The corruption of the 4th Estate

The firing of Google James Damore after the histrionic explosion of outrage in the mainstream media and social media outlets and the subsequent furor after a citation and graph-redacted version of a memo he wrote intended for serious, internal discussion of how the climate of political correctness inside of Google stifles discussion of serious issues, like those related to diversity and how to increase it in certain job categories was troubling, and no doubt a major challenge for him, his family, friends, and whatever cadre of colleagues still at Google who will be branded with the scarlet A of PC apostasy. If the Google execs had just fired him without comment, that probably would have sent the matter skipping down the memory hole. Their Orwellian Doublespeak may come back to haunt them, but that's a matter for a different post.

No, the great disturbance in the Force is the corruption of the credibility of journalism with the near-universal slander, misrepresentation, and lies which comprise the mainstream coverage. No matter what you think of the style of the memo, no matter what you think of the potential efficacy of his earnestly-given suggestions to actually increase diversity by making certain jobs more attractive to a wider swath of women, and no matter how you feel about the current state and conduct of diversity programs, the extrapolations and conclusions converted into vitriol which utterly destroyed an, apparently otherwise promising career at Google, likely destroyed any notion of truly free inquiry with parts of its corporate culture, and will create a legal shit-show that could drag on for years hitting Google and any number of news outlets: major, minor, and otherwise.

Here's the problem: if you just read the articles, it would easy to believe that Google has bravely rid itself of an anti-diversity alt-right bigot and is bravely standing up for all that's right in the world. That's almost exactly opposite of what actually happened. But who is going to take the time to read the memo and try to understand what he wrote in the context he was trying to write it. The public trusts reporters to do this minimum threshold of work for them -- and far and away the majority didn't just fail to do so, it either simply didn't try, or if it did, bent their perceptions away from the evidence to politically correct dogma. The problem stemmed with the classic conflation of the goal of a policy and the policy itself. Being against the means by which you attempt to increase diversity does not imply being against increasing diversity. Repeat:

Being against the means by which you attempt to increase diversity does not imply being against increasing diversity.

Again:

Being against the means by which you attempt to increase diversity does not imply being against increasing diversity.

I am going to reproduce the (here enumerated) TL;DR (too long; didn't read) here:

1. Google’s political bias has equated the freedom from offense with psychological safety, but shaming into silence is the antithesis of psychological safety.
2. This silencing has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed.
3. 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
4. Differences in distributions of traits between men and women (and not "socially constructed oppression") may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership.
5. Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.

1. Google’s political bias has equated the freedom from offense with psychological safety, but shaming into silence is the antithesis of psychological safety.

From the search results, an article on psychological safety on the withgoogle.com domain (apparently a site for experimental Google stuff) has a pretty typical notion of what psychological safety is and why it's important:

Psychological safety describes a climate where people recognize their ability and responsibility to overcome fear and reluctance to speak up with potentially controversial ideas or questions. A lack of psychological safety can be found at the root of many noteworthy organizational errors and failures. In corporations, hospitals, and government agencies, our research has shown that reluctance to offer ideas and expertise undermines many decisions and harms the execution of work that requires judgment or collaboration.

Has Google's political bias equated freedom from offense with psychological safety? I surely seems that way, but who's going to speak up now? I don't think the assertion "shaming into silence is the antithesis of psychological safety" can reasonably be challenged if you buy into the definition above. 

2. This silencing has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed.

Every now and again, Chomsky is good for something:

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate. -- The Common Good, Noam Chomsky

When you step outside the acceptable opinion spectrum, you are no longer simply wrong or misguided, you're guilty of heresy. The punishment for heresy is excommunication. Or worse. Maybe there is no ideological echo chamber with ideas too sacred to be honestly discussed, but because that memo violated Google's code of conduct for what it expressed? Um, I'll let Conner Friedersdorf and David Brooks take care of that. If that memo marks ideas on the outside of the spectrum of acceptable debate and exploration, Google has more in common with a cult than an organization that values free expression, free thought, debate, and reason.

3. The lack of discussion fosters the most extreme and authoritarian elements of this ideology.

This seems intuitively obvious, but what might the mechanism be? Lack of broad discussion leads to pockets of groupthink. Favored ideas get re-enforced and amplified. Continuous amplification and lack of critical reflection leads to distortion. Bam! Extreme (WTF?) and authoritarian (DON'T SPEAK!) elements. Seems plausible. Argue against it. Lack of discussion fosters tolerant and inclusive elements of some ideology...

4. Differences between men and women may lead to different decisions about what they want to do with their lives. These differences may be biological.

As to the first part with women perhaps making different decisions with what they want to do with their lives. If this is so controversial, why didn't that alt-right propaganda outlet NPR blow up the Internet in 2015 in the scandalous Why the STEM gender gap is overblown? Is it not because it's not controversial? For a really good dig into this, check out Scott Alexander's takedown of the one lone scientific voice in the woods to try to invalidate the memo. The TL;DR is that it seems that many, but certainly not all, really smart women might opt into more people-oriented fields like pediatrics and vet medicine than thing-oriented fields like computer programming and radiology. Seems reasonable. The heresy of the memo, however, is to suggest that these preferences might be in part biological in origin. That men generally prefer sex with women, and that women generally prefer to have sex with men *might* have something to do with biology -- is that controversial? Well, it's certainly a preference, and measurable, at least in some statistical sense across a population. That's certainly a much baser preference, but might not a whole hierarchy of biologically-influenced preferences and notions inform higher-level preferences and decisions? The science seems to indicate that's the case.

5. Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.

Is discrimination unfair? This is a concrete assertion and so can be argued. As an advocate of an "equal protection" form of social justice (everyone should be able to *fairly* play the hand they are dealt to the best of their abilities), I do believe that discrimination is unfair. There are other folks who do not take this view, but it does not invalidate the equal protection argument nor does it make the assertion dismissable as being made in bad faith.

Is discrimination divisive? Again, another concrete assertion. If you're being discriminated against, you likely don't like it, and you're likely not going to be inclined who derives the benefit of your discrimination. Here's a thought experiment. Imagine lining up college applicants in rank order based on their applications, transcripts, etc., with no regard to race -- actually lining them up physically. Then, using a separate set of rankings made with whatever gender, race, legacy, economic, or other factors have the folks who benefit from those weights actually go tell the person in their slot they're replacing them. That's going to be divisive, especially if it's repeated year after year. Now, what if the weighting is done to achieve parity with some sort of diversity goal (none dare call it quota). That would be more divisive still. What is the argument that diversity is not divisive?

Is discrimination bad for business? Concrete assertion, and arguable. It is certainly bad for business if by being unfair and divisive it creates an atmosphere which hinders the performance of the company as a whole. It is certainly bad for business if it excludes talent that would have increased the performance of the company as a whole. If the business is sports, discrimination is certainly bad, and teams that discriminate generally cannot stand against those who don't. Alabama's football team was all white in 1970. Do you think today's Alabama's head coach gives a flying flip about your race, creed, or religion? Not if you can run a 4.4 forty. I think that it's generally unimpeachable that for Google, or any other tech company to get their technical staff to more generally reflect broader society when the CS departments reflect something very different will have to resort to discriminatory practices, and live with the unfairness, divisiveness, and illegality[1]

The actual suggestions that Damore made for non-discriminatory diversity enhancement are not called out explicitly in the TL;DR, but they are reasonable and arguable. They may work, they may not. How do you know until you try?

So, given that Damore wrote anything but an "anti-diversity screed", how could they get it so wrong? A culture of political correctness. A high incentive to generate click bait. A low incentive to get things right. A 24-hour news cycle. An absolute requirement not to miss out. There is not much we can do about the press (though Damore might smack them around a little bit with some law suits if slander can be proved and he can go lawyer-to-lawyer with them), but we can be open minded, critical, and check the sources. We shouldn't have to check the sources with outlets like NYT and BBC (doing that work is their job, after all), but this case is proof positive that we must.

Stay skeptical, my friends.

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[1] Using Computer Science as a proxy for what you might expect Google's technical staff to break out demographically. Of course, Google's technical staff has people with a wide variety of degrees working in a wide variety of jobs. However, Computer Science seems like a reasonable proxy, since a large slice of the workforce is developing software, systems, and the like. Electrical Engineering might be another, perhaps better, proxy, or maybe Physics, but it's certainly not Biology or Environmental Engineering.