"The [James Damore] lawsuit claims that numerous Google managers maintained 'blacklists' of conservative employees with whom they refused to work..."

"... that Google has a list of conservatives who are banned from visiting the campus; and that Google’s firings of Damore and the other named plaintiff, David Gudeman, were discriminatory... The company’s workforce, like much of the rest of the tech industry, is overwhelmingly white, Asian, and male.... But the Damore lawsuit purports to expose a cultural bias toward promoting diversity and 'social justice' that, the suit claims, has created a 'protected, distorted bubble of groupthink.'... Internal posts discussing the debate around diversity at Google, such as a meme of a penguin with the text 'If you want to increase diversity at Google fire all the bigoted white men,' are filed as an appendix to the lawsuit under the heading 'Anti-Caucasian postings.'..."

From "James Damore sues Google, alleging intolerance of white male conservatives/Class-action lawsuit led by fired engineer includes 100 pages of internal documents and claims conservatives are 'ostracized, belittled, and punished'" in The Guardian.

"The department head... said there might have been alternative explanations for the professor’s behavior including 'maybe he just needs his eyeglasses adjusted'..."

"... (to explain the breast staring), 'he might be on the autism spectrum,' 'he might just be socially awkward like Albert Einstein was' and 'do you think maybe you’re more sensitive than other people?'"

From "UW-Madison dean acknowledges school's failure to address sexual harassment" at the Wisconsin State Journal.

For reference, here's Larry David getting out of a social gaffe (racial, not sexual) by lying about having Asperger's syndrome:



But it should be noted that some people with Asperger's Syndrome have been speculating for years that Larry David is on the spectrum and that Jerry Seinfeld has diagnosed himself as "on the spectrum":



Maybe all that great "observational" comedy has to do with the autistic tendency to focus on exactly what isn't the focus for the nonautistic.

In that clip, Jerry talks about comedians being the only people that he feels "completely relaxed" around. Maybe that suggests some insight into what's wrong with Louis C.K....



Meanwhile, on the tech front: "'I see things differently': James Damore on his autism and the Google memo/ He was fired from Google for arguing that men may be more suited to working in tech than women. Now James Damore opens up about his regrets – and how autism may have shaped his experience of the world."

Where are you on the spectrum from "This excuse is bullshit" to "We must empathize with and accommodate the differently abled"?

"I have known, worked for, and taught countless men who could have written the now-infamous Google 'manifesto' — or who are on some level persuaded by it."

"Given these facts, I’d like to treat it — and them — with some degree of charity and try to explain why it generated so much outrage."

Writes Cynthia Lee in "I'm a woman in computer science. Let me ladysplain the Google memo to you" (Vox).

Read that. I'm not going to ladysplain the ladysplaining.

I tried to help you guys long ago when I devised the rule that many people have repeated and called The Althouse Rule (e.g., Instapundit, 3 days ago). The rule, as I put it in November 2005:

Scientists: remember to portray whatever you find to be true of women as superior.

I've said it before, and I must repeat, the rule is: If you do scientific research into the differences between men and women, you must portray whatever you find to be true of women as superior. And when you read reports about scientific research into the differences between men and women, use the hypothesis that the scientists are following that rule. It makes reading the reports quite humorous.

I've mainly used this rule to make fun of reports that follow this rule. I said:

It's patronizing. And it's unscientific! I understand the motivation of the scientists, though. I think they have reason to be afraid not to couch their findings this way.

Apparently, Damore wasn't sufficiently afraid. He didn't see that this was the unacknowledged rule. Google is a safe space, muffling the fear. That in itself is something to be afraid of. When sparing everyone fear is the order of the day, you need to fear you will be deemed the embodiment of the fear that others must be spared. Then you're completely unsafe. And gone. No man, no fear.

I'd been thinking that if only Damore had followed the rule, maybe he wouldn't have gotten fired. I have been tempted to take his memo and rewrite it following The Althouse Rule. I'm rereading the memo, however, looking for a good paragraph to make an example of, and it's not that easy to find one. I think Damore did try to assume a neutral pose and balanced the aptitudes he ascribed to the 2 gender stereotypes.

If anything, it seems better to fit his female stereotype. I mean if you were a soul in the ante-chamber to life and given your choice how to enter the world, with only this document to use to decide whether to enter your allotted human life as a male or a female, wouldn't you pick female? You have your one shot at living the life of a human being: Do you want to be oriented toward people and cooperation or to things and competition?

"Google CEO Sundar Pichai canceled an all-hands meeting about gender controversy due to employee worries of online harassment."

Recode reports.

Pichai was set to address the search giant’s 60,000 employees in 30 minutes in an all-hands meeting about a recent post by recently fired employee James Damore....

Wired reported earlier that conservative pundit Milo Yiannopoulos “posted on his Facebook page the Twitter biographies of eight Google employees who criticized Damore’s post.”...

Sources inside Google said some employees had begun to experience “doxxing” — online harassment that can take various forms and is defined “searching for and publishing private or identifying information about (a particular individual) on the Internet, typically with malicious intent.”

What a mess!

Why did Google fire James Damore?

If you read the note that went out on the 8th from Google CEO Sindar Pichai, it comes across as so conciliatory and inclusive that it's hard to understand the abrupt disinclusion of Damore.

Looking for an answer, I found this at Recode, which went up about an hour ago:

Pichai made the final decision about Damore’s fate, after what several sources with knowledge of the meeting characterized as a tough debate by top management, with initial disagreement over... what to do about Google’s continual and complex balancing act between free speech and fostering a safe workplace.... “But Sundar had to make a call about what kind of Google he wanted to stress and he did.”...

“I think the problem and also benefit of Google has been that we’ve created and encouraged an environment where everyone thinks they can say what they want, because that is what has always been the way it has been,” said another top exec. “But, at some point, if we really want to change, we have to think harder about what impact that has, especially when it makes women or others feel unsafe in the environment we have created.”...

Note that "or others" and consider this:

“It was a cordial discussion, considering the topic, and you could see how you could argue both sides on the face of it,” said one source. “But I think Damore’s focus on biology really made it clear that he had crossed the line.” What turned the tide, said sources, was when it was noted that if Damore’s dubious contentions about women’s skills were replaced by those about race or religion, there would be no debate.

In fact, [another longtime Google leader, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, wrote in Fortune]: “For instance, what if we replaced the word ‘women’ in the memo with another group? What if the memo said that biological differences amongst Black, Hispanic, or LGBTQ employees explained their underrepresentation in tech and leadership roles? Would some people still be discussing the merit of the memo’s arguments or would there be a universal call for swift action against its author? I don’t ask this to compare one group to another, but rather to point out that the language of discrimination can take many different forms and none are acceptable or productive.”...

Pichai wrote to employees on Monday...: “To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK.”

Maybe what is really freaking out Google management is race. I noticed this, in Damore's discussion with Jordan B. Peterson. Damore was provoked by "super-secret" meetings about "potentially illegal practices that they've been doing to try to increase diversity... basically treating people differently based on what their race is" (pause) "or gender are" (sic):

Since I used the word "phallocracy..."

... I decided to look it up in the NYT archive. I was surprised that it has only appeared 3 times. The Times is big on feminism, and it's a real word, defined in the OED as "A society dominated by males; the dominance of men over women; the distinguishing belief of a phallocrat."

January 27, 1985:

["Sisterhood Is Global/The International Women's Movement Anthology"] abounds with emotions and opinions, and has little of the style of a standard reference work. And despite its stress on statistics, accuracy is not its strongest suit.... The editor, Robin Morgan, chose the contributors and then gave them a free rein... For the Dutch contributor, the major issue is ''Do we still make love with our oppressor?'' The problems are rather different in Haiti, where teen-age girls stitch baseballs for 14 cents an hour. Elsewhere, the titles tell much of the story: ''Women in a Warrior Society'' (Australia); ''Fighting for the Right to Fight'' (Colombia); ''Elegance Amid the Phallocracy'' (Senegal)....

August 15, 1999:

For nigh on 20 years, Mary Daly, who is widely considered the world's foremost radical feminist philosopher and theologian, has barred men from her classroom at Boston College, arguing that they marred the learning experience of women.

For 20 years, too, the university objected to her separatism and penalized her with reprimands and denial of promotion, but never fired her. Nor could it change the strong mind of a woman who... even uses her own lexicon, with words like phallocracy and academentia....

This week, Boston College, a Jesuit-run Catholic university, officially took Dr. Daly's office back from her....

December 21, 2010:

She had names for what she was fighting. “Phallocracy, penocracy, jockocracy, cockocracy — call it whatever,” [Mary] Daly said. In 1987, with a co-author, she published her own dictionary — seventh in a line of nine books she wrote — meant to spell out a new lexicon for women... Anyone who didn’t bother to question male dominance was a snool; anyone who promoted it, a dickspeaker....

There's also "phallocrat," which the OED defines as "A person who advocates or assumes the existence of a male-dominated society; a male chauvinist or supremacist." The NYT has used that word only twice, and the first one predates the earliest publication found by the OED. Hey! I beat the OED on something. Here, from July 1972:

Nelly Kaplan, the French writer‐director whose “Papa, Les Petits Bateaus” and “A Very Curious Girl” were shown at the recent Festival of Women's Films, has writ ten two more screenplays which she hopes to put before the cameras soon in France. The first is called “Phallocrat,” and it deals with a man who is, tyrannical in his relations with his wife and daughter.

The other one, from 2010 is an article about Susan Faludi's memoir "In the Darkroom":

It is... a project as high concept as a sitcom pitch: What if a famous feminist author — whose activism was spurred by her father’s bullying machismo — discovered that said phallocrat had become a woman? Complications ensue. But Ms. Faludi mines her material less for easy ironies than for insights into the very meaning of identity.

So how did I happen to use that word today? Commenters have been pushing me to watch the video of James Damore — the memo-writing ex-employee of Google — with Jordan Peterson.

All I said was:

I watched the entire Peterson video. I should write something about it. Peterson had no idea how to draw Damore out and seemed only too willing to fill up all the available space on his own. Phallocracy in action??

Reviving the original meaning of "demoralize."

Here's something in the "Suggestions" section of James Damore's suddenly famous memo:

De-moralize diversity.

As soon as we start to moralize an issue, we stop thinking about it in terms of costs and benefits, dismiss anyone that disagrees as immoral, and harshly punish those we see as villains to protect the “victims.”

The hyphen in "de-moralize" shows the writer meant to distinguish his word from the usual "demoralize" and to push us to see the new, unusual meaning he intends and thinks the reader can figure out.

(I'm reminded of an essay I wrote in junior high school. Taking the position that grades should be abolished, I titled the essay "The De-Grading System." Ironically, I received a C, and I've never forgotten what the teacher wrote on it: "Great title, but what are you talking about?")

Damore's use of "de-moralize" jumped out at me, because I've been listening to the wonderful lectures "English in America: A Linguistic History," and I happened to learn just the other day that "demoralize" was the one word that was first used by Noah Webster.

As a lexicographer, Noah Webster was focused on recording the words other people used and not on inventing words of his own, but he did also write a piece called "The Revolution in France" (1794), which contained this passage:

However necessary might be the revolution in France, and however noble the object, such great changes and a long war will have an effect on the moral character of the nation, which is deeply to be deplored. All wars have, if I may use a new but emphatic word, a demoralizing tendency; but the revolution in France, in addition to the usual influence of war, is attended with a total change in the minds of the people. They are released, not only from the ordinary restraints of law, but from all their former habits of thinking. From the fetters of a debasing religious system, the people are let loose in the wide field of mental licentiousness; and as men naturally run from one extreme to another, the French will probably rush into the wildest vagaries of opinion, both in their political and moral creeds. The decree of the convention authorizing divorces, upon the application of either party, alleging only unsuitableness of temper, hereby offering allurements to infidelity and domestic broils, is a singular proof of the little regard in which the morals of the nation are held by the ruling party. The efforts made by the convention to exterminate every thing that looks like imposing restraint upon the passions, by the fear of a supreme being and future punishments, are a most extraordinary experiment in government, to ascertain whether nations can exist in peace, order and harmony, without any such restraints. It is an experiment to prove that impressions of a supreme being and a divine providence, which men have hitherto considered as natural, are all the illusions of imagination; the effect of a wrong education. It is an experiment to try whether atheism and materialism, as articles of national creed, will not render men more happy in society than a belief in a God, a Providence and the Immortality of the soul. The experiment is new; it is bold; it is astonishing.

The Oxford English Dictionary identifies that as the first published use of the word. You can see that it means to do the reverse of moralizing. To moralize is "To interpret morally or symbolically; to explain the moral meaning of." And Webster's addition of the prefix "de" is easily understood as reversing the process.

Webster didn't use a hyphen. He just said: I'm creating a new word. But Damore's hyphen does the same thing, nudging you to build the easily understood parts into a word that you'll be able to figure out. Interestingly, we have to figure this idea of reversing the process of moralizing all over again, because the original meaning of the word, Webster's meaning, is almost never used anymore. In OED parlance, it's "archaic." (It's not obsolete, however, because The South Bend Tribune used it in 1998 to say "The whole unclean and sordid spectacle that has enriched the press, the media and the legal establishment at the expense of demoralizing young adults and people in general." We need not digress into what that "unclean and sordid spectacle" was. Though it sounds exciting, it's irrelevant to the subject at hand, the meaning of "demoralize.")

The word "demoralize" — as ordinary speakers of the language use it — has come to refer not to the destruction of moral principles but the destruction of morale. (I wonder if it was ever pronounced "de-morale-ize.") Somehow this newer meaning overwhelmed the original meaning, perhaps because it caught on in the military context, where there were so many occasions to deploy it and perhaps  because we haven't felt much of a need to talk about the reverse process of moralizing.

Of course, we still use and easily understand the word "moralizing." We continue to talk about infusing a subject with ideas about morality. The oldest related word is the adjective "moral," which means: "Of or relating to human character or behaviour considered as good or bad; of or relating to the distinction between right and wrong, or good and evil, in relation to the actions, desires, or character of responsible human beings; ethical." That goes back to the 14th century. The word "morale" is much more recent. Though it once meant the same as "morals," the usage we understand now — hope and confidence — arose in the military context, just like "demoralize," as we understand it today.

So my question for you is: Should we — on the occasion of the Damore memo — revive the original meaning of "demoralize"? It would confuse people for a while, but we could help them by retaining the hyphen until the new usage catches on. The benefit would be the parallelism with "moralize." Since we tend to object to "moralizing," "demoralizing" could be a useful word pointing the way to a needed process that should be applied where moralizing has already occurred. As Damore used the word, it was a call for sober scientific research and rational reflection: We've loaded too much morality into diversity, so let's demoralize it, clear out the obstructions, and figure out what's really going on.

"It is impossible to consider this field of science without grappling with the flaws of the institution—and of the deification—of science itself."

"For example: It was argued to me this week that the Google memo failed to constitute hostile behavior because it cited peer-reviewed articles that suggest women have different brains. The well-known scientist who made this comment to me is both a woman and someone who knows quite well that 'peer-reviewed' and 'correct' are not interchangeable terms. This brings us to the question that many have grappled with this week. It’s 2017, and to some extent scientific literature still supports a patriarchal view that ranks a man’s intellect above a woman’s. It’s easy to end up in an endless loop of using our prodigious scientific skills to carefully debunk the shoddy science that props up this argument. This is important and valuable work, but it’s also worth considering why this loop exists at all. Science’s greatest myth is that it doesn’t encode bias and is always self-correcting. In fact, science has often made its living from encoding and justifying bias, and refusing to do anything about the fact that the data says something’s wrong...."

From "Stop Equating 'Science' With Truth/Evolutionary psychology is just the most obvious example of science's flaws," by particle physicist and philosopher of science Chanda Prescod-Weinstein in Slate.

IN THE COMMENTS: Matthew Sablan said:

Who is arguing the things claimed in the first paragraph? I haven't read the manifesto, but I thought he was talking trends and averages while reinforcing that individuals can fall anywhere on that continuum. What scientist is arguing for sexism in the workplace?

You need to go read the first paragraph at Slate to see how horribly Prescod-Weinstein summarizes what James Damore wrote. Scientists are untrustworthy, she argues and, simultaneously, demonstrates.

"More than 60 current and former Google employees are considering bringing a class-action lawsuit alleging sexism and pay disparities against women..."

The Guardian reports:

James Finberg, the civil rights attorney working on the possible legal action on behalf of the female employees, told the Guardian they contend they have earned less than men at Google despite equal qualifications and comparable positions....

A class-action gender discrimination suit would build on a case brought by the US Department of Labor (DoL), which is arguing that Google systematically underpays women and recently convinced a judge to force the company to hand over a portion of the company’s salary records....

“[The prospective plaintiffs in the lawsuit] are concerned that women are channeled to levels and positions that pay less than men with similar education and experience,” Finberg said.... Several women he interviewed have said they make around $40,000 less than male colleagues doing the same work, with one woman saying she makes two-thirds of a male peer’s salary....

“I felt like I wasn’t playing the game in the ‘boys club’ environment,” said another woman who worked for two years as a user experience designer and recently left Google. She said she regularly dealt with sexist remarks, such as comments about her looks, and that she felt it was discriminatory when she was denied a promotion despite her achievements and large workload.

“I was watching male coworkers progress at a faster rate than myself. It was really disturbing,” said the designer, who also requested anonymity....

The women’s stories bolster the claims of labor department officials, who have said that a preliminary analysis found that women face “extreme” pay discrimination across the company and have recently raised concerns that Google’s strict confidentiality agreements are discouraging employees from speaking up.

I will repeat what I said in a post yesterday about the firing of James Damore:

It's possible that what Damore talked about in his memo actually reflects what many people at Google privately think and are trying to hide and that he was treated harshly to manufacture evidence against a proposition that matters in the lawsuit.

I'd like to know a lot more, so I'll just throw out the hypothesis that Damore is being scapegoated not because Google is dominated by social-justice warriors but because there really is deeply entrenched prejudice against women in the tech field and Google is desperate to hide it.

"Symbiotic relationships, both parasitic and mutualistic, are ubiquitous in nature."

"Understanding how these symbioses evolve, from bacteria and their phages to humans and our gut microflora, is crucial in understanding how life operates. Often, symbioses consist of a slowly evolving host species with each host only interacting with its own sub-population of symbionts. The Red Queen hypothesis describes coevolutionary relationships as constant arms races with each species rushing to evolve an advantage over the other, suggesting that faster evolution is favored. Here, we use a simple game theoretic model of host-symbiont coevolution that includes population structure to show that if the symbionts evolve much faster than the host, the equilibrium distribution is the same as it would be if it were a sequential game where the host moves first against its symbionts."

He's talking about Google, right? 

(I'm trying to understand James Damore — not just why he was fired, but why he was hired.)

Wikileaks offers a job to fired Google engineer James Damore.

1/ Censorship is for losers. @WikiLeaks is offering a job to fired Google engineer James Damore. https://t.co/tmrflE72p3

— Julian Assange 🔹 (@JulianAssange) August 8, 2017

"Google Fires Author of Divisive Memo on Gender Differences."

Bloomberg reports.

Earlier on Monday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai sent a note to employees that said portions of the memo “violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.”...  A Google representative, asked about the dismissal, referred to Pichai’s memo.

[James] Damore’s 10-page memorandum accused Google of silencing conservative political opinions and argued that biological differences play a role in the shortage of women in tech and leadership positions. It circulated widely inside the company and became public over the weekend, causing a furor that amplified the pressure on Google executives to take a more definitive stand.

I'm still trying to understand how Damore distributed the memo. Did he shoot it out to a lot of people in an effort to suddenly force them to face up to the issue in his terms right now or did he muse on paper to develop his own thoughts and only share it with a few people who'd shown an interest in working through ideas they'd already talked about with him?

The phrase "It circulated widely inside the company" doesn't explain what he did. I can't figure out what to think about what happened to him without knowing more.

Firing him seems cruel and chilling toward free speech, but the company is entitled and even required to demand that employees not participate in creating unequal working conditions for men and women.

The memo and surrounding debate comes as Google fends off a lawsuit from the U.S. Department of Labor alleging the company systemically discriminates against women. Google has denied the charges, arguing that it doesn’t have a gender gap in pay, but has declined to share full salary information with the government. 

It's possible that what Damore talked about in his memo actually reflects what many people at Google privately think and are trying to hide and that he was treated harshly to manufacture evidence against a proposition that matters in the lawsuit.

I'd like to know a lot more, so I'll just throw out the hypothesis that Damore is being scapegoated not because Google is dominated by social-justice warriors but because there really is deeply entrenched prejudice against women in the tech field and Google is desperate to hide it.

ADDED: From the NYT article on the firing:

Before being fired, Mr. Damore said, he had submitted a complaint to the National Labor Relations Board claiming that Google’s upper management was “misrepresenting and shaming me in order to silence my complaints.” He added that it was “illegal to retaliate” against an N.L.R.B. charge.