Thread by @NGrossman81

James Damore's Google gender diversity memo is back in the news thanks to the NYT story about Slate Star Codex, and most get it wrong.
It's neither entirely sexist nor brave truth-telling. As I showed in @ArcDigi, it's deeply flawed scientific reasoning.
arcdigital.media/evaluating-the…

Damore's argument about gender and diversity in the tech industry is full of logical fallacies and misguided assumptions.
It reads more as a just-so story, in which he sees more men than women in tech, assumes that's natural, and goes looking for things to confirm his priors.

Damore & his defenders claim to be scientific by referencing studies that find differences between men & women on average.
But small average differences in the general population doesn't tell us anything about big differences in a non-representative sub-population (tech recruits)

Google asked employees to speak openly and fired one who did. Reasonable to criticize that combo.
At the same time, the flawed scientific reasoning make it reasonable to criticize the memo as aiming to support preconceptions about women's natural inferiority when it comes to tech

But despite the memo's flaws, there's an interesting underlying question: What's the end goal of diversity initiatives? One can reasonably say "more diverse than it is now," but that doesn't provide a way to measure when diversity efforts have succeeded & are no longer necessary.