Google’s phony feminism
Google fired engineer James Dalmore because he suggested that perhaps, on average, women are more people-oriented and less gadget-oriented than men are.
This week, top Google executives are meeting with the Saudi crown prince, who imprisons businessmen who criticize his rule and presides over a regime in which women are not allowed to drive cars, to discuss what sort of business deals they can strike with him.
If Dalmore had just had a couple of hundred billion dollars to invest, he probably could have imprisoned women who were trying to program and gotten away with it, as far as the Google executives are concerned.
That's not why they fired him. They fired him because he said some of his coworkers didn't deserve their jobs.
ReplyDeleteI just reread the whole memo, and he absolutely did not say anything like what you claim he said. Why would you want to make something like this up?
DeleteI think what I wrote is a pretty reasonable one-sentence summary of Sundar Pichai's explanation of why they fired him.
DeleteOK, so that’s why Pichai SAID they fired. But given Dalmore did not write anything like that, why should we believe Pichai?
DeleteIn the memo, Damore (not "Dalmore") says Google has "A high priority queue and special treatment for 'diversity' candidates" and "Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for 'diversity' candidates by decreasing the false negative rate".
DeleteI'm having a hard time coming up with an interpretation of those statements that doesn't imply he thought some of his coworkers didn't deserve their jobs.
Oh boy! You’re now essentially admitting he never said what you contended he said. He made a couple of factual statements: Google DOES have such programs, and they DO lower The bar for diversity candidates. This is not even disputable: the very purpose of such programs is just to lower that bar.
DeleteWhether or not people who got in by jumping over a lower bar “deserve“ their jobs is a normative statement. The move from Dalmore’s purely factual statement to the normative statement you made is entirely yours. Salmore never suggests anything of the kind.
Four instance, here is a quite different normative statement that is completely compatible with the facts Dalmore cited: “Google’s diversity programs lower the bar for certain groups, which is entirely justified, given the past discrimination people in those groups have faced. It will turn out that these people completely deserved the jobs they’re getting based on this lowered bar.”
Delete(i) I don't agree the statements I quoted are indisputably factual, especially not without specific knowledge of Google's actual hiring policies and outcomes (which I suspect you don't have, either).
Delete(ii) Are you really going to claim that Damore is merely dispassionately listing facts, and that any normative conclusions the reader might draw are entirely incidental to his rhetorical intent? The fact that the statements I quoted appear in a section called "The harm of Google's biases" and that the very next paragraph says they are "veiled neo-Marxist ideology that can irreparably harm Google" would seem to argue pretty strongly against that reading.
"I don't agree the statements I quoted are indisputably factual..."
DeleteThen you are a clown not worth debating.
Shonk gives a pithy, clear (and false) one liner. When challenged he refers to someone other than Damore, and the when challenged again produces that prolix, tendentious, paragraph about something else entirely.
DeleteBut I bet he repeats the short, direct falsehood freely elsewhere. It's like whack-a-mole Gene.