Note Added in response to 2020 Twitter mob attack which attempts to misrepresent my views: This blog post discusses the firing of James Damore by Google. It was a sensation at the time in Silicon Valley and made national news. This post is primarily about the legal status of the firing, and the legal status of the claims made by Damore in his memo. Initial media reports describing his memo were very misleading and few people made the effort to read what Damore actually wrote before attacking him.
In his memo, James Damore asserts that Google is engaged in illegal discriminatory practices as part of its efforts to increase diversity. (See earlier post, In the matter of James Damore, ex-Googler.)
The image below is from the actual memo. Does Damore sound like a sexist brogrammer Neanderthal?
OKRs = Objectives and Key Results. Damore is pointing out that pro-diversity objectives may incentivize managers to discriminate by gender or race in hiring and promotion.
According to Margot Cleveland (attorney who teaches labor law at Notre Dame):
The Federalist: ... Damore wrote “Google has created several discriminatory practices.” This reads of a classic case of opposition to an unlawful employment practice. (Under the case law, the practice need not actually be illegal if the employee reasonably believed it discriminatory.)
This passage may well be Google’s undoing. Damore can present a prima facie case of illegal retaliation: he engaged in protected activity by opposing several discriminatory practices, and was fired from his job. The close temporal nexus creates an inference that Google fired him because of his opposition to illegal discrimination.
... Google will counter that it fired him not because of his opposition but because of the gender stereotypes he included in the memo.
But of course the Google Brain was simultaneously using these "stereotypes" = correlations as its core revenue driver:
Professor Cleveland concludes:
... Once before a jury, Google will be hard-pressed to justify Damore’s firing because the jury will be force-fed the actual words Damore wrote, not the press’ hysterical gloss. In this regard, Google was in a no-win situation: Once the Neanderthal narrative formed, Google had no real choice but to fire Damore—which doesn’t make it right or, as Google is likely to find out soon, legal. In the meantime, the rest of the country will be treated to a nice civics refresher course and a deep-dive into federal employment and labor law.
Not to mention a deep-dive into the science of statistical / distributional group differences!
Here is Damore's brief summary of his memo (which contains many citations to original scientific research), and the conclusion:
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.
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).
This actual excerpt is of course very different from the heavily biased (mendacious) characterizations of the memo in the (lying) media. Perhaps that should make you wonder about the reliability of mainstream accounts concerning this matter.
Damore correctly anticipated his own demise! CEO Sundar Pichai's company-wide message seems to ban almost all scientific discussion of statistical or distributional group differences, on threat of termination:
This has been a very difficult time. 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. ...
Larry Summers was fired from the Harvard presidency (at least in part) for pointing out (correctly, it seems) that males exhibit higher variance in performance on cognitive tests (more very low- and high-scoring men than women per capita). His detractors justified the termination due to his highly public and symbolic role as the leader of the institution. In contrast, Damore was simply an engineer (with a background in computational biology) expressing his opinion on some basic scientific questions still under active investigation by researchers all over the world. His firing has to be regarded as scary authoritarian policing of thought.
If I worked at Google would this blog post get me fired?
Note Added:
* Damore may be ABD (left Harvard before completing his dissertation) rather than a PhD.
Damore is going to fight Google in court (NYTimes):
Mr. Damore, who worked on infrastructure for Google’s search product, said he believed that the company’s actions were illegal and that he would “likely be pursuing legal action.”
“I have a legal right to express my concerns about the terms and conditions of my working environment and to bring up potentially illegal behavior, which is what my document does,” Mr. Damore said.
Before being fired, Mr. Damore said, he had submitted a complaint to the National Labor Relations Board claiming that Google’s upper management was “misrepresenting and shaming me in order to silence my complaints.” He added that it was “illegal to retaliate” against an N.L.R.B. charge.
Note Added in response to 2020 Twitter mob attack which attempts to misrepresent my views: This blog post discusses the firing of James Damore by Google. It was a sensation at the time in Silicon Valley and made national news. This post is primarily about the scientific content of Damore's memo. Initial media reports describing his memo were very misleading and few people made the effort to read what Damore actually wrote before attacking him. I happened to notice that the Stanford Medical School magazine had (by coincidence) just featured an article on some of the issues discussed by Damore. Whether (below) the Stanford neuroscientist Nirao Shah or the former President of the American Psychological Association Diane Halpern are correct or not about the science, it seems unfair to call Damore a crank if he is simply referencing (in good faith) results in the published scientific literature. The same kinds of results are presented in the article below, written for the alumni of Stanford Medical School. In the second part of the post below I describe some recent survey results on individual preferences among mathematically gifted men and women who are part of a ~50 year longitudinal study -- they have been studied since childhood. I note specifically that differences in preferences between men and women are not necessarily biological in origin (we simply don't know): they could be the result of sexism in child rearing, schooling, postdoc training, etc. However, the point is that the survey results are likely descriptive of how actual adult men and women think and feel, and may have implications for labor markets. This is NOT a discussion about ability differences between men and women (all the individuals in the study are mathematically gifted), but rather about preferences concerning life fulfillment, lifestyle, work-life balance, etc. And again, no causation is assumed -- the situation may be entirely due to sexism in society, with zero biological basis.
The Spring 2017 issue of the Stanford Medical School magazine has a special theme: Sex, Gender, and Medicine. I recommend the article excerpted below to journalists covering the Google Manifesto / James Damore firing. After reading it, they can decide for themselves whether his memo is based on established neuroscience or bro-pseudoscience.
Perhaps top Google executives will want to head down the road to Stanford for a refresher course in reality.
Stanford Neuroscience Professor Nirao Shah and Diane Halpern, past president of the American Psychological Association, would both make excellent expert witnesses in the Trial of the Century.
... Nirao Shah decided in 1998 to study sex-based differences in the brain ... “I wanted to find and explore neural circuits that regulate specific behaviors,” says Shah, then a newly minted Caltech PhD who was beginning a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia. So, he zeroed in on sex-associated behavioral differences in mating, parenting and aggression.
“These behaviors are essential for survival and propagation,” says Shah, MD, PhD, now a Stanford professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and of neurobiology. “They’re innate rather than learned — at least in animals — so the circuitry involved ought to be developmentally hard-wired into the brain. These circuits should differ depending on which sex you’re looking at.”
His plan was to learn what he could about the activity of genes tied to behaviors that differ between the sexes, then use that knowledge to help identify the neuronal circuits — clusters of nerve cells in close communication with one another — underlying those behaviors.
At the time, this was not a universally popular idea. The neuroscience community had largely considered any observed sex-associated differences in cognition and behavior in humans to be due to the effects of cultural influences. Animal researchers, for their part, seldom even bothered to use female rodents in their experiments, figuring that the cyclical variations in their reproductive hormones would introduce confounding variability into the search for fundamental neurological insights.
But over the past 15 years or so, there’s been a sea change as new technologies have generated a growing pile of evidence that there are inherent differences in how men’s and women’s brains are wired and how they work.
... There was too much data pointing to the biological basis of sex-based cognitive differences to ignore, Halpern says. For one thing, the animal-research findings resonated with sex-based differences ascribed to people. These findings continue to accrue. In a study of 34 rhesus monkeys, for example, males strongly preferred toys with wheels over plush toys, whereas females found plush toys likable. It would be tough to argue that the monkeys’ parents bought them sex-typed toys or that simian society encourages its male offspring to play more with trucks. A much more recent study established that boys and girls 9 to 17 months old — an age when children show few if any signs of recognizing either their own or other children’s sex — nonetheless show marked differences in their preference for stereotypically male versus stereotypically female toys.
Halpern and others have cataloged plenty of human behavioral differences. “These findings have all been replicated,” she says.
... “You see sex differences in spatial-visualization ability in 2- and 3-month-old infants,” Halpern says. Infant girls respond more readily to faces and begin talking earlier. Boys react earlier in infancy to experimentally induced perceptual discrepancies in their visual environment. In adulthood, women remain more oriented to faces, men to things.
All these measured differences are averages derived from pooling widely varying individual results. While statistically significant, the differences tend not to be gigantic. They are most noticeable at the extremes of a bell curve, rather than in the middle, where most people cluster. ...
The recent SMPY paper below describes a group of mathematically gifted (top 1% ability) individuals who have been followed for 40 years. This is precisely the pool from which one would hope to draw STEM and technological leadership talent. There are 1037 men and 613 women in the study.
The figures show significant gender differences in life and career preferences, which affect choices and outcomes even after ability is controlled for. (Click for larger versions.) According to the results, SMPY men are more concerned with money, prestige, success, creating or inventing something with impact, etc. SMPY women prefer time and work flexibility, want to give back to the community, and are less comfortable advocating unpopular ideas. Some of these asymmetries are at the 0.5 SD level or greater. Here are three survey items with a ~ 0.4 SD or more asymmetry:
# Society should invest in my ideas because they are more important than those of other people.
# Discomforting others does not deter me from stating the facts.
# Receiving criticism from others does not inhibit me from expressing my thoughts.
I would guess that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and leading technologists are typically about +2 SD on each of these items! One can directly estimate M/F ratios from these parameters ...
For example, if a typical male SV entrepreneur / tech leader is roughly +2SD on these traits whereas a female is +2.5SD, the population fraction would be 3:1 or 4:1 larger for males. This doesn't mean that the females who are > +2.5SD (in the female population) are ill-suited to the role (they may be as good as the men), just that there are fewer of them in the general population. I was shocked to see that even top Google leadership didn't understand this point that Damore tried to make in his memo.
A 6ft3 Asian-American guard (Jeremy Lin) might be just as good as other guards in the NBA, but the fraction of Asian-American males who are 6ft3 is smaller than for other groups, like African-Americans. Even if there were no discrimination against Asian players, you'd expect to see fewer (relative to base population) in the NBA due to the average height difference.
Watch a few minutes of this Bloomberg interview and I think you'll agree he's both sincere and well-meaning, if a bit naive about the buzzsaw he has stepped into. Definitely not a brogrammer.
He reminds me of Richard Hendricks of the HBO show Silicon Valley.
I have not responded to these nasty Twitter attacks, but unfortunately they have gotten enough traction that I feel I need to respond now. [ Note: I have been informed that some of the signatures on their petition are fake, including one purported to be from my colleague Corey Washington! See counter petition and support letters on my behalf. ]
The attacks attempt to depict me as a racist and sexist, using short video clips out of context, and also by misrepresenting the content of some of my blog posts. A cursory inspection reveals bad faith in their presentation.
The accusations are entirely false -- I am neither racist nor sexist.
The Twitter mobs want to suppress scientific work that they find objectionable. What is really at stake: academic freedom, open discussion of important ideas, scientific inquiry. All are imperiled and all must be defended.
One of the video clips is taken from an interview I did with YouTuber Stefan Molyneux in 2017. Molyneux was not a controversial figure in 2017, although he has since become one. Prominent scientists working on human intelligence who were interviewed on his show around the same time include James Flynn and Eric Turkheimer. (Noam Chomsky was also a guest some time after I was.) Here is what I said to Molyneux about genetic group differences in intelligence:
As you can see, contrary to the Twitter accusations (lies), I do not endorse claims of genetic group differences. In fact I urge great caution in this area.
The tweets also criticize two podcasts I recorded with my co-host Corey Washington: a discussion with a prominent MSU Psychology professor who studies police shootings (this discussion has elicited a strong response due to the tragic death of George Floyd), and with Claude Steele, a renowned African American researcher who discovered Stereotype Threat and has been Provost at Columbia and Berkeley. The conversation with Steele is a nuanced discussion of race, discrimination, and education in America.
The blog posts under attack, dating back over a decade, are almost all discussions of published scientific papers by leading scholars in Psychology, Neuroscience, Genomics, Machine Learning, and other fields. The papers are published in journals like Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. However, a detailed reading is required to judge the research and related inferences. I maintain that all the work described is well-motivated and potentially important. Certainly worthy of a blog post. (I have written several thousand blog posts; apparently these are the most objectionable out of those thousands!)
In several of the blog posts I explicitly denounce racism and discrimination based on identity.
This paper, from 2008, discusses early capability to ascertain ancestry from gene sequence. The topic was highly controversial in 2008 (subject to political attack, because it suggested there could be a genetic basis for “race”), but the science is correct. It is now common for people to investigate their heritage using DNA samples (23andMe, Ancestry) using exactly these methods. This case provides a perfect example of science that faced suppression for political reasons, but has since been developed for many useful applications.
This 2016 paper is by the UCSD Pediatric Imaging, Neurocognition, and Genetics collaboration. They claim that fMRI features of brain morphology can be predicted by genetic ancestry via machine learning.
These blog posts discuss the firing of software engineer James Damore by Google over a memo on diversity practices. The first post describes the legal situation and quotes a professor of labor law at Notre Dame. The second compares the claims made in Damore’s memo to an article in the Stanford Medical School magazine, which covers similar material and was (by coincidence) published around the same time.
These papers discuss evidence from large DNA datasets for recent natural selection in human evolution. This research has been attacked for political reasons, but should be defended since it addresses fundamental questions in deep human history and evolution.
Regarding my work as Vice President for Research, the numbers speak for themselves. MSU went from roughly $500M in annual research expenditures to about $700M during my tenure. We have often been ranked #1 in the Big Ten for research growth. I participated in the recruitment of numerous prominent female and minority professors, in fields like Precision Medicine, Genomics, Chemistry, and many others. Until this Twitter attack there has been not even a single allegation (over 8 years) of bias or discrimination on my part in promotion and tenure or faculty recruitment. These are two activities at the heart of the modern research university, involving hundreds of individuals each year.
Academics and scientists must not submit to mob rule.
