[jglamine]

I think that's uncharitable. He was a regular SWE who got cancelled. Granted I have not followed him closely but I haven't seen him claim to be a genius or special. Sure he went to Harvard, maybe he had wealthy parents (IDK his background) but neither of those are crimes.

I don't think he's the activist people make him out to be. He went on a few podcasts early on but has generally kept a low profile. I'm not under the impression he's doing the paid speaker / podcast circuit. Probably just living his life.

After he was cancelled probably nobody wanted to hire him, maybe he left tech completely.

But yes, agree it was weird to include him next to the other names. He's not like, a billionaire founder.

[acdha]

> was a regular SWE who got cancelled. Granted I have not followed him closely but I haven't seen him claim to be a genius or special.

He did more than that. It wasn’t that he had the opinion that women were innately less qualified but that he tried to repeatedly discuss that at work after being told not to. It wasn’t just that he was wrong about the biology (to be clear, he was[1]) but that he wanted to have a public forum where he could say that some of his colleagues were less qualified.

If he’d just been some guy wrong in the internet on his own time, he almost certainly wouldn’t have been fired. Doing it at work in public changes things because any future lawsuit alleging discrimination could cite that as tacit approval. Whatever Google’s senior management felt about the merits of the piece, I’m sure their lawyers were saying it’d be a lot cheaper to hire another early-career engineer. The NLRB upheld the firing, too, so it’s not like good lawyers haven’t reviewed it.

(To be clear, I don’t think he’s Satan or anything - just some young guy who got some bad science out of the manosphere and had an unfortunately high-profile learning experience about why boundaries between your personal and professional lives are important)

1. https://medium.com/@tweetingmouse/the-truth-has-got-its-boot... https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-...

[tristor]

>He did more than that. It wasn’t that he had the opinion that women were innately less qualified

He never said that in his letter. The memo was published unredacted. You can definitely disagree with what he said and there are many reasons to do so, but you should at least reference his actual statements and arguments when doing that.

> but that he tried to repeatedly discuss that at work after being told not to.

That is also not true. My understanding is the memo was a report in response to a request from a committee he was part of and wasn't intended to be more widespread. It was leaked inside Google and then outside Google and then people demonized him and he got fired. That's pretty much the high-level set of events. He definitely did not write this after being explicitly told not to, especially "repeatedly" per basically every piece of evidence about the entire kerfuffle.

I'm not a Damore apologist either, but like the sibling it really pisses me off when I see someone just straight up strawmanning or lying about what someone else did to smear them. The man was already blackballed from the entire tech industry and had to leave the country after being fired, mostly for saying factually true statements that are controversial because of the color he (and others) added to them. Isn't that enough? Do you have to lie about what he said, when it was published publicly and anyone can read it for themselves?

[llm_nerd]

Man, I really don't want to be a Damore apologist, but-

"that women were innately less qualified"

He never said that, though. If you have to grossly misrepresent his argument like that, you've demonstrated that you have no good faith retort and have lost the argument at the outset.

His paper was about on the average traits. That if you've split humans into various subsets -- for instance ethnicity, sex, age, etc -- each group has average and percentile traits on a variety of axes, whether it's aptitudes or intelligence spread (e.g. the variability hypothesis), musculature, long distance running, etc. These traits have negligible applicability to any individual person or subset, but if you're selecting from the whole set for exceptional extremes, you likely will get a set that doesn't demographically represent the whole.

NBA/NFL/NHL/MLB players. Nobel prize winners. Top mathematicians. Long distance runners. And so on.

Damore's mistake was that a) there was no value in publishing this, b) he is on the spectrum and didn't realize how dangerous this absolute statement of fact was.

You say that he had bad science, but then you link to a piece that says that it's "politically naive, and at worst dangerous". Which is precisely the sort of tired "but it isn't socially acceptable" sort of response that is just boorish and unproductive.

I get why Google fired him. They pretty much had to (though I would argue that he could have contested it as punishing his handicap). But for all his folly, when people have to misrepresent what he said, or do the "it's bad science because I don't like it"....meh.