…the ObamaCare Industrial Complex:
You can call this a bailout or just a swindle of taxpayers who were fed a litany of lies about Obamacare’s virtues from the very start. Either way taxpayers get shafted (again) and the Obamacare industrial complex gets fat and happy. If Republicans are partners to this fiscal crime, they are as culpable as the Democrats who passed this turkey in the first place and they certainly don’t deserve to be the governing party.
John McCain can rot in Hell.
The Cape has been quiet for a few weeks while undergoing needed modernization. But things are about to pick up, with today’s SpaceX CRS launch less than an hour away. If they don’t get it off today, they’ll have to wait another five days, due to EVA scheduling issues and other things. You can watch here.
[Post-launch update]
Another successful launch, and perfect landing. Mission won’t be complete until Dragon delivers its cargo to ISS, then returns to earth, but it’s off to another good start.
Given that the full text of the memo is public, that it is the subject of a national debate on an important subject, that many educated people disagree with one another about what claims it made, and that clarity can only help Google employees adhere to the company’s rules going forward, would you be willing to highlight the memo using green to indicate the “much” that you identified as “fair to debate” and red to flag the “portions” that you deemed Code-of-Conduct violations?
He can’t do that, because a) he doesn’t know himself and b) maintaining uncertainty is a key element of totalitarian thought control.
[Update a couple minutes later]
The Google Archipelago: A nice round up of links from Ed Driscoll.
[Updatea a while later]
This whole thing is so rife with irony. Google may regret being a California company:
Dan Eaton, an employment lawyer, in San Diego wrote on CNBC: “Federal labour law bars even non-union employers like Google from punishing an employee for communicating with fellow employees about improving working conditions … California law prohibits employers from threatening to fire employees to get them to adopt or refrain from adopting a particular political course of action.”
He also said” “It is unlawful for an employer to discipline an employee for challenging conduct that the employee reasonably believed to be discriminatory, even when a court later determines the conduct was not actually prohibited by the discrimination laws.”
Oh, what a tangled web we weave…
[Monday-morning update]
Cathy Young has an interview with Damore, in which he provides his influencers. I’m probably going to write up something on this myself at some point. There are so many issues to unpack.
[Update early afternoon]
Yes, Pichai should go, but that’s not enough:
When you use Facebook or Google (or Twitter, or Amazon, or Netflix) you’re sharing a lot of data with a company that you have to trust won’t abuse that. It’s much harder to trust a company that has decided to aggressively pursue thoughtcrime. And it doesn’t matter where you are on the political spectrum – Damore describes himself as a centrist. But it only takes one politically incorrect utterance, as so many in academia have learned, to achieve Enemy Of The People status. And then, apparently, you’re fair game.
Can you trust a self-driving car from Google, if some new company policy might reprogram it to avoid events Google doesn’t approve? Can you trust Google to prevent its (apparently many) “social-justice warrior” employees from trawling through your personal data looking for dirt, and then leaking it?
As Robert Tracinski writes, this is the big danger for Google: “The most dangerous part is that they are now beginning to be seen by the public (or revealed, depending on how you look at it) as politicized entities. Politicized entities to whom we are giving enormous amounts of data on our lives, thoughts and interests.”
There should, at a minimum, be Congressional hearings.
Judith Curry explains.
The WaPo calls them out on a massive reporting screw up.
I’m not concerned at all about the GMO issue, but given that it’s soy based, I wonder if this burger is nutritionally equivalent to beef, and not just tastes like it.
It is no surprise, then, that corporations are increasingly populated with young adults who do not know how to handle political views or scientific claims they have been taught are out of bounds of public discussion. When Google’s diversity officer replied to James Damore’s email, it was an incoherent affirmation of the company’s diversity policy, coupled with an accusation of sexism. It didn’t even attempt to cite reasons why the science Damore mentioned was wrong, or why his political views about diversity policy were misguided. It just asserted they were, and then used that assertion the next day as a pretext to fire him. This is what we get when university professors abuse their power and attempt to turn students into pawns in their political game, rather than autonomous agents with the capacity (but not yet ability) to think for themselves.
Combined with the problems of journalism, which are also discussed, this is a societal disaster.
[Update a while later]
Straight talk about sex differences in the workplace.
[Update mid-morning]
No one expects the Google Inquisition.
[Late-morning update]
By firing the memo author, Google validated his thesis.
[Update a few minutes later]
I don’t often agree with David Brooks, but yes, the Google CEO should resign.
[Update early afternoon]
Google is run like a religious cult:
“Conform and carry out the rituals, and you’ll be rewarded and praised; ask any uncomfortable questions or offend the wrong people, and the threats and public shaming will be swift and ruthless. The religion in this case is a kind of intersectional feminism, its central tenets are Diversity and Inclusion, its demonic enemy is Bias, and its purifying rituals include humiliating forms of ‘training’ that resemble Maoist struggle sessions.”
“This might sound crazy to a lot of your readers, but college students should understand, since it’s a similar culture.”
This is just awful.
[Update a couple minutes later]
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.
And as Stalin would have said, “No problem.”
[Update a while later]
This is not a new problem. It goes back to Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve and (as she mentions) the mau mauing of Larry Summers out of Harvard when he had the temerity to suggest that math ability in men may have longer statistical tails than in women.
In reading commentary on Twitter, I see a lot of straw-man misrepresentation of what Damore allegedly wrote (I haven’t read it yet). For instance:
Congrats to Jennifer Cochran, new chair of Stanford's Bioengineering Dept. Shame women are bad at STEM (sarcasm) https://t.co/9gTEkVxbm9
— Hank Greely (@HankGreelyLSJU) August 8, 2017
Also a shame that boiling down a statistical argument to the straw man "women are bad at STEM" is rhetorically effective, but a lie.
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) August 8, 2017
But this is what one would expect from people who view everything through a lens of racism, sexism, genderism, otherism. All that matter to them is what group you’re a member of, and the notion of treating people as individuals is anathema to them, because individualism itself is anathema to them (it’s selfish donchaknow). So when someone makes a statistical statement about a group (valid or not), they must take it as an insult to every member of that group. (Note, this isn’t the same as things like talking about “rape culture,” which in fact does implicitly accuse every man of wanting to and finding it acceptable to rape, which is where the #NotAllMen hashtag came from).
Of course many women face sexism, and of course many women have been discouraged as individuals to go into STEM for no reasons other than they’re women, and that’s terrible. And everywhere it occurs, it should be fought and women who want to and are capable of advancing in those fields should be instead encouraged. But it would be utterly illogical for any woman to be discouraged by a simple statistical reality, because no woman is a statistic.
"Men are on average five foot ten inches."
Me: I'm five foot eleven. WHY ARE THEY PUTTING DOWN MY HEIGHT?! WHERE IS MY SAFE SPACE?!!!!11!
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) August 8, 2017
But the notion that every group should be represented in every endeavor in exact proportion to their representation in society at large is…insane. Men and women really are different, and they are statistically likely to be more interested in, and better at, different things. So if there really is a goal that we are going to get as many percentage of women into STEM as there are in the population, it is either doomed to failure, or it will doom whatever organization that attempts to do it, in terms of having to compete with other organizations that make technical excellence their priority instead.
And if Google becomes Mozilla, I won’t weep for it. And after this incident, I will be even more adamant in not trusting them with my data. Because I’m sure I’d be at the top of one of their blacklists.
[Update a couple minutes later]
It’s ironic to note 1) That these women who claim to be so great at STEM who are upset at this are apparently unable to deal with statistics and
2) That when Larry Summers said what he said, he was actually claiming that women are on average better than men at math, because the tail goes both ways.
But apparently “average” is an alien concept to them. Perhaps they think that everyone should be above it.
[Update a few minutes later]
Some sane thoughts from Julia Galef:
…as far as I can see, there are only two intellectually honest ways to respond to the memo:
1. Acknowledge gender differences may play some role, but point out other flaws in his argument (my preference)
2. Say “This topic is harmful to people and we shouldn’t discuss it” (a little draconian maybe, but at least intellectually honest)
Unfortunately most people have taken option 3, “Pretend there is no evidence of gender differences relevant to tech and only a sexist could believe otherwise.”
I’m going to try to cite only women in this post, just because, even though it’s sexist.
[Update early evening]
Many (but surely not all–there will be many more to come) of the lies that the media has told about the memo have been collected. By a woman.
[Wednesday update]
Kirsten Powers and other women are amazed at the lying and hysteria over this.
Almost.
Landed early from Denver, but our gate is occupied by another aircraft with maintenance issues. This time of day, not a lot spare gates at LAX,, so who knows how long we’ll sit.
[Update a few minutes later]
OK, gate cleared, and we’re pulling into it.
We may be on the verge of creating human gametes in the lab. It will be a blessing for infertile couples but, as always, the technology carries societal risks.