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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 spec

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 1y ago
> 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-boots-on-what-the-evidence-says-about-mr-damores-google-memo-bc93c8b2fdb9 https://medium.com/@tweetingmouse/the-truth-has-got-its-boot... https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-damores-google-memo/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-...
- llm_nerd 1y ago
  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.
  - acdha 1y ago
    The problem with the averages argument is not that it’s wrong but that the established biological causes have been for basic low-level things like grip strength but not for higher level cognitive behaviour, especially at the level of software engineering at Google which combines a number of different advanced skills – and there’s a fair variation in the mix of skills equally successful people use, too. Running is a much simpler, highly physical skill which was highly relevant to our evolutionary history whereas being a senior engineer involves a mix of cognitive skills developed over a longer time in a highly social environment, and there just isn’t high-quality data linking those skills to innate biological traits at the level needed to explain the current outcomes. Complex behavior is very hard to link to underlying biology because our brains are incredibly plastic and actual researchers spend a lot of time looking for ways to tease out the complex interplay between genes and training. I used to support some neuroscience labs which studied things like this but the researchers were careful to note the difference in confidence between the effects they measured and the attempts to identify the underlying biology (e.g. maybe undergrad men could track more moving objects than women, but if monkeys didn’t show an effect you might want to check things like how many hours they spent playing ball sports or video games). Everyone was generally of the opinion that there were innate differences, but that they couldn’t be anywhere near the magnitude we see with athletic performance because too many well-crafted studies have been done to miss something big. When you’re looking at those bell curves, it’s important to remember that even if you ignore the questions about the methodology for things like personality traits the overlap is tighter than shown, and contrary to one of his foundational claims, there’s enough cultural variation to suggest that the effect is not biological in origin. The first piece I linked discusses at some length how he was thrown off by the Wikipedia summary of a meta-analysis paper on personality traits which found very limited effects, with one analysis within the margin of error. That pattern continues for the few claims he makes in enough detail to assess: inconclusive data, mistakes cribbed from intermediary sources, or failing to link a very low level behaviour to success at a company like Google. That last part is really important to think about with all of the evo-psych stories which claim our social dynamics of today are based on our evolutionary history without considering just how different the skills we use to work in offices developing software are from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle – anyone at Google is working with more people than was common in most of our evolutionary history!

acdha 1y ago

> 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-boots-on-what-the-evidence-says-about-mr-damores-google-memo-bc93c8b2fdb9 https://medium.com/@tweetingmouse/the-truth-has-got-its-boot... https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-damores-google-memo/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-...

llm_nerd 1y ago
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.
- acdha 1y ago
  The problem with the averages argument is not that it’s wrong but that the established biological causes have been for basic low-level things like grip strength but not for higher level cognitive behaviour, especially at the level of software engineering at Google which combines a number of different advanced skills – and there’s a fair variation in the mix of skills equally successful people use, too. Running is a much simpler, highly physical skill which was highly relevant to our evolutionary history whereas being a senior engineer involves a mix of cognitive skills developed over a longer time in a highly social environment, and there just isn’t high-quality data linking those skills to innate biological traits at the level needed to explain the current outcomes. Complex behavior is very hard to link to underlying biology because our brains are incredibly plastic and actual researchers spend a lot of time looking for ways to tease out the complex interplay between genes and training. I used to support some neuroscience labs which studied things like this but the researchers were careful to note the difference in confidence between the effects they measured and the attempts to identify the underlying biology (e.g. maybe undergrad men could track more moving objects than women, but if monkeys didn’t show an effect you might want to check things like how many hours they spent playing ball sports or video games). Everyone was generally of the opinion that there were innate differences, but that they couldn’t be anywhere near the magnitude we see with athletic performance because too many well-crafted studies have been done to miss something big. When you’re looking at those bell curves, it’s important to remember that even if you ignore the questions about the methodology for things like personality traits the overlap is tighter than shown, and contrary to one of his foundational claims, there’s enough cultural variation to suggest that the effect is not biological in origin. The first piece I linked discusses at some length how he was thrown off by the Wikipedia summary of a meta-analysis paper on personality traits which found very limited effects, with one analysis within the margin of error. That pattern continues for the few claims he makes in enough detail to assess: inconclusive data, mistakes cribbed from intermediary sources, or failing to link a very low level behaviour to success at a company like Google. That last part is really important to think about with all of the evo-psych stories which claim our social dynamics of today are based on our evolutionary history without considering just how different the skills we use to work in offices developing software are from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle – anyone at Google is working with more people than was common in most of our evolutionary history!