The e-mail Larry Page should have written to James Damore

https://www.economist.com/news/21726276-last-week-paper-said-alphabets-boss-should-write-detailed-ringing-rebuttal

by supercanuck • 9 years ago

82 73 9 years ago

economist.com

ludicast• 9 years ago

Something funny just happened. I clicked the link and the economist told me "you've reached your article limit".

For a moment I thought that was the rebuttal.

taivokasper• 9 years ago

You were not the only one. Larry should have relied: "You’ve reached your article limit".

Why does Hacker news allow paywalled articles!?

collyw3• 9 years ago

Right click open in a private window works for most of those. Maybe you are expected to know this as an HN reader.

_xhok• 9 years ago

This started out pretty good (and on the whole was fair and measured), but then at one point included this:

Then you seem to make a giant leap from group differences between men and women on such measures as interest in people rather than things, or systematising versus empathising, to differences in men’s and women’s ability to code. At least that’s what you seem to be doing; you don’t quite say so.

Well, if he "doesn't quite say so," how do you know that's what he seems to be doing? If you analyze his essay without searching desperately for subtexts, and if you listen to his clarifications in his interviews, it's fairly clear he's talking about interest, not ability. Unfortunately much of the next seven paragraphs then consists of breaking down their presumed argument as if it were the one he made.

It wasn't until this memo that I realized how many people, when presented with a body of text, immediately start performing motive inference, subtext analysis, dogwhistle detection, etc.

rsp1984• 9 years ago

Agree. Sounds like just another strawman response.

trendia• 9 years ago

It's pretty amazing to watch the news responses to his article, because so many respond to what they wanted to see in his article rather than what he wrote.

What he wrote: "Men and women have different interests."

What everyone pretends he said: "Men and women have different abilities."

rtx• 9 years ago

When people have comfortable lives, they create monsters to give them a purpose.

burkaman6• 9 years ago

His points about stress tolerance and anxiety are clearly ability-related. He didn't say women are less interested in stressful work, he said they are biologically inclined to be less capable of handling stress.

Which might be true, I have no idea, but it's not true that he only talked about interests.

Edit: When I say "might be true", I mean it academically might be true, but it clearly has no practical application to job performance. If women can perform equally well at a job as stressful as surgery, they obviously will not have a problem helping Google sell more ads in one of the most comfortable offices in the world.

sp332• 9 years ago

Quote from the original memo http://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-div...

I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.

ubernostrum3• 9 years ago

The basic issue here is we're presented with this memo and told that he wrote all this stuff in order to... do what, exactly? If not this, then what point was he trying to make, or what position was he trying to argue for? Was he just citing a bunch of things for no particular reason whatsoever? And felt that this "memo about nothing" was of such Seinfeldian importance that the entire company needed to read it?

Or we can ask ourselves: what conditions would have to hold for someone to think all this was relevant and important to write about? And the answer is that if we want to be charitable and assume there's logical coherence to what he was thinking, the conditions that need to hold are something along the lines of "he thinks women are, for hard-coded unalterable biological reasons, less fit than men to work in tech jobs at Google".

collyw3• 9 years ago

I would suggest reading the "suggestions" section at the end:

"My larger point is that we have an intolerance for ideas and evidence that don’t fit a certain ideology. I’m also not saying that we should restrict people to certain gender roles; I’m advocating for quite the opposite: treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group (tribalism)"

metaphorm3• 9 years ago

I think his motivation was much closer to "I feel irritated because I was just forced to attend a feminist indoctrination program and I want to let management know I disagree with this kind of thing". And then he proceeded to make his request obliquely, by attempting to couch it as a scientific debate, when really it was a cultural one.

humanrebar8• 9 years ago

and on the whole was fair and measured

I think you're giving too much credit. From the article:

Your memo was a great example of what’s called “motivated reasoning”—seeking out only the information that supports what you already believe.

...when one accuses someone of "motivated reasoning", they beg the question of whether they have "motivated reasoning" problems. That question wasn't addressed.

It was derogatory to women in our industry and elsewhere.

Not all women even agree on this point. It's not hard to find a female-authored piece that is sympathetic to Damore. If the memo was derogatory, I would think we couldn't find any.

I could keep going.

If Page should write or sponsor a rebuttal, it needs to be much more impartial and even handed than this piece. From start to finish.

yladiz• 9 years ago

Unless he was advocating something truly reviled in society, like murder or cannibalism, it's not difficult to find ways to be sympathetic towards him and his words. This does not mean it isn't derogatory against a group, even if that group doesn't all agree.

JoshTriplett• 9 years ago

It wasn't until this memo that I realized how many people, when presented with a body of text, immediately start performing motive inference, subtext analysis, dogwhistle detection, etc.

When evaluating a piece of software, do you look for the subtle signs that it's poorly maintained, or that the developer has contempt for decent software engineering practices?

When you see a headline like "P versus NP", do you look at criteria like http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=304 to check for signs of credibility?

When you see the latest anti-systemd screed (not thoughtful critique, just random thoughtless reiterated bashing treaded out again and again), do you notice how many of those screeds intentionally misspell it as "SystemD", and display other such warning signs?

People are very good at pattern matching, including social patterns.

mbunch• 9 years ago

When you see a headline like "P versus NP", do you look at criteria like http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=304 to check for signs of credibility?

It's funny that you reference another person who was pilloried by the social media masses for being a misogynistic monster because he made a post that conformed to certain maligned social patterns (http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2119)

trothamel2• 9 years ago

Is there a difference between this and fanfiction other than most fanfiction authors being willing to at least put a pseudonym on their work?

It seems kind of wrong to avoid staking a position by phrasing your arguments in the mouth of someone else, using words that person didn't use.

tantalor• 9 years ago

Are you referring to the absence of a byline? That's because The Economist generally does not attribute editorials to authors. This one is not special.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist#Editorial_anonym...

trothamel2• 9 years ago

It's the mix of the lack of a byline, and the basic premise of putting words in someone else's mouth that kind of rubs me the wrong way.

"It is my position that it is only honorable that people should talk about James Damore under their own names." - Abraham Lincoln

observation7• 9 years ago

That's a great word to describe how reporting is made and used on the web. Nearly all reporting by partisans on their enemies is fan fiction.

burkaman6• 9 years ago

The best way to approach people who agree with Damore and will shut down at the mention of anything like "sexism" or "discrimination" is to just explain that software engineering is really not a particularly stressful job. Many of Damore's arguments, if they were true, would apply to nearly any job in the world.

Specifically, you can compare software engineering to something like surgery. It is not controversial to claim that surgery is more stressful, more detail oriented, requires more dedication, etc. than software engineering. Yet the gender ratio of surgeons is about 60-40 male to female, far more equal than software. How can this be, if Damore's arguments have any merit? Affirmative action can't explain this, because if you're a bad surgeon, you'll be sued for malpractice and fired. If you're a bad software engineer, it's much easier to kind of muddle through and do well enough to not get fired.

vkou• 9 years ago

Or, take PhDs. Working towards, writing, and defending your PhD is more stressful then anything half of Silicon Valley's engineers will ever do.

Yet, more women receive PhDs in the US then men do.

mnglkhn2• 9 years ago

To truly analyze this you need to breakdown things by:

* foreign vs local PhD candidates

* STEM vs non-STEM categories

burkaman6• 9 years ago

You're right, but if you're trying to win an argument, I would stick to on-the-job examples. You need to preemptively shut down any possibility of affirmative action explanations. If you talk about PhDs, I guarantee someone will claim that schools intentionally lower standards for women to inflate their diversity numbers.

humanrebar8• 9 years ago

The best way to approach people who agree with Damore and will shut down at the mention of anything like "sexism" or "discrimination" is to just explain that software engineering is really not a particularly stressful job.

Except Damore didn't claim that stress was the overriding factor in the gender gap. Your rebuttal assumes that's his position.

burkaman6• 9 years ago

Right, stress was just one of a few points, but the same argument can be used against each of the differences he references. Nothing he talked about was specific to software engineers. I think surgery is a perfect example because all of his arguments should apply even more to surgeons than they do to software engineers, but the numbers don't agree.

joelrunyon• 9 years ago

I shouldn’t have had to write this: I’m busy and a little effort on your part would have made it unnecessary

This line seems really over the top. If you're the leader of your company - it's your JOB to write to the team, correct them where they're wrong and steer the conversation in a productive manner.

Not really a fan of this overall post (50% of Googler's still don't think he should have been fired). If you think he should have been fired - that's fine - but I think if you watch his interviews, he was earnestly looking for a discussion. Feel free to write a letter or explain in real terms why he was wrong if you feel like that - but all these pieces about "why we shouldn't even have to have the discussion" - are sort of missing the point he brought up - which was that he didn't feel they could even have a discussion on this topic.

dnautics• 9 years ago

Statistics are even more insidious. We know empirically on average women are smarter than men, but also men are, from a particular perspective, genetically defective, which causes a wider variation in a non-insignificant set of traits.

You can still get a heavy tailing effect when on average population 1 is worse than population 2. This comes at the expense of the other fat tail:. Men are more likely to be mentally defective, commit suicide, die on the job, choose to go to war, choose to join gangs, etc.

guardiangod• 9 years ago

"You" - 82 counts

"I" - 30 counts (cap letter)

"we" - 44 counts

"pdf" - 0 counts

"http" - 0 counts

"www" - 0 counts

".edu" or ".gov" - 0 counts

I was very excited to read a rebuttal of the memo from the Economist. I've read arguments from both sides extensively and wanted to see The E's take. The original memo was almost naive in its argument; it's not hard to pick its argument chain apart.

Then I got to the mid section of the letter and the whole letter just fall apart.

Shame on the Economist for publishing such an ill-argued letter.

The author listed 6 logical flaws in the original memo (even though the the author said he found 1 + 6 more flaws). The listed flaws overlap too much, and 3 of them can be directly rebutted using lines from the memo.

"First, you ignore many other gender differences, basing your argument only on a few that you think support your conclusion. Second, you’re ignoring everything else that could explain the gender gap. Third, the gender differences you cite differ between countries and over time. Fourth, they don’t even support your argument, because you don’t seem to understand what makes a great software engineer. Fifth, you clearly don’t understand our company, and so fail to understand what we are trying to do when we hire. And sixth, even if you are right that more men than women are well-suited to the job of software engineer at google, you are wrong that taking steps to recruit more women is inherently unfair to men."

The rest of the flaws I agree with (depending on the reading of the text), but there's no citation for anything. So even though the conclusion might be correct, the arguments are weak.

BTW- "Fifth, you clearly don’t understand our company, and so fail to understand what we are trying to do when we hire."

Such a great line. So "inter-dimensional" that I can't put this as mere ironic.

rndmwlk• 9 years ago

Your memo was a triumph of motivated reasoning

The irony is palpable. "Larry" cites a bunch of well reasoned essays that support his view, but there were plenty of the same supporting James'.

Teamwork, in particular, is important

At this point I feel they didn't even read James' essay. He points this out, and as a potential solution suggests pair programming should be emphasized.

I don't agree with everything James put forth in his "manifesto," but I don't think he should be demonized for putting forth a well reasoned argument. I think he brings up a great point in this "diversity equals morality" culture stifles real discussion and real solutions. He attempted to put forth a few solutions, which is more than I can say for this article.

humanrebar8• 9 years ago

diversity equals morality

Good point. The "Larry" memo does nothing to promote healthy discussion. It's just a longer form rebuttal that more or less says, "You're wrong enough to be despicable, so we fired you."

metaphorm3• 9 years ago

the unbelievable irony of a a fake letter dressing down someone for "motivated reasoning" by explicitly using motivated reasoning.

Noxchi• 9 years ago

Is anyone else disgusted by these "X should have responded like this" articles?

They are so cringy. It's like asking a kid what he would do if he was president... but actually taking it seriously.

The problem with critics is that they have no skin in the game. If they're wrong, they just shrug their shoulders.

You're a paid (if that) journalist writing for profit. Figure out some other angle for peddling your gossip.

gnarbarian3• 9 years ago

This is a much better response but it could use more citations and quite a bit less sanctimony.

The big issue to me is how Google has already let ideology creep into what should be impartial.

The first one I noticed is when they removed guns from online shopping search results.

More recently there has been talk of doctoring search results to remove controversial content:

https://www.mintpressnews.com/youtube-censor-controversial-c...

Google is a private company, so they don't have to respect anyone's freedom of speech legally. But we do need to consider the implications of this when they are one of the largest conduits of information out there and they are using that position to ideologically alter what we can and can't see on their platforms. They never would have been able to get away with this kind of censorship earlier when there was more competition in this space and now that they're the 800lb gorilla it is just another case of 'absolute power corrupts absolutely'.

If Google refuses to be a platform that allows the free exchange of ideas then we need an apolitical platform who will.

observation7• 9 years ago

I have noticed that my searches on certain wrongthink topics bring up a slew of supposed 'rebuttals' to the information I was searching for. I did look at the rebuttals, but they were all non-sequiturs coupled with fury and not, well, reason.

A little while ago a Socialist website argued they were being demoted in the search results and only typing their explicit domain name alongside the search terms brought up their arguments.

I know this is a complex topic far beyond my tiny snippet of text here, but I do not think this is good.

I also think this website (its owners and management) has a bias, towards Liberalism. I do not mean 'Democrats'. I mean the political thought of the upper middle class. This isn't a Red Team vs Blue Team thing the way most people seem to assume, there's a third actor. It believes itself correct, rationally and morally but naturally has its own vices.

Remember Orwell's discussion of class in 1984!

gnarbarian3• 9 years ago

Ya, more and more large tech companies are oblivious to the practice of not mixing politics with business. It will always alienate and anger a large fraction of your customers. Off the top of my head: Github, Mozilla, and Google all seem to be doing this unfortunately.

This is especially ironic to me when measures are taken to ensure some tiny quantity of people don't feel uncomfortable in exchange for angering a huge swath of their customers.

The Crockford/Nodevember thing is a perfect example of this:

http://atom-morgan.github.io/in-defense-of-douglas-crockford

thedevil• 9 years ago

Why did we fire you?
You’ve driven the point home with your “Goolag” T-shirt and new twitter handle, @Fired4Truth.
You're wrong.
I shouldn’t have had to write this: I’m busy and a little effort on your part would have made it unnecessary
Your chain of reasoning had so many missing links that it hardly mattered what you based your argument on.
We try to hire people who are willing to follow where the facts lead, whatever their preconceptions. In your case we clearly got it wrong.

This is how political bloggers write. It's not how executives write.

Bloggers fan the flames for readership. Executives face legal and PR risks.

humanrebar8• 9 years ago

Well, executives and modern presidents.

FlashGit• 9 years ago

Is this your homework Larry?

chickenbane3• 9 years ago

John Gruber perceptively pointed out that Page/Brin/Schmidt have been taking the backseat for this ordeal, putting Pichai solely responsible. I assume this is intentional to ensure Pichai's opinion on the matter is clearly that of Google.

However, aside from Damore himself, the only Googlers I've seen make comments are:

* Sundar Pichai

* Danielle Brown, VP of Diversity, Integrity & Governance

* Susan Wojcicki, YouTube CEO

To be very honest, it would be helpful if white male Googlers spoke out for diversity. I know this is a sensitive and heated topic right now, but especially after seeing the (unrelated, but very fresh, and the video is really worth 1000 words):

https://news.vice.com/story/vice-news-tonight-full-episode-c...

it would be really nice to see actual individuals standing up for the beliefs their company purports to have.

humanrebar8• 9 years ago

To be very honest, it would be helpful if white male Googlers spoke out for diversity.

Do you mean spoke out against Damore? Damore lauded diversity himself. Being "for diversity" doesn't carry much water, it seems.

EDIT: Just watched (enough of) the video. Are you equating Damore with skinheads?

chickenbane3• 9 years ago

Are you equating Damore with skinheads?

Of course not. But honestly, until Charlottesville I didn't think Nazis were a serious influence in the US. I no longer think that.

I also assumed the President of the United States would have no issue immediately condemning Nazis, but here we are.

David Brooks asked for Pichai to resign (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14990494). Brooks has written many op-eds, so I searched for other times he's asked for CEOs to resign. Weird, nothing came back aside from Sundar Pichai. Not Travis Kalanick, even when Uber had much worse news? Not Marissa Mayer, when Yahoo had huge data breaches?

Sorry if asking white guys to support their CEO is too much. After seeing the skinheads it'd be nice to reminded the good guys haven't lost their voice and are a serious influence as well.

swanson• 9 years ago

PSA: Never write an email this long to be sent to "all-employees@company.com", "Larry" should know better!

bassman9000• 9 years ago

I stopped when I got to

Here’s why, in the words of Jon Snow in “Game of Thrones”

Can't we make an argument without having to resort to popular culture? Does the author think we're that stupid than we're not going to understand his point? Or is he projecting?

anabis• 9 years ago

I thought this e-mail was sent in a happy world where Damore was not fired, but no, paragraph 3:

Why did we fire you?

This is a much higher bar than just pointing out how the points in the memo were wrong. Damore's memo was not a peer reviewed paper, and even those have mistakes which are tolerated.

Your memo was a great example of what’s called “motivated reasoning”—seeking out only the information that supports what you already believe. It was derogatory to women in our industry and elsewhere. Despite your stated support for diversity and fairness, it demonstrated profound prejudice. Your chain of reasoning had so many missing links that it hardly mattered what you based your argument on. We try to hire people who are willing to follow where the facts lead, whatever their preconceptions. In your case we clearly got it wrong.

This is unsatifactory. Are you fired from Google if you display biases all humans have? How can we notice and overcome them if we can't have discussion without getting fired?

The Economist should have said the firing was wrong, and changed the premise to no fireing, or 80% of the e-mail should be about the justification of the firing.

The e-mail Larry Page should have written to James Damore

Related Stories