Tuesday, August 08, 2017

How Google is evil to fire Damore

The NY Times reports on Google firing James Damore for his opinions in an internal memo:
In a companywide email, Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, said portions of the memo had violated the company’s code of conduct and crossed the line “by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.”

The memo put the company in a bind. On one hand, Google has long promoted a culture of openness, with employees allowed to question senior executives and even mock its strategy in internal forums. However, Google, like many other technology firms, is dealing with criticism that it has not done enough to hire and promote women and minorities.

One female Google engineer posted on Twitter upon reading the memo that she would consider leaving the company unless the human resources department took action.
Wow, this confirms “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”, as described in the memo, as well as the leftist-victim-censorship mentality.

Here is a representative point from the memo:
Suggestions

I hope it’s clear that I’m not saying that diversity is bad, that Google or society is 100% fair, that we shouldn’t try to correct for existing biases, or that minorities have the same experience of those in the majority. 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).

My concrete suggestions are to: ...

De-emphasize empathy.

I’ve heard several calls for increased empathy on diversity issues. While I strongly support trying to understand how and why people think the way they do, relying on affective empathy—feeling another’s pain—causes us to focus on anecdotes, favor individuals similar to us, and harbor other irrational and dangerous biases. Being emotionally unengaged helps us better reason about the facts.
If Google had followed his advice, then it would be better able to reason about the facts. Instead, it apparently caved in to over-emotional leftist females demanding that the guy be fired. The CEO presumably thought that he was empathizing with the females, as he came back from his overseas vacation to fire him.

It is hard to believe that this is the same company that once had a motto of "Don't be evil", and whose CEO Eric Schmidt was quoted as saying:
Google is run by three computer scientists. We’re going to make all the mistakes computer scientists running a company would make. But one of the mistakes we’re not going to make is the mistake non-scientists make. We’re going to make mistakes based on facts and data and analysis.
No, Google has no facts or analysis that Damore is wrong about anything.

Google is not really that big a believer in diversity. Yahoo has brought in females to a greater extent, and Google has profited greatly from Yahoo's poor management.

It should be obvious that Damore was fired for telling the truth. If Damore were wrong, then the company would just rebut what he said. But instead the company has just denounced him without denying anything in his memo. It merely said things like "we cannot allow stereotyping".

Google makes about $80B a year on stereotyping. That is, it spies on you, uses stereotypes to develop a profile on you, and then sells ads based on that profile. It also makes about $10B a year from other services. So I guess it is a little sensitive about stereotyping.

The memo with links has now been posted at diversitymemo.com/. Google was a big political supporter of the Obama administration, until the Obama DoJ sued Google for sex discrimination against women. Breitbart has documented Google witchhunts against employees with non-conforming views. CNBC says it may have been illegal for Google to fire Damore, as he as a right to express his political opinions and communicate with fellow employees about improving working conditions.

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