Feb. 18, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
28:50
4004 Google’s Firing of James Damore Was Legal, Science Is Now Discrimination
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has determined that Google did not violate federal labor law when it fired engineer James Damore in August 2017. Damore had already dropped the NLRB complaint to focus on his class action lawsuit against Google for “allegedly” discriminating against white, male, and conservative employees. Stefan Molyneux breaks down the National Labor Relations Board’s absurdly anti-science response and the dangerous precedent that it sets moving forward. National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) Ruling: http://www.fdrurl.com/damore-responseGoogle Memo: Aftermath with Jordan Peterson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYdfVA5JUREGoogle Memo: Interview with James Damorehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TN1vEfqHGroYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
I wanted to have a look at the Labor Relations Board response to fired, I guess, ex-Google engineer James Damore and his issue and his memorandum that he'd sent around regarding diversity programs.
And it's just important to remember, he quoted a lot of science, gave a lot of footnotes that were mysteriously stripped out by a lot of mainstream media outlets when reporting on this.
And he had no issues with diversity.
He said, let's just take some science into account when looking to recruit and help women get to the top.
So I'll put a link to the document below, but I wanted to sort of start out.
Charging party is, I think, James Damore.
And we sort of look at here, it says...
So after there was a summit, right?
And they said, give us feedback on how we can improve diversity.
Shortly thereafter, the charging party drafted a memorandum outlining concerns about the effectiveness and necessity of the employer's programs, particularly those targeted for women working for the employer.
And that's a reasonable thing.
I mean, if there are mistakes in how people are approaching questions of diversity, particularly mistakes about basic scientific differences, then they're going to be less effective than they should be.
And then it was sort of shared internally, and this gets quite interesting from here.
So it says here, from July 2nd through August 3rd, the charging party shared the memorandum with other employees, often incorporating their suggestions into the memorandum.
On August 3rd, He posted the memorandum to another employer-provided discussion group called Skeptics, a larger forum that provided the document with more potential readers.
This is somewhat redacted. Around that same time, numerous employees complained to HR about the charging party's memorandum, and at least two female engineering candidates for employment withdrew from consideration, citing the memo as their reason for doing so.
Now what's conspicuously absent from this, of course, is any rebuttal to the very clear science that is in the memorandum.
Additionally, at least one employee contacted the charging party directly and threatened retaliation against him.
And this shows up down here.
Email read in relevant part.
You're a misogynist and a terrible human.
I suppose that means human being.
I will keep hounding you until one of us is fired.
F you! The employee was issued a final warning for sending this email.
Not terminated, of course.
So, what is the big problem here?
So, in the version of the document upon which the employer based its investigation, the charging party, James Damore, posited that the employer had a left-leaning monoculture Ooh, that sounds bad.
That does not sound a lot like diversity to me because there are these people out there who believe that diversity simply means anti-male, anti-white.
So if there is a left-leaning monoculture, an ideological echo chamber, then that's bad diversity, right?
Diversity is supposed to be a multiplicity of viewpoints.
Apparently, though, diversity does not include, I don't know, facts, science, evidence, empirical data.
So he included specific critiques of many of the employers, that's Google's inclusion and diversity policies, and a long list of suggestions to correct for the biases identified.
Ah, very good.
So here we get to the heart of things.
This is redacted, so I'm reading between the lines here, but it seems that the memo...
Also argued that there were immutable biological differences between men and women that were likely responsible for the gender gap in the tech industry at large and the employer in particular.
Now, that's not true because the memo argued that, of course, we're talking about groups, we're not talking about individuals, and it's not responsible for everything.
It's just a part that hasn't been addressed.
So, here are the big issues.
Women are more prone to neuroticism, resulting in women experiencing higher anxiety and exhibiting lower tolerance for stress, which, quote, may contribute to the low number of women in high-stress jobs.
Hmm. So that's interesting.
That's interesting. So if you go...
I just want to go back up here for a sec, right?
Immutable biological differences between men and women that were likely responsible for the gender gap in the tech industry at large.
Hmm. Now, likely responsible.
So does that mean they're somewhat responsible for 100% or they're likely responsible for some portion of it?
This, it says, not likely responsible for a portion of the gender gap or some part of the gender gap or they contribute to the gender gap.
But here, this is what they say.
It's likely responsible for the gender gap.
And here it says, well, it may contribute to the lower number of women in high-stress jobs.
So we've gone from kind of a certainty to very much a much smaller contribution.
Now, as far as this goes, so there are these big five personality traits.
You can look them up yourself. One of them, of course, is neuroticism.
And that is, of course, much higher in women than in men, as is agreeableness and other things like that.
And there is most likely a genetic element to it.
There is an element of socialization.
I'm sure to it is nature and nurture, of course, like all of these things.
But these facts need to be understood if you want to do a successful outreach to women.
I mean, let me give you an example.
So if you look at a woman's magazine on the supermarket rack and you look at a men's magazine, they're different, right?
They're quite different indeed.
And so these are groups reaching out to men versus groups reaching out to women.
For women, and they take into account differences and they tailor their publications accordingly.
And so that's an example.
Is it, for instance, sexist or is it a form of aggression to say that women are significantly more likely than men to experience depression after the age of 12?
Is that bad?
Is that wrong? Well, so as far as neuroticism goes, it may end up with a lower tolerance for stress.
So stress, for instance, would be, I don't know, maybe somebody has an opinion that you find surprising or alarming or upsetting.
That would be a stressful situation.
Now, if you can handle that stress, what you do is you say to the person, can you show me your data?
Can you show me the sources?
I find this upsetting, but, you know, the facts are the facts, and we sure as heck wouldn't want to run everything by our feelings because that would be very stereotypical with regards to female behavior.
So the question is, can they handle stress?
Can the women handle stress?
Well, of course, some women can handle stress magnificently and many men can't.
But let's go back up here for just a sec.
Saying that there's higher neuroticism and less of a capacity to handle stress.
Right? Numerous employees complained to HR about this memorandum and two female engineering candidates for employment withdrew from consideration, citing the memo as their reason for doing so.
So he's saying maybe because of higher neuroticism, women have a slightly less capacity to handle stress.
Why would you let a memo stand in the way of your career?
Why would you let an internal argument based upon scientific data stand between you and your career?
Why? This makes no sense to me.
I mean, do you not think that?
I face headwind and opposition in what it is that I do.
Do you not think that I've been wildly attacked and mislabeled and, you know, misattributed and taken out of context?
And the most horrifying stuff said, I mean, why would you...
You can't let this stop you if you've got a goal.
I mean, why would you let... Oh, some guy wrote a memo that I don't think is true.
Well, rebut it. You know, don't just take your resume and go home.
I mean, so it's just kind of weird.
And you'll see this throughout this rebuttal, in my opinion, that...
There's an example of complaints to HR about the memorandum.
Why would you complain to HR? Why would you call the teacher?
This is science, for God's sakes.
You know, if someone puts out something, I mean, you know, I have a long debate with people.
I have long debates with people I disagree with enormously.
I did like an hour debating a guy who believes that the earth is flat.
And I'm not calling HR. So if something's wrong, you just put out something that's better.
You're correct. You engage in robust debate.
You don't just run to HR and say, I'm not going to even try and get ahead in my career because of this memo.
Does that behavior that is cited in this document either, A, push back against the idea of high neuroticism and low capacity for stress, or B, perhaps kind of make it look that way?
So this was the one sin that, quoting, and this is a very well-established, there are two fairly well-established things in psychology, about the most that can be.
Number one, of course, is this big five personality traits, and something like risk-taking has been measured from 20% to 80% genetic.
So, neuroticism. Now, the second we get to down here.
Men demonstrate greater variance in IQ than women, such that there are more men at both the top and bottom of the distribution.
So, you know this, right?
There's a bell curve for IQ. Most people clustered around the middle, a few people at the high end, a few people at the low end.
Now, I've heard different arguments about this.
The latest data seems to be that men are clustered at the highest levels of IQ more so than women.
There's not this idea that it's flattened out, that it's...
Flattened out for men and clustered more around the center for women doesn't seem to be quite as true.
What seems to be the case is that when you get to the highest levels of IQ, men outnumber women 10 to 1, 15 to 1.
At the very highest levels, there are virtually no women at all.
This doesn't mean that there aren't brilliant women.
It's so funny, you know. I mean, I'm happily married.
I've got a wonderful daughter. She's brilliant.
And some of my biggest influences have been women and culture and Ayn Rand and so on.
So this idea that, you know, but these are facts.
These are just... And so the big five personality traits in IQ, its measurement, its distribution across genders, ethnicities, its role in success, how much of it is genetic.
Later on in life, sort of middle age and afterwards, your IQ is about 80% genetic.
So that's a lot.
I'm just, you know, don't get mad at me.
These are just the facts. So women were prone to neuroticism, very well established in psychology.
Men have strengths and weakness.
Genders have strengths and weaknesses.
Doesn't mean there's inequalities. And so that's the first one.
Second one, men...
Let's just go with what is said here.
Men demonstrate greater variance in IQ than women.
More men at the top and bottom of the distribution.
This is sort of the more CEOs and more homeless people are men.
So thus posited, the employer's preference to hire from the top of the curve may result in a candidate pool with fewer females than those of less selective tech companies.
Right. If there are fewer women at the very top of the IQ curve, then if you say we're only going to hire from the very top of the IQ curve, you're going to get disproportionately more men than women.
This is very well understood.
And the language of the memo is very careful, and this is admitted here.
It says here, throughout the memo, the charging party included limiting language using disclaimers, such as study show and on average, and noting that these differences didn't necessarily apply to all individuals.
Yep. And so, I don't know what limiting language means.
Isn't that just accurate? Isn't that just kind of true?
So here we go. So on blah blah blah, the employer determined that certain portions of the charging party's memorandum violated existing policies on harassment and discrimination.
Harassment and discrimination.
But there's no rebuttal.
There's no pointing out that this is false.
So what they're saying is, I'm going to assume that it was women who were bothered by this, that women are harassed and discriminated against by science.
That women are harassed and discriminated against by facts.
Now, I am not deeply versed in all of the relevant literature, but I have not seen rebuttals.
And Jordan Peterson, a psychologist I enormously respect, has supported the information that's in the memo.
So, anyway.
So, later that evening, the employer terminated the charging party's employment.
The HR manager and the director of the charging party's team prepared written talking points in advance, which the director read to inform the charging party of discharge.
The talking point stated in pertinent part.
This is the communication from Google to James.
Your post advanced and relied on offensive gender stereotypes to suggest that women cannot be successful in the same kinds of jobs at the employer, I guess that's Google, as men.
So, I think we can say that the key word is here.
Offensive. Offensive.
Now, there is a stereotype out there that, not just that women can't tell stories, but that women rely more on feelings than facts, right?
The fascism of the feels.
And so, your post advanced and relied on offensive gender stereotypes.
Offensive. Offensive. No rebuttal of the facts.
No rebuttal of the expert testimony.
So here, I want to make clear, the statement goes on, I want to make clear that our decision is based solely upon the part of your post that generalizes and advances stereotypes about women versus men.
Generalizes and advances stereotypes about women versus men.
Look, sorry, women score higher on neuroticism and agreeableness than men.
I mean, good lord. If you've been raised by a mother and a father, men are like, go for it, and the moms worry.
I mean, it's a stereotype, but stereotypes are not always false.
Okay, so they're very clear.
They don't want to base, I guess they talk to their lawyers.
It says, Google is not based in any way on the portions of your posts that discuss the employer's programs or trainings, or how the employer can improve its inclusion of differing political views.
Right, so differing political views apparently is fine, But scientifically validated facts are not.
All right. So having a different political view is absolutely fine.
Advancing gender stereotypes is not.
Advancing gender stereotypes is not.
Again, no rebuttal of the actual facts.
So we're just going to go on because it gets pretty wild as we go forward.
So there's a bunch of case history here, which is, you know, you can go through it if you want, but I think what's interesting here is this.
The charging party's use of stereotypes based on purported biological differences between women and men should not be treated differently than the types of conduct the board found unprotected in these above cases.
See, here we have purported.
Purported, which means...
Alleged, I suppose. So purported biological differences.
The word purported is not an argument, of course, right?
What does this mean? I don't know.
It means that you can use the word purported to sort of wave away decades of highly sophisticated scientific research that is entirely...
It is entirely unremarkable and...
Non-problematic within the field.
It is not a radical statement to say within the field, women's go higher on neuroticism and agreeableness and some conscientiousness and stuff like that.
So here we go.
So I guess this is the memos or James' statement about the immutable traits linked to sex, such as women's heightened neuroticism and men's prevalence at the top of the IQ distribution, were discriminatory and constituted sexual harassment.
Right there. Let's just zoom in on that.
That is astounding.
Sexual harassment.
Sexual harassment.
Isn't that astonishing? Let's just read it again.
Statements about immutable traits linked to sex, such as women's heightened neuroticism and men's prevalence at the top of IQ distribution, We're discriminatory and constituted sexual harassment.
That is...
I mean, I keep waiting for the PC culture to hit the low point.
That is, to me, absolutely astonishing.
Now, they do have, of course, the challenge that there was a lot of science and literature and reference and so on, right?
Nonwithstanding, nonwithstanding, James's effort to cloak his comments with Oh, here we go.
Here we go. What do we see here?
It's the word scientific.
In square quotes.
In scare quotes. In scare quotes.
You see? You can use the word purported, and you can use the word scientific, but if you put quotes around it, the science is no longer valid.
You see, the cloak comments.
So this is mind reading.
This is saying, well, I know exactly what James was trying to do.
And I also know that he was trying to cloak what he was trying to do with scientific references and analysis.
So he didn't read the science and come to his conclusions.
He has a biased and bigoted conclusion.
And then he cloaked it. He looked up all of the science.
Like, this is mind reading. And you can't do that, I don't think, in the law.
I mean, I don't think fairly you can do that in the law.
You just can't do mind reading.
You can deal with the facts, right? So, moreover, these statements were likely to cause serious dissension and disruption in the workplace.
Oh. Look at that.
Dissension. See, the way it works is diversity is really, really good because lots of different viewpoints really help people get to the right conclusions and determine the best course of action.
So diversity is really good. But when someone comes along with bad think, with wrong think, then it's not diversity, you see.
It's dissension.
Dissension. This is a rather Soviet creepy phrase in my view.
And disruption. Disruption in the workplace.
So dissension and disruption in the workplace means people are upset and can't resolve their differences.
Well, of course, once you throw out science with your scare quotes, once you throw out reason, evidence, and data, then you get disruption.
So dissension and disruption in the workplace.
Why on earth, if diversity is so good and women are exactly the same as men, why would facts about women cause dissension and disruption in the workplace?
Amazing. Amazing.
Indeed, the memorandum did cause extreme discord.
Right? Extreme discord.
I don't know. To me, maybe it's just a language thing.
To me, extreme discord? French Revolution?
Slaughtering millions of kulaks during the Holodomor in Ukraine after the Russian Revolution.
Mao's slaughtering of 30 million Chinese.
Well, that to me would be extreme discord.
I'm not sure what's going on on the listservs or whatever they use in Google.
But here we go.
Numerous employees. What happened?
Numerous employees complained to the employer that the memorandum was discriminatory against women.
Deeply offensive. And made them feel unsafe at work.
Now, that is wild.
Because they complain that it's discriminatory against women, deeply offensive, and make them feel unsafe at work.
So science makes women feel unsafe.
Facts discriminate against women.
Facts, evidence, data, generally accepted positions in the field of psychology are deeply offensive to women.
Now, does that seem neurotic to you or not?
This is the astounding lack of self-knowledge that is going on in these kinds of environments.
It's just mind-blowing when you get it.
How dare James Damore cite data that says that women score somewhat higher on neuroticism than men?
Because the women at Google, and I assume this is women, maybe in others, right?
The women who are told that women can be slightly higher in neuroticism view that data as discriminatory, deeply offensive, and makes them feel scared to go to work.
That's not helping to dispel the notion that women score higher in neuroticism.
I mean, does anyone else?
Please let me know in the comments below.
Is this? Does that look neurotic to you?
Does that look like a strong reaction based upon emotionality rather than a recent and critical view of the evidence?
I don't know. So there are two female engineers who don't want to go for a particular job or something like that, withdrew their applications because of this memo.
I don't know that I would really want engineers who get offended by facts.
Moreover, the charging party reasonably should have known that the memorandum would likely be disseminated further, even beyond the workplace.
So? I don't understand that at all.
So, thus, while much of the charging party's memorandum was likely protected, the statements regarding biological differences between the sexes were so harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive as to be unprotected, which means the law will not guard him regarding that.
So, again, we have emotional-based words.
We have hyper-strong reactions.
It's harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive.
That's not how Engineering works.
That's not how science works.
That's not how philosophy, the pursuit of truth, reason, evidence, data.
It's not how it works.
Holding your breath until you turn blue because you feel something's harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive, and you no longer feel safe at work because somebody typed facts into a computer.
This... I mean, how...
I feel like I just have to put on a crash helmet, reboot, and prevent my hypocrisy meter from going supernova.
This is terrible stuff.
This is so disrespectful to women.
So disrespectful. And confirms all the worst stereotypes.
Far more so than anything James Damore could ever have typed.
Just astonishing.
Discrimination or harassment.
That is just astonishing.
So that's the story of why his pursuit under the Labor Relations Board was rejected.
And I just really want to stop here because I can't even.
Science constitutes sexual harassment.
Facts, reason, evidence, data, well-cited arguments constitute sexual harassment.
What I think is terrible about this, I mean on so many levels, there's not one counter fact, not one counter argument.
First of all, by saying that you can shut down arguments you don't like by becoming hysterical, it's only going to encourage this kind of hysteria.
And it also says what an echo chamber people are growing up in if they've never encountered this kind of information.
Never encountered this kind of information.
Like the IQ stuff I remember learning about in a psychology class in the 90s, early 90s.
So it just says, well, what do you mean you've never encountered this information?
Like the entire time you've been in clutches of government education, for a lot of these people, it's well north of 20 years if you count sort of all the way from kindergarten through to graduating from an undergraduate degree, 20, you know, 18, 16, 18, 20 years. You've never encountered this information.
Does that not trouble anyone that this mono- Culture, this ideological echo chamber is completely real.
Sexual harassment is a very real problem.
It is not just men to women.
I was certainly sexually harassed at various times when I was trying to get into the art world.
I never succumbed to it and I never was even tempted by it, but it was nasty, you know, I'll advance your career if you'll sleep with me.
It's a very real issue.
And using this term sexual harassment to refer to A scientific argument?
It is not a wise move.
Because what it's going to do is...
It's like the word racism.
If you spray and pray everywhere, you just throw it out everywhere in the hopes that you can just shame people or bully people into complying with your ideological viewpoint, you're cheapening the word.
And you are doing a massive disservice to women and men who are in fact victims of sexual harassment.
But writing a memo...
Based upon readily available scientific literature is not sexual harassment.
To say that women can be sexually harassed by science, reason, evidence, data.
And please understand, James Moore could be entirely wrong.
Maybe everyone I've ever read, maybe all the experts, it doesn't matter.
That's how science works. You don't just get to have a tantrum, claim that you're being sexually harassed, and make reasoned arguments vanish.
And disrupting the work, oh my goodness, these women didn't put their applications in for something because of this memo, and that's really terrible while James Damore got his ass fired for writing this.
In other words, disruption of the workforce only matters if you're not a white male.
And that, of course, is everyone's concern.
That when they say diversity, what they mean is everyone except white males.
And I also wonder if anyone has ever talked about something like the patriarchy or rape culture at these tech companies.
Because you see, bringing science to bear on gender questions with the hopes and goals of solving some of the problems with hiring and recruiting talented women, that is sexual harassment.
But I wonder if anyone's ever talked about something like rape culture, patriarchy, misogyny, and so on.
Because that is very hostile towards men.
Hostile work environment? This guy wrote a memo.
Circulated it around. Somebody leaked it.
He got fired.
He got rejected from attempting to gain restitution.
I know he's pursuing something else as well.
A hostile work environment?
You want to see a hostile work environment, my friends?
