views, and, because the argument seems rationalist, they'll conclude that their poor treatment of women is rationalist. That might not be the intent of the document, but it is a predictable outcome.

Words that validate sexist behavior, intentionally or unintentionally, contribute to the problem. Regardless of the merit of the underlying idea, or the valuable conversations it inspired, it's important to remember that the memo itself did harm. It's appropriate that some people are focusing on that.

[zbyte64]

s/sexist/racist/g

Weird how race realists use the same template.

[malandrew]

https://status451.com/2017/08/06/judging-things-by-their-sid...

[matchu]

Yeah, that's a good point! It's important to consider the truth of the underlying idea, as well as the consequences of how it was expressed—though I don't like that the blog post seems to give up on the latter problem just because it's less objective. Discussions about social values and social consequences are worth having, despite not being subject to pure rationalism.

Still, while both lenses are valid, I'm focusing on the consequences lens, because we're discussing an Atlantic article that tries to invalidate it. It's not misleading to call the memo "anti-diversity", if you're focusing on the memo's role as a social artifact rather than as a dissertation, and that's a valid perspective. Words often serve both roles, and it's important to consider both.

(Incidentally, I don't find the memo's argument to be especially sound, either, so it's not just that it was expressed carelessly—but that's sorta beyond the scope of this thread.)