Tag: SJW

History and the limits of SJW dishonesty

Don’t bother looking for the limits of SJW stupidity or dishonesty. You will not find them. In an astonishingly inept attempt to defend the BBC and “historian” Mary Beard, one English SJW actually put forward the following defense, accompanied by a screenshot.
Dave Tooke‏ @burstdrum
I answered your question. Even though it was a straw man. No one ever said mixed race families were typical (majority) of Roman Britain.
Dave Tooke‏ @burstdrum
The BBC cartoon did not say “typical”. It merely suggested one such family as possible. Which it was.
This was the screenshot attached to the second tweet.

In fairness, the SJW was undermined by the dishonesty of the BBC, which is the more significant aspect of this little story. You see, this was how the video was described 5 days ago, before BBC “historian” Mary Beard tried to school Paul Joseph Watson and was caught bullshitting by NN Taleb. Emphasis added.
Original BBC Two description
Life in Roman Britain is shown through the eyes of a typical family nearly 2000 years ago. The Romans bring towns to Britain, and also roads, forts, and Hadrian’s Wall, to keep out the Picts. The father is supervising the building of Hadrian’s Wall, while the son manages to lose his father’s special military scarf, or focale. This incident is used to explore Roman beliefs and religion, food and entertainment.

Current BBC Two description
Life in Roman Britain as seen through the eyes of one family nearly 2000 years ago. The Romans bring towns to Britain, and also roads, forts, and Hadrian’s Wall, to keep out the Picts. The father is supervising the building of Hadrian’s Wall, while his son manages to lose his father’s special military scarf, or focale. This incident is used to explore Roman beliefs and religion.
You see, with SJWs, it’s Fake News and Fake History all the way down. You can NEVER trust anything they say. Because – all together now – SJWS ALWAYS LIE.

Breitbart is on it.

Yeah, this diversity debacle doesn’t promise to die down anytime soon:

Numerous individuals alleged to be members of Google’s management team have been caught bragging about forming blacklists to impact the careers of colleagues with different political beliefs.
In a series of screenshots from 2015 onwards provided to Breitbart News by a verified Google employee, individuals described as left-wing Google management employees can be seen discussing the ways they punish their colleagues both inside and out of the company.
“While Google appears to be doing very little to quell the hostile voices that exists inside the company, I want those hostile voices to know: I will never, ever hire hire/transfer you onto my team. Ever. I don’t care if you are perfect fit of technically excellent or whatever,” declared former employee Adam Fletcher in a post on Google’s internal, staff-only Google+ network: “Internal Plus.” “I will actively not work with you, even to the point where your team or product is impacted by this decision. I’ll communicate why to your manager if it comes up.”
“You’re being blacklisted by people at companies outside of Google,” he continued. “You might not have been aware of this, but people know, people talk. There are always social consequences.”

Nothing new to readers here, but Breitbart has considerably more reach than I do. However, Allum Bokhari’s interview with a rebel Googler, “Hal”, is illuminating:

Hal: Witch hunts are a well-known cultural problem at Google. The company is currently facing a Federal complaint filed by the National Labor Relations Board in April for interfering with employees’ legal right to discuss “workplace diversity and social justice initiatives.” The complaint alleges that Senior Vice President Urs Holzle and numerous managers in his organization actively stoked up witch hunts in 2015 and 2016 intended to muzzle low-level employees who raised concerns about the company’s practices. The trial is set for November.
Several managers have openly admitted to keeping blacklists of the employees in question, and preventing them from seeking work at other companies. There have been numerous cases in which social justice activists coordinated attempts to sabotage other employees’ performance reviews for expressing a different opinion. These have been raised to the Senior VP level, with no action taken whatsoever.
Allum Bokhari: What’s it like to work in such an environment? Do you think it damages employee output?
Hal: A lot of social justice activists essentially spend all day fighting the culture war, and get nothing done. The company has made it a point to hire more people like this. The diversity gospel has been woven into nearly everything the company does, to the point where senior leaders focus on diversity first and technology second. The companywide “Google Insider” emails used to talk about cool new tech, but now they’re entirely about social justice initiatives. Likewise, the weekly all-hands “TGIF” meetings used to focus on tech, but now they’re split about 50/50 between tech and identity politics signaling.
For conservative employees, this is obviously demoralizing, but it is also dangerous. Several have been driven out of the company or fired outright for sharing a dissenting view. Others have had their promotions denied or suffered other forms of deniable retaliation. Most of us just keep our heads down because we can’t afford to lose our jobs.

Google takes a stand

It’s a bold move by Sundararajan. We’ll see how it works out for him. It was inevitable, because SJWs always double down, but the irony of Pichai Sundararajan, a high-caste Tamil Brahmin, firing an employee for expressing his belief in biological inequality, is practically off the charts.

Google has fired an employee who wrote an internal memo that ascribed gender inequality in the technology industry to biological differences. James Damore, the engineer who wrote the memo, confirmed his dismissal saying that he had been fired for “perpetuating gender stereotypes,” in an email to Reuters on Monday. Damore said he is exploring all possible legal remedies.

As I observed after reading the Google CEO’s memo, Damore was doomed because Sundararajan had to mollify his insane SJW employee base, which right now is dancing and celebrating its own inevitable demise. Damore will be fine; he’s better off out of the SJW-converged madhouse and has already been offered jobs by Gab’s Andrew Torba and WikiLeaks’s Julian Assange. But Google will not be, because this is a clear signal to the key engineers in Search and AdWords that it is Time To Go.
DH, who is one of the Dread Ilk’s expert data guy’s, explains.

All of Google is kept afloat by one thing only. Adwords. They have no other significant source of income after a decade or more of trying to diversify. Every other business is borderline trivial when compared to AdWords. All the moonshots have failed. All the R&D has failed. It’s. All. AdWords.
The money-making core of Google is a tiny speck of its workforce, a tiny core of people who make AdWords work. The fear is not that 2/3 are SJWs, it’s that one or two or three of the key engineers, who are working on the next version of Search and Adwords, who are actively fighting and hardening against existential threats to the product, might walk, or even just do a slightly less great job.
Google is actually a very fragile company. They are ripe for disruption from a new player, or alternatively, to be drained from a few deep pocketed rivals. The entire bubble of online advertising stems from a belief that is often irrational that online advertising is effective at certain definitions of cost effectiveness.

In other words, as the AdWords model fails, which is already happening, Google’s massive market cap is going to rapidly decline with it because all of its other businesses have failed to find traction. The company has observably entered the ideological death spiral that is the inevitable result of the Impossibility of Social Justice Convergence.

Back early

Google’s CEO returns home early from vacation and sends a message:

From: Sundar
Subject: Our words matter
This has been a very difficult few days. I wanted to provide an update on the memo that was circulated over this past week.
First, let me say that we strongly support the right of Googlers to express themselves, and much of what was in that memo is fair to debate, regardless of whether a vast majority of Googlers disagree with it. However, portions of the memo violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace. Our job is to build great products for users that make a difference in their lives. To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK. It is contrary to our basic values and our Code of Conduct, which expects “each Googler to do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias and unlawful discrimination.”
The memo has clearly impacted our co-workers, some of whom are hurting and feel judged based on their gender. Our co-workers shouldn’t have to worry that each time they open their mouths to speak in a meeting, they have to prove that they are not like the memo states, being “agreeable” rather than “assertive,” showing a “lower stress tolerance,” or being “neurotic.”
At the same time, there are co-workers who are questioning whether they can safely express their views in the workplace (especially those with a minority viewpoint). They too feel under threat, and that is also not OK. People must feel free to express dissent. So to be clear again, many points raised in the memo — such as the portions criticizing Google’s trainings, questioning the role of ideology in the workplace, and debating whether programs for women and underserved groups are sufficiently open to all — are important topics. The author had a right to express their views on those topics — we encourage an environment in which people can do this and it remains our policy to not take action against anyone for prompting these discussions.
The past few days have been very difficult for many at the company, and we need to find a way to debate issues on which we might disagree — while doing so in line with our Code of Conduct. I’d encourage each of you to make an effort over the coming days to reach out to those who might have different perspectives from your own. I will be doing the same.
I have been on work related travel in Africa and Europe the past couple of weeks and had just started my family vacation here this week. I have decided to return tomorrow as clearly there’s a lot more to discuss as a group — including how we create a more inclusive environment for all.
So please join me, along with members of the leadership team at a town hall on Thursday. Check your calendar soon for details.
— Sundar

Translation: you can go ahead and fire him, because Code of Conduct, but we’ve got a problem here and we really need to figure out how to keep the whackjobs from getting completely out of hand.
But it’s always harder to get off the tiger without it eating you.

Dear Yes-at-Googlers

Welcome to the home of the Evil Legion of Evil.

I, Vox Day, the Supreme Dark Lord of said ELoE, am your humble host. Benvenuti. You need not worry about your physical safety being at risk, the Vile Faceless Minions are chained in their kennels, and muzzled, and have been provided sufficient SJW bones upon which to chew.

Let me assure you that as the bestselling author of SJWs Always Lie, I am perfectly aware that you have been lied to by your fellow Googlers about me and this site. This is not a site that incites harassment, quite to the contrary, as an American Indian who is regularly attacked and misraced and misrepresented and lied about, I am often a victim of SJW harassment.

Since I have been receiving death threats from your kind since 2001, when I first became a political columnist, you will forgive me if I am less than entirely impressed with your preening and posturing about the imminent danger that public exposure supposedly poses you. And before you attempt to engage in the usual toothless social justice rhetoric here, you may wish to keep in mind that I literally wrote the book on the subject.

As you were belatedly informed, your newsletter, of course, does not endorse the content here, so let this welcome serve as your trigger warning that here you will encounter people who:

  • do not agree with you
  • are actually more intelligent than you
  • are better-educated than you
  • and frankly find you to be tediously predictable and rendered functionally stupid, if not delusional, by your foolish social justice convergence.

But if you are polite and civil, I expect the Dread Ilk will treat you in a similarly polite and civil manner. And if you choose otherwise, well, as our guests, we are happy to permit you to establish the rules of engagement.

In certain confidence of the ultimate victory of the Legion, I am,

VD,
SDL
ELoE

Since absolutely no one here has any idea what I’m talking about, I refer to the following excerpts from Google’s internal SJW newsletter, to which I of course subscribe. Apparently making it known that Google employees are threatening people with violence, threatening to silence those with differing opinions, refusing to work with each other, spying on each other, and making blacklists is, somehow “putting Googlers’ physical safety at risk”.

I would have thought it was putting their employment at risk, but perhaps Google’s executives want their employees engaging in that behavior. I don’t know, and really, I don’t care. And if you think the best way to move forward is lobbying your bosses to delete this blog, well, all I can say is that it certainly would make for one HELL of a chapter in my forthcoming SJWs Always Double Down.

The whining continues

English “historian” Mary Beard is still whining about the pushback she received for incorrectly claiming that a multiracial Roman British family was “typical”, as portrayed in a BBC children’s cartoon.

Mary Beard has spoken about the “Twitterstorm” of abuse she received after arguing that Roman Britain was ethnically diverse.

The historian and television presenter said she received a “torrent of aggressive insults” for days after she said a BBC schools video that depicted a high-ranking solider and a father of a Roman Britain family as being black to be “pretty accurate”.

She argued that the character in the BBC cartoon was loosely based on “Quintus Lollius Urbicus, a man from what is now Algeria, who became governor of Britain.”

She spoke against the “rubbish” arguments about genetic evidence from alt-right commentators and their “desire for certainty” when it came to historical information that was not always possible to ascertain, such as the population of Britain during the Roman empire and the ethnic make-up.

“It also feels very sad to me that we cannot have a reasonable discussion on such a topic as the cultural ethnic composition of Roman Britain without resorting to unnecessary insult, abuse, misogyny and language of war not debate (and that includes one senior academic),” she wrote in the Times Literary Supplement. She was referring to comments from  Nicholas Nassim Taleb who accused her of “bullsh*tting”.

I don’t think her new book is going to help restore her reputation any time soon. Best response: “It would explain all the dead white wives.”

In the meantime, Cambridge University has doubled down and released a Faculty Statement.


Faculty statement responding to the online debate of ethnic diversity in Roman Britain

Roman Britain has long been an important part of the teaching and research in the Faculty of Classics. The question of ethnic diversity in the province has been getting unusual amounts of attention recently. Professor Mary Beard has been at the centre of some of this attention. In the Faculty we welcome and encourage public interest in, and reasoned debate about, the ancient world, such as Professor Beard has always sought to encourage. The evidence is in fact overwhelming that Roman Britain was indeed a multi-ethnic society. This was not, of course, evenly spread through the province, and it would have been infinitely more noticeable — it can be assumed — in an urban or military context than in a rural one. There are, however, still significant gaps in our understanding. New scientific evidence (including but not limited to genetic data) offers exciting ways forward, but it needs to be interpreted carefully.

UPDATE: Glorious. Mary has really become quite prolific of late. We need to send old GRR Martin a case of whatever she’s drinking.

Convergence at AirBNB

I don’t use AirBNB. But if I did, I would stop.

This Saturday, Virginia’s Lee Park is slated to be the meeting place of the Unite The Right rally, a much-publicized gathering of far-right personalities and their sycophants. With less than a week to go, Airbnb has taken active measures to delete the accounts of some members the company believes to be staying in Charlottesville for the rally… According to screenshots shared on Twitter, the users have apparently been banned for violating Airbnb’s Terms of Service.

“Violating Terms of Service” is SJW speak for banning badthinkers and thought criminals. And their list of badthinkers and thought criminals is growing every single day.

Meanwhile, at Google, you can expect to discuss diversity, and nothing but diversity, should you happen to interview there. The middle managers want to make sure they hire nothing but SJWs. At this rate, Google’s eventual crash-and-burn promises to rival Yahoo’s.

All the heads of the medusa

First, I’m not applauding the official Google response. Their position is intrinsically and observably absurd; the fact that they are managing to refrain from digging themselves in deeper by going on a witch hunt and burning one of their employees at the stake is merely an indication that someone in the Google executive team possesses at least a minimal amount of common sense. If you want to provide a platform for everyone, then you obviously have to give up any ambitions of playing thought police.

Second, we can see that Google’s SJWs are starting to get nervous as evidence of their internal thought-policing begins to leak out into the public. And never forget, they genuinely believe that they are better-educated, as well as our moral and intellectual superiors, because Google only hires the smartest, best-educated people, right? You would almost feel sorry for the executives who have to deal with this nonsense, until you stop and think, what else could have possibly resulted from their decision to hire SJWs and prioritize diversity?

However, the way in which the SJWs immediately go to no-platforming as an ideal response underlines my oft-repeated point about the importance of building and supporting our own platforms.

Attacking dissent at Google

An anonymous Googler is providing evidence at Gab that various employees at Google are openly attacking James Damore, the author of the document dissenting from the SJW diversity doctrine there, and actively lobbying the executives to fire him, despite the fact that more than one-third of Googlers surveyed tend to agree with his dissent.

Paul and Sitaram are managers. Colm is a director with 101 full-time employees in his organization. Dave is a director with 242 full-time employees in his organization. These posts are from the internal version of the Google+ social network, which is limited to Googlers only.

Dozens of managers emailed their teams to smear the document’s author for raising his concerns in the paper. Subsequently, the author received all manner of hate mail and threats from thousands of other employees. It was a coordinated mob attack and numerous managers were deliberately stoking the flames in order to punish him.

The pie charts show that a large share of Googlers agreed with James’ points on an anonymous survey.  Hence the grave importance of maintaining control over the Narrative.

Google Leak #1
Google Leak #2
Google Leak #3
Google Leak #4
Google Leak #5
Google Leak #6
Google Leak #7

If anyone is going to be fired as a result of this, it should not be James Damore, who has a PhD in Biology from Harvard and therefore is unlikely to be opining in ignorance, but rather, the SJW co-workers who are demonstrating their complete lack of corporate professionalism. Nor is Damore alone in his rather mild criticism of the SJW excesses there. As always, the SJWs overestimate their strength, even in one of their most influential strongholds.

It should be mentioned, however, that at least up to this point, Google’s response has been reasonable. The VP of Diversity has issued a statement that the organization stands by its insane SJW principles, which is a surprise to no one, but has also observed that “fostering a culture in which those with alternative views, including different political views, feel safe sharing their opinions”. On the other hand, the caveat “that discourse needs to work alongside the principles of equal employment found in our Code of Conduct, policies, and anti-discrimination laws” does provide cover for anti-free speech action.

So, we’ll see if Google wants to roll the dice by going full SJW while under fire from European governments and anti-trust scrutiny from the Trump administration. The smartest thing for them to do would be to do nothing, as they are not responsible for the personal or professional opinions of their employees, but their internal SJWs may not make that possible given the sheer number of them Google has collected.

UPDATE: More evidence that this is Best Timeline.

Julian Assange@JulianAssange
Identity politics 2.0 wars come to Google. Oh no. But mass spying is fine since its equal opportunity predation.





UPDATE: Welcome, Yes-At-Googlers

Welcome to the home of the Evil Legion of Evil.

I, Vox Day, the Supreme Dark Lord of said ELoE, am your humble host. Benvenuti. You need not worry about your physical safety being at risk, the Vile Faceless Minions are chained in their kennels, and muzzled, and have been provided sufficient SJW bones upon which to chew.

Let me assure you that as the bestselling author of SJWs Always Lie, I am perfectly aware that you have been lied to by your fellow Googlers about me and this site. This is not a site that incites harassment, quite to the contrary, as an American Indian who is regularly attacked and misraced and misrepresented and lied about, I am often a victim of SJW harassment.

Since I have been receiving death threats from your kind since 2001, when I first became a political columnist, you will forgive me if I am less than entirely impressed with your preening and posturing. And before you attempt to engage in the usual toothless social justice rhetoric, you may wish to keep in mind that I literally wrote the book on the subject.

As you were belatedly informed, your newsletter, of course, does not endorse the content here, so let this welcome serve as your trigger warning that here you will encounter people who:

  • do not agree with you
  • are actually more intelligent than you
  • are better-educated than you
  • and frankly find you to be tediously predictable and rendered functionally stupid, if not delusional, by your foolish social justice convergence.

But if you are polite and civil, I expect the Dread Ilk will treat you in a similarly polite and civil manner. And if you choose otherwise, well, as our guests, we are happy to permit you to establish the rules of engagement.

In certain confidence of the ultimate victory of the Legion, I am,

VD,
SDL
ELoE

Dissent at Google

This is the document being circulated among those Googlers dissenting from the converged regime there. Needless to say, it has resulted in utter outrage among the SJWs there and the inevitable witch hunt. It will be interesting to see what happens when the culprit is revealed and what excuse is given for his firing. One hopes he has read SJWAL, or at least the SJW Attack Survival Guide.


Reply to public response and misrepresentation

I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes. When addressing the gap in representation in the population, we need to look at population level differences in distributions. If we can’t have an honest discussion about this, then we can never truly solve the problem. Psychological safety is built on mutual respect and acceptance, but unfortunately our culture of shaming and misrepresentation is disrespectful and unaccepting of anyone outside its echo chamber. Despite what the public response seems to have been, I’ve gotten many personal messages from fellow Googlers expressing their gratitude for bringing up these very important issues which they agree with but would never have the courage to say or defend because of our shaming culture and the possibility of being fired. This needs to change.

TL:DR

Google’s political bias has equated the freedom from offense with psychological safety, but shaming into silence is the antithesis of psychological safety.
This silencing has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed.
The lack of discussion fosters the most extreme and authoritarian elements of this ideology.
Extreme: all disparities in representation are due to oppression
Authoritarian: we should discriminate to correct for this oppression
Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership. Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.

Background [1]

People generally have good intentions, but we all have biases which are invisible to us. Thankfully, open and honest discussion with those who disagree can highlight our blind spots and help us grow, which is why I wrote this document.[2] Google has several biases and honest discussion about these biases is being silenced by the dominant ideology. What follows is by no means the complete story, but it’s a perspective that desperately needs to be told at Google.


Google’s biases

At Google, we talk so much about unconscious bias as it applies to race and gender, but we rarely discuss our moral biases. Political orientation is actually a result of deep moral preferences and thus biases. Considering that the overwhelming majority of the social sciences, media, and Google lean left, we should critically examine these prejudices.

Left Biases

  • Compassion for the weak
  • Disparities are due to injustices
  • Humans are inherently cooperative
  • Change is good (unstable)
  • Open
  • Idealist

Right Biases

  • Respect for the strong/authority
  • Disparities are natural and just
  • Humans are inherently competitive
  • Change is dangerous (stable)
  • Closed
  • Pragmatic

Neither side is 100% correct and both viewpoints are necessary for a functioning society or, in this case, company. A company too far to the right may be slow to react, overly hierarchical, and untrusting of others. In contrast, a company too far to the left will constantly be changing (deprecating much loved services), over diversify its interests (ignoring or being ashamed of its core business), and overly trust its employees and competitors.

Only facts and reason can shed light on these biases, but when it comes to diversity and inclusion, Google’s left bias has created a politically correct monoculture that maintains its hold by shaming dissenters into silence. This silence removes any checks against encroaching extremist and authoritarian policies. For the rest of this document, I’ll concentrate on the extreme stance that all differences in outcome are due to differential treatment and the authoritarian element that’s required to actually discriminate to create equal representation.

Possible non-bias causes of the gender gap in tech [3]

At Google, we’re regularly told that implicit (unconscious) and explicit biases are holding women back in tech and leadership. Of course, men and women experience bias, tech, and the workplace differently and we should be cognizant of this, but it’s far from the whole story.

On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. These differences aren’t just socially constructed because:

  • They’re universal across human cultures
  • They often have clear biological causes and links to prenatal testosterone
  • Biological males that were castrated at birth and raised as females often still identify and act like males
  • The underlying traits are highly heritable
  • They’re exactly what we would predict from an evolutionary psychology perspective

Note, I’m not saying that all men differ from women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.” 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. Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.

Personality differences

Women, on average, have more:

  • Openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing).
  • These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas. More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics.
  • Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness.
  • This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading. Note that these are just average differences and there’s overlap between men and women, but this is seen solely as a women’s issue. This leads to exclusory programs like Stretch and swaths of men without support.
  • Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance).This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs.

Note that contrary to what a social constructionist would argue, research suggests that “greater nation-level gender equality leads to psychological dissimilarity in men’s and women’s personality traits.” Because as “society becomes more prosperous and more egalitarian, innate dispositional differences between men and women have more space to develop and the gap that exists between men and women in their personality becomes wider.” We need to stop assuming that gender gaps imply sexism.

Men’s higher drive for status

We always ask why we don’t see women in top leadership positions, but we never ask why we see so many men in these jobs. These positions often require long, stressful hours that may not be worth it if you want a balanced and fulfilling life.

Status is the primary metric that men are judged on[4], pushing many men into these higher paying, less satisfying jobs for the status that they entail. Note, the same forces that lead men into high pay/high stress jobs in tech and leadership cause men to take undesirable and dangerous jobs like coal mining, garbage collection, and firefighting, and suffer 93% of work-related deaths.

Non-discriminatory ways to reduce the gender gap

Below I’ll go over some of the differences in distribution of traits between men and women that I outlined in the previous section and suggest ways to address them to increase women’s representation in tech and without resorting to discrimination. Google is already making strides in many of these areas, but I think it’s still instructive to list them:

  • Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things
  • We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration. Unfortunately, there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles and Google can be and we shouldn’t deceive ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get female students into coding might be doing this).
  • Women on average are more cooperative
  • Allow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive. Recent updates to Perf may be doing this to an extent, but maybe there’s more we can do. This doesn’t mean that we should remove all competitiveness from Google. Competitiveness and self reliance can be valuable traits and we shouldn’t necessarily disadvantage those that have them, like what’s been done in education. Women on average are more prone to anxiety. Make tech and leadership less stressful. Google already partly does this with its many stress reduction courses and benefits.
  • Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average
  • Unfortunately, as long as tech and leadership remain high status, lucrative careers, men may disproportionately want to be in them. Allowing and truly endorsing (as part of our culture) part time work though can keep more women in tech.
  • The male gender role is currently inflexible
  • Feminism has made great progress in freeing women from the female gender role, but men are still very much tied to the male gender role. If we, as a society, allow men to be more “feminine,” then the gender gap will shrink, although probably because men will leave tech and leadership for traditionally feminine roles.

Philosophically, I don’t think we should do arbitrary social engineering of tech just to make it appealing to equal portions of both men and women. For each of these changes, we need principles reasons for why it helps Google; that is, we should be optimizing for Google—with Google’s diversity being a component of that. For example currently those trying to work extra hours or take extra stress will inevitably get ahead and if we try to change that too much, it may have disastrous consequences. Also, when considering the costs and benefits, we should keep in mind that Google’s funding is finite so its allocation is more zero-sum than is generally acknowledged.

The Harm of Google’s biases

I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more. However, to achieve a more equal gender and race representation, Google has created several discriminatory practices:

  • Programs, mentoring, and classes only for people with a certain gender or race [5]
  • A high priority queue and special treatment for “diversity” candidates
  • Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate
  • Reconsidering any set of people if it’s not “diverse” enough, but not showing that same scrutiny in the reverse direction (clear confirmation bias)
  • Setting org level OKRs for increased representation which can incentivize illegal discrimination [6]

These practices are based on false assumptions generated by our biases and can actually increase race and gender tensions. We’re told by senior leadership that what we’re doing is both the morally and economically correct thing to do, but without evidence this is just veiled left ideology[7] that can irreparably harm Google.

Why we’re blind

We all have biases and use motivated reasoning to dismiss ideas that run counter to our internal values. Just as some on the Right deny science that runs counter to the “God > humans > environment” hierarchy (e.g., evolution and climate change) the Left tends to deny science concerning biological differences between people (e.g., IQ[8] and sex differences). Thankfully, climate scientists and evolutionary biologists generally aren’t on the right. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of humanities and social scientists learn left (about 95%), which creates enormous confirmation bias, changes what’s being studied, and maintains myths like social constructionism and the gender wage gap[9]. Google’s left leaning makes us blind to this bias and uncritical of its results, which we’re using to justify highly politicized programs.

In addition to the Left’s affinity for those it sees as weak, humans are generally biased towards protecting females. As mentioned before, this likely evolved because males are biologically disposable and because women are generally more cooperative and areeable than men. We have extensive government and Google programs, fields of study, and legal and social norms to protect women, but when a man complains about a gender issue issue [sic] affecting men, he’s labelled as a misogynist and whiner[10]. Nearly every difference between men and women is interpreted as a form of women’s oppression. As with many things in life, gender differences are often a case of “grass being greener on the other side”; unfortunately, taxpayer and Google money is spent to water only one side of the lawn.

The same compassion for those seen as weak creates political correctness[11], which constrains discourse and is complacent to the extremely sensitive PC-authoritarians that use violence and shaming to advance their cause. While Google hasn’t harbored the violent leftists protests that we’re seeing at universities, the frequent shaming in TGIF and in our culture has created the same silence, psychologically unsafe environment.

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-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.”

Stop alienating conservatives.

  • Viewpoint diversity is arguably the most important type of diversity and political orientation is one of the most fundamental and significant ways in which people view things differently.
  • In highly progressive environments, conservatives are a minority that feel like they need to stay in the closet to avoid open hostility. We should empower those with different ideologies to be able to express themselves.
  • Alienating conservatives is both non-inclusive and generally bad business because conservatives tend to be higher in conscientiousness, which is require for much of the drudgery and maintenance work characteristic of a mature company.

Confront Google’s biases.

  • I’ve mostly concentrated on how our biases cloud our thinking about diversity and inclusion, but our moral biases are farther reaching than that.
  • I would start by breaking down Googlegeist scores by political orientation and personality to give a fuller picture into how our biases are affecting our culture.
  • Stop restricting programs and classes to certain genders or races.

These discriminatory practices are both unfair and divisive. Instead focus on some of the non-discriminatory practices I outlined.
Have an open and honest discussion about the costs and benefits of our diversity programs.

  • Discriminating just to increase the representation of women in tech is as misguided and biased as mandating increases for women’s representation in the homeless, work-related and violent deaths, prisons, and school dropouts.
  • There’s currently very little transparency into the extend of our diversity programs which keeps it immune to criticism from those outside its ideological echo chamber.
  • These programs are highly politicized which further alienates non-progressives.
  • I realize that some of our programs may be precautions against government accusations of discrimination, but that can easily backfire since they incentivize illegal discrimination.

Focus on psychological safety, not just race/gender diversity.

  • We should focus on psychological safety, which has shown positive effects and should (hopefully) not lead to unfair discrimination.
  • We need psychological safety and shared values to gain the benefits of diversity
  • Having representative viewpoints is important for those designing and testing our products, but the benefits are less clear for those more removed from UX.

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.

Prioritize intention.

  • Our focus on microaggressions and other unintentional transgressions increases our sensitivity, which is not universally positive: sensitivity increases both our tendency to take offense and our self censorship, leading to authoritarian policies. Speaking up without the fear of being harshly judged is central to psychological safety, but these practices can remove that safety by judging unintentional transgressions.
  • Microaggression training incorrectly and dangerously equates speech with violence and isn’t backed by evidence.

Be open about the science of human nature.

  • Once we acknowledge that not all differences are socially constructed or due to discrimination, we open our eyes to a more accurate view of the human condition which is necessary if we actually want to solve problems.

Reconsider making Unconscious Bias training mandatory for promo committees.

  • We haven’t been able to measure any effect of our Unconscious Bias training and it has the potential for overcorrecting or backlash, especially if made mandatory.
  • Some of the suggested methods of the current training (v2.3) are likely useful, but the political bias of the presentation is clear from the factual inaccuracies and the examples shown.
  • Spend more time on the many other types of biases besides stereotypes. Stereotypes are much more accurate and responsive to new information than the training suggests (I’m not advocating for using stereotypes, I [sic] just pointing out the factual inaccuracy of what’s said in the training).

[1] This document is mostly written from the perspective of Google’s Mountain View campus, I can’t speak about other offices or countries.

[2] Of course, I may be biased and only see evidence that supports my viewpoint. In terms of political biases, I consider myself a classical liberal and strongly value individualism and reason. I’d be very happy to discuss any of the document further and provide more citations.

[3] Throughout the document, by “tech”, I mostly mean software engineering.

[4] For heterosexual romantic relationships, men are more strongly judged by status and women by beauty. Again, this has biological origins and is culturally universal.

[5] Stretch, BOLD, CSSI, Engineering Practicum (to an extent), and several other Google funded internal and external programs are for people with a certain gender or race.

[6] Instead set Googlegeist OKRs, potentially for certain demographics. We can increase representation at an org level by either making it a better environment for certain groups (which would be seen in survey scores) or discriminating based on a protected status (which is illegal and I’ve seen it done). Increased representation OKRs can incentivize the latter and create zero-sum struggles between orgs.

[7] Communism promised to be both morally and economically superior to capitalism, but every attempt became morally corrupt and an economic failure. As it became clear that the working class of the liberal democracies wasn’t going to overthrow their “capitalist oppressors,” the Marxist intellectuals transitioned from class warfare to gender and race politics. The core oppressor-oppressed dynamics remained, but now the oppressor is the “white, straight, cis-gendered patriarchy.”

[8] Ironically, IQ tests were initially championed by the Left when meritocracy meant helping the victims of the aristocracy.

[9] Yes, in a national aggregate, women have lower salaries than men for a variety of reasons. For the same work though, women get paid just as much as men. Considering women spend more money than men and that salary represents how much the employees sacrifices (e.g. more hours, stress, and danger), we really need to rethink our stereotypes around power.

[10] “The traditionalist system of gender does not deal well with the idea of men needing support. Men are expected to be strong, to not complain, and to deal with problems on their own. Men’s problems are more often seen as personal failings rather than victimhood,, due to our gendered idea of agency. This discourages men from bringing attention to their issues (whether individual or group-wide issues), for fear of being seen as whiners, complainers, or weak.”

[11] Political correctness is defined as “the avoidance of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against,” which makes it clear why it’s a phenomenon of the Left and a tool of authoritarians.