If you find the title confusing, DDG the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. (DuckDuckGo.com is a search engine whose acronym is hereby designated as one of the replacements for the verb google.)
Warning: SLL is about to put forth two propositions that are so obvious they’re undoubtedly controversial. Readers offended by the obvious but controversial are advised to stop reading.
Proposition one: If Group A and Group B are competing for the same jobs and standards are lowered for Group B but not Group A, on average the members of Group B will not be as good at the jobs as members of Group A.
Proposition two: Men and women are different.
This, when you wade through James Damore’s excruciatingly diplomatic Google memorandum is the crux of what he said. SLL can say it but Damore couldn’t; Google fired him for “perpetuating gender stereotypes.”
Google’s highly compensated management and engineering jobs are held disproportionately by white males. Here’s a fact: the universal set of people inside and outside of Google who have the ability to write complex computer code, or have the ability to manage such people, is disproportionately white males. That may be changing, but as of August 13, 2017, that’s still a fact.
While perpetuating gender stereotypes supposedly got Damore the boot, the money portion of his memo nails the contradiction at the heart of diversity and affirmative action programs: lower standards for Group B in the interest of promoting “equality” is inherently unequal. Group A has been disadvantaged and Group B has received preferential treatment.
From James Damore’s Google memorandum:
The harm of Google’s biases
I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more. However, to achieve a more equal gender and race representation, Google has created several discriminatory practices:
• Programs, mentoring, and classes for people with a certain gender or race
• A high priority queue and special treatment for “diversity” candidates
• Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate
• Reconsidering any set of people if it’s not “diverse” enough, but not showing the same scrutiny in the reverse direct (clear confirmation bias)
• Setting org level OKRs [Objectives and Key Results] for increased representation which can incentivize illegal discrimination
You can have equal treatment or preferential treatment, but you can’t have both. De jure unequal leads to de facto unequal, not de facto equal. It leads to two other consequences: the favored group will on average not do the job as well, and the unfavored group will know it.
A cherished goal of the diversity drones is to get the unfavored group to applaud not just the drones’ enlightened moral status, but to pretend that the favored group does just as good a job as the unfavored one, and that diversity of secondary traits (but not, evidently, diversity of thought) itself confers a benefit. It’s a subset of an “optics” problem that besets the entire redistributive racket: how do you get unfavored producers not just to go along with the scam and keep producing unearned benefits for the racketeers and redistributees, but to pretend they like it?
How a Google coder’s gender or gender identification, race, ethnicity, creed, or any other secondary characteristic will affect his or her ability to spot and fix the flaws in an algorithm is left unstated. But that’s not the diversity drones’ problem. Google makes so much money it can afford some less-than-stellar employees in service to enlightened ideals and the greater good. If members of the unfavored group can’t bring themselves to applaud, they should at least shut up. Or else!
Denounce the theory of evolution and you’ll be roundly condemned as anti-science. Turn around and accept the theory, point out that evolution’s prime directive is the propagation of a given species, that for humans each sex has an evolutionary role, that women’s evolutionary role is to bear and rear children, that men’s role is to protect and provide for the family, especially when the woman is pregnant and then nursing and is unable to do so, and that men and women are equipped with different hormones, sex drives, and yes, brain wiring to facilitate their differing evolutionary roles, and you will earn for yourself a fusillade of criticism from the same people who were condemning your earlier stance against evolutionary theory.
The existence of differences, and what they might be, are questions for scientific inquiry. Repression is when you get shot for telling the truth. Totalitarianism is when you get shot for asking questions. We’re reaching the point where questions cannot be asked, and all sorts of energy is expended maintaining the fantasy that men and women are not different, that gender itself is merely a matter of choice and can even vary day-to-day.
We’re running into evolutionary dead ends. In the springtime of their lives, when both men and women’s fancy used to lightly turn to thoughts of love—and then marriage and procreation—appreciable percentages of both sexes hate each other. Many feminist groups despise men; men’s groups like MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way, aka Men Grabbing Their Own Weenies) despise women. One suspects that much of the antipathy stems from the eternal rejections and betrayals they’ve encountered with the opposite sex. In the good old days, the rejected and betrayed turned to lyric laments—“Your Cheating Heart,” “You’re No Good”—but didn’t lose romantic hope. Now they change their sexual orientation…or their sex…or embrace celibacy…or all of the above. And the birth rate continues to decline.
There is always one group of victims overlooked when standards are lowered for Group B: the members of Group B who meet the Group A standards. To say that computer coding skills might be more prevalent among men than women and minorities is not to say that no women or minorities have such skills, a point Damore bent over backwards trying to make (he even used illustrative graphs). He urged stepping up “nondiscriminatory” efforts to find them.
The women and minorities who make the “A” grade should be more upset at the lowering of standards than their white male coworkers. They will be unfairly stigmatized, and their advancement within Google will come with an asterisk—winks and nods that they climbed the diversity, not the talent and achievement, ladder.
That is an injustice against these individuals. However, in Google’s brave new world there are only groups, not individuals. Individual James Damore questioned the new order. Google exercised its right to fire him and intimidate everyone else. However, the decision to seek employment with a company is an individual one, as is the decision whether to stay or leave.
The kind of people who draw top dollars and stock options at Google have rare talents and are always in demand. Some of them may depart for companies eschewing today’s fashionable but counterproductive doctrines, where they and their coworkers will be judged on their own merits, not secondary characteristics. In its echo chamber—the Goolag Echopeligo—Google can maintain the fiction that Group A can be replaced by Group B, but competitive edges are remarkably ephemeral. The technology landscape is littered with the corpses of yesteryear’s hot new thing.
The decision to use a particular technology is also an individual one. Individuals critical of Google can refuse to use its products and services. There are plenty of other competitive technologies. DuckDuckGo claims it doesn’t track you. DDG your next search!
