On Google's Firing of James Damore

The firing of engineer James Damore from Google is an example of how one can be punished for simply trying to understand the world around us. It’s an example of how authoritarianism does not like it when its cherished beliefs are challenged. Oddly enough, what offended most people about the Google memo was that Damore introduced the term 'neuroticism,' which is one of the measurable personality traits on the 'Big Five Personality Model' in psychology, and he gave supporting evidence for how women score higher than men on this psychometric scale in personality tests. Many interpreted this as an "insult" to women but its merely scientific data. It sounds like a pejorative if you don't know what it means. In multiple podcast interviews (like the Rubin Report and the Joe Rogan Experience) Damore said that, in retrospect, he regrets using the word 'neuroticism' but I think that this is silly and wrong to back down from knowing something when faced with undue criticism. We cannot be forced to self-censor ourselves simply because some people are ignorant and uneducated about psychology and the historical definitions and terms used in scientific literature. Anyone at Google could have easily searched the definition of 'neuroticism' and the historical use of the term but instead people decided to take offense as part of this new 'outrage-and-victimhood culture.'

In many ways, it’s not surprising that James Damore got fired from Google because a lot of the "social justice left” is very open about their policy which is: 'Shut them down. If they don’t agree with you, get rid of them. If they don’t go away easily, threaten & tar them with accusations of “racism” and “sexism.” Shout them down.' The irony is that in a quest for “diversity,” Google has set up policies which explicitly discriminate against people on the basis of race & gender. They claim to be all about inclusion when in secret they are enacting policies which are non-inclusive. As they say, "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions." Not only will individuals suffer as a consequence of this, but the society as a whole will suffer from censorship and the shutting-out of ideas. We want “equality of opportunity,” not “equality of outcomes.”

We witnessed this tactic with the example of Bret Weinstein at Evergreen State College in Washington (see stevenrepka.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-attempts-at-evergreen-state-college.html). The tactic is to stifle the debate, suppress the dialogue and prevent a real discussion or dialectic from occurring. The “social justice warrior’s" way of ‘winning’ the argument is to make sure that the opposition is not heard, and often making false accusations and claims about the person (i.e. ad hominem attacks). Many have surmised that this tactic is used because they have no supporting evidence for their claims. Their argument is based solely on emotions, feelings, and irrationality. Like Christopher Hitchens said, if you have a better argument, one must have the courage to have an open and public debate about it. Let the audience decide who wins the argument. This is called civil debate. The level of suppression of free speech on liberal college campuses across America in the 21st century is astounding to me. Did we not learn from our history? The point of 'freedom of speech' (and the First Amendment) is not for speech which conforms to our pre-existing beliefs but rather to protect people who may have unwelcoming perspectives or non-conformist views. 

There’s a strain of anti-intellectualism which seems to have become more predominant in the past decade in America with the advent of the internet (I personally did not realize how controversial the findings of psychology and psychometrics were in many academic circles until I went to a liberal arts college and discovered many of their ideas in the social sciences). We have entered into the “twilight zone” where subjective meaning outweighs objective truth. This is very dangerous and this development ought to be considered an affront to logic and reason. Good science questions everything. In science, a good theory must be testable and falsifiable. The scientific method works so well because it has built-in measures to prevent cognitive biases from influencing the results.

To Google: this is what happens when radical social constructionist ideology overshadows reality. This is what happens when people are lead by dogma instead of empirical evidence, knowable facts and objective truths. This is what happens when people ignore scientific consensus in favor of their personal biases. Biological sex differences exist; that is evolution, that is science. The exceptions do not disprove the rule. [Can we move on to bigger things and more important discussions now?]