Reply to post: "...therefore Socrates is a dog"

"...therefore Socrates is a dog"

Well I did read what he wrote. It's crap. It's structure is typical of conspiracy theories - the introduction says nothing controversial and concedes some points in an attempt to gain your trust that the author is impartial and acting in good faith. Then the actual argument begins (from the section "the harm of Google's biases"), and logic goes for a beer somewhere.

Even if I agreed with his hypothesis, I couldn't endorse this bunch of logical fallacies that attempt to "prove" that he's being badly treated as a result of some political-correctness conspiracy. If that document is an example of his logical reasoning skills, he's unfit to be a software engineer.

Where to start? How about the beginning. From the get-go, by denouncing every program to change it, he takes as given that the current status-quo is the best possible in the tech industry. Well, I'd just note that there once was a time where every Olympic runner was a white guy. I suppose the only reason it's different now is that about sixty years ago, black guys must have decided to stop complaining about things being unfair and instead learn to run like white men...

Next, anyone who says we need to "De-emphasise empathy" when designing software has made a fundamental error about the reasons why we write software. If it does not make the life of a human being better in some way, there is no point to it. (Sadly, that doesn't preclude things that make one human's life better by making another's much worse, or much, much shorter; but I'm not the one claiming this is an easy thing to "fix").

The only things he writes that are verifiably true are the data-points he quotes in the introduction, but these are ignored by the time he's launched into his argument proper. Just because someone uses lots of facts, it doesn't mean that they're reasoning from them properly. Or should we really combat global warming by becoming pirates?

Take the quoted excerpt above: when an easily identifiable subset of workers, women, at Google report more anxiety than the majority group (I'll assume that this is a fact), Damore leaps to the one hypothesis that suits his agenda without considering other, likelier causes. Here's his "cause", plus three reasons I'd want to look at in addition:

a. Women are naturally more prone to be neurotic (says Damore)

b. Men under-report the amount of stress they're under at work

c. The raised stress is as a result of the nature of the jobs more commonly done by women

d. The raised stress is as a result of unfair treatment (lack of advancement, lower pay, etc)

A look at work-related suicide statistics should make you stop and consider "b" for a moment (if we want to talk about how men are badly treated by workplaces, this is where we start). Damore himself glides over "c" without stopping to consider that front-end, user-facing development is the most fluid and most subject to customer interference part of a project and therefore one of the most stressful development tasks. And "d" might explain why the shittiest jobs have an overabundance of female engineers doing them, but we're simply told (without evidence to back it up) that "women are better at front-end". Yes, and I'm sure someone told me that Mexicans naturally gifted at picking fruit.

The argument Damore is making is not, as his defenders claim, that men and women have (in general) different approaches to work and problem solving, and that we need to consider everyone's needs in a workplace. That's not even an argument, and as a statement it's so obvious that it's hardly worthy of comment. His argument is the big non-sequitir rant that follows those platitudes: that we should not change anything if it makes white men like him uncomfortable, because white men like him are the best engineers. The problem with that argument is that he defines "desirable" qualities as those which he and other men like him possess, and discounts those skills he lacks as being worthless. He also sees the situation as a zero-sum game, and so creates a false dilemma where measures to help minority participants can only disadvantage people like him.

I could summarise the whole ten pages as "(A) I am a good engineer, (B) I am a man, therefore (C) men are good engineers"