Let’s debate his points, so his bad ideas can be defeated
William Pietri wrote a thing that resonates strongly with me (and a lot of other people).
Some people are having a hard time understanding why the Google engineer was fired. “Let’s debate his points,” they say, “so his bad ideas can be defeated.” That sounds reasonable, but it isn’t. To understand why, let’s conduct a thought experiment.
Imagine that tomorrow, your least-favorite work colleague reveals that he is a literal Nazi. At your company all hands, he would like to debate a proposition with you. His proposition is: “Inferior races like the n****** and the k**** should be immediately executed; women should return to their status as property of men and be executed if they object.” You ask why he wants to debate this. He says that this is what he believes should happen. Do you accept the debate?
Let’s assume that you refuse, possibly with some swearing. This means you believe, as I do, some ideas are not worth debating. Perhaps you recognize how this would make non-white-male members of the audience feel to have their humanity and survival up for debate. Perhaps you see that by debating his ideas, you help normalize them, making them more likely to happen. Perhaps you realize that you’d be exposing your company to a massive lawsuit. And maybe you just don’t want to give this guy or his terrible ideas the elevation in stature that comes with treating them as worth serious discussion. Your colleague slinks away.
The next day, he proposes a different, less extreme debate topic: “Non-white races should be enslaved; women should be treated as property and beaten if they object.” You ask if he has changed his beliefs. He shakes his head. Again you say no; again he goes away.
On day three, he has another proposal. “Non-white races should be isolated in ghettos and reservations; women cannot work or own property and must always be accompanied by a male relative when outside their home.” Again you say no. Again he leaves.
Each night, he realizes that his ideas as expressed are beyond what’s socially acceptable. Each day, he comes back to you with a slightly more mild debate proposition. His intent never changes; he’s just looking for a way to get on stage. When do you say yes?
You might say, “Never!” But at some point, he will have refined his pitch enough that a bystander not having heard the history will say, “Why are you refusing to debate him? That seems like an entirely reasonable thing to talk about.”
That’s where we are with James Damore and his manifesto. If one has plenty of privilege, doesn’t know the long history of race- and gender-based oppression in America, and hasn’t kept up with the arguments of terrible people, it is apparently easy to read his screed and say, “Well, maybe we should talk about it.” That’s especially easy to say if your humanity and your participation in the workforce aren’t up for debate. Not only is it no skin off your nose, but you are being invited to judge everybody else, which can feel appealing.
Exactly. Damore’s manifesto is strikingly un-novel, unoriginal, unsurprising; it’s the same old shit we’ve been seeing forever, especially and with extra venom over the past few years (thanks, Twitter). No we don’t need to “talk about it” yet again; it’s been talked about ad infinitum for decades. Plus it’s shit.
It’s the same trick the alt right and the neoreaction loons have been pulling. They get that white hoods and swastika armbands and prison tattoos are beyond the pale. So they have carefully rebranded their ideas. They are still white nationalists. But they talk about their opposition to multiculturalism. They talk about supporting people who want to live near people like themselves. They fret about “too much” immigration “changing the character” of America. America first, they say! They still admit to wanting ethnic cleansing, but maybe they describe it as peaceful demographic change.
I won’t tell you not to talk to these people. But I will tell you that giving them a platform is exactly what they want. Getting the mildest versions of their ideas discussed is the foot in the door, the leading edge of the axe. They will use your attention and credulity to shift the Overton window bit by bit. You might think you’re being brave and open-minded, but marginalized people around you will realize that you can’t be trusted. That you value the appearance of openness far more than their safety.
That window? It’s shifted a lot already.
There’s also the implicit assumption that the strongest arguments – objectively speaking – are also the most subjectively persuasive ones to a lay audience. If the history of creationism or climate change denial has (or should have) taught us one thing it’s that this assumption is erroneous. Contrary to what Dunning Kruger skeptics often seem to think, having science and logic on your side isn’t the decisive advantage that it’s cracked up to be in the battle for public opinion. Indeed, as many naive biologists or climate scientists have discovered a little too late, a case could be made that the opposite is true, since playing by the rules of science and intellectual honesty is nothing if not constraining (forces you to acknowledge all kinds of caveats, prevents you from cheating, spinning the truth, claiming more certainty than is warranted by the currently available data etc.), whereas your opponent has full freedom to say whatever serves his/her case whether it’s supported by science or not.
And on Facebook Pietri says “I should add that I don’t think Damore is necessarily a conscious Nazi”, thus implying that Damore’s an unconscious one. It’s worrying that someone who imputes imaginary thought crimes to those he disagrees with should meet such acclaim. Anyone who thinks his screed is a useful addition to the “debate” is too easily impressed.
The central premise of Pietri’s argument seems to be that Damore has gradually inched his way in from extreme rightist views towards a position where he might perhaps get a hearing. Is there the slightest evidence that this is what happened? Damore expressed the entirely reasonable view that population-level differences may have an impact on the gender composition of the Google work force. For those who are interested in the actual issue, rather than in persecuting heretics, here’s a genuinely useful contribution. http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/
Eric, that is an incorrect or dishonest interpretation of the argument. Pietri clearly states that he is conducting a thought experiment to explain why it’s not a good idea to have debates like this. He is not claiming that Damore has acted like the person in the thought experiment.
Didn’t you read this part?
He’s talking about the fact that people might see Damore’s manifesto as reasonable because they are unaware of the horror show that is the history of the oppression of women and girls. I’m going to take Pietri’s advice and not debate this with you, but you should at least understand his argument.
OK, maybe I was very slightly inaccurate and what I should have written was that “Damore is now in the position of someone who has gradually inched his way in…” After all, if that isn’t true the whole analogy collapses. And he most certainly stated that Damore is not a *conscious* Nazi, thus implying that he is a Nazi without realising it.
I have done my best to understand Pietri’s argument, and see it as overwrought – why bring the Nazis into this? – and irrelevant. I just think it’s a pity that more people haven’t tried to engage with Damore’s arguments. If they’re so bad why haven’t they been refuted yet? And if you’re not going to engage with them, then simply ignore them rather than going on and on about how awful they are without producing any substantive rebuttal of his central thesis.
Yes – woman and girls and indeed almost every group other than upper-class white adult heterosexual males have had been oppressed in the past. But to suggest that the evils perpetrated by the Nazis somehow have some bearing on the apparent underrepresentation of woman at Google (which Damore also sees as a problem) is just silly.
I think you still don’t understand the analogy.
We don’t debate nazis with hugely extreme views partly because those views are absolutely terrible.
We don’t debate more moderate(-seeming) nazis with less extreme views partly because the views are still terrible but also partly because of the context of those ideas, their history. These histories are very real for many people and debating with nazis can feel to them like you’re negotiating for their human rights or even their lives on their behalf. You’re acting as though rights are negotiable. The debater might not see that because it has never been more than an abstract reality to them. It might seem to the debater that they’re helping the oppressed because they are exposing bad ideas to scrutiny, but it’s about more than ideas.
There is also a valid concern about the thin end of the wedge. Debate nazis and you normalise some of those ideas. You’re unlikely to convert any nazis to the left, but you’re very likely indeed to get a chorus of assent from latent nazis. “Yeah, that’s right, we have too many immigrants!” all too easily becomes “send them all back where they came from.”
This is a direct and apt analogy to the Damore case. How can I put this so you can understand: WOMEN ARE SICK OF THIS SHIT. They get it constantly. It is their daily reality. You are advocating a debate over their human rights (not to be discriminated against). By holding the debate, you are telling half the population that their human rights are negotiable.
The thin end of the wedge argument is also highly applicable here. If it’s OK to discriminate against women in the workplace, what about everywhere else? What about their other human rights?
Perhaps you don’t get the analogy because you are blind to the oppression (historical and current) of half the population. My Spider-Sense is telling me that you’re going to complain about equating the suffering of women with the suffering in Nazi Germany. Don’t do that, that isn’t happening.
I hope you see the analogy – and its relevance – now.
You have got to be kidding me. They have been refuted time and time again. Do you think he’s the first person ever to say something like this? Do you know anything at all about the entire history of feminism? Or of human societies, for that matter?
Rushing to specifically refute this one, tiny, comparatively insignificant instance of a vast wealth of exactly the same kind of shit going back forever is at best exhausting and at worse supplies Google Idiot and his giggling cohorts with the platform they want. Besides, what would it achieve? Do you think everyone would just say “oh, actually that’s a really good point, I’m not going to be a sexist idiot any more?”
And there we go. Everything’s totally fine now. Nobody is oppressed even a little bit. Everyone is totally equal in the eyes of society and the law. It doesn’t take a Spider-Sense to guess your demographic.
You’re the expert, dude.
Sorry for getting all mansplainy there, guy boils my piss.
Oh and while I’m at it, Eric: stop harping on about that one borderline ad hominem (I haven’t seen it in context). It doesn’t undermine Pietri’s argument in any way.
I guess we should start giving everyone who wants to make an “entirely reasonable” point about “academic freedom” wrt. the teaching of evolution or climate science the benefit of the doubt as well. On second thought, screw that. Each new repetition does not occur in a vacuum, and it’s neither practical nor rational to act as if it did.
Well, that’s quite a contribution after you said you weren’t going to debate this with me! Thank you for the explanation – you’re right that I don’t get the relevance of the analogy to this case. That’s not sarcasm or anything, the argument simply doesn’t work for me. The problem could be with the argument, or it could be with me.
I am not calling women’s human rights into question. To be clear, women and men should have exactly the same rights. But I see no reason to believe that Google’s hiring practices are systemically sexist, which is what this was originally all about. I’ve seen nothing to suggest Damore was arguing in favour of oppression, rather the opposite: he was trying to explain how differences between men and women at the level of the entire population might give to apparent discrepancies in hiring practices, and suggesting improvements to get over this.
I didn’t suggest that oppression is only a thing of the past. I know very well that it still goes on throughout the world and many women still suffer greatly as a result. But California today is probably the least oppressive place in the entire history of humankind.
Incidentally, your suggestion that you can guess my demographic from the views I hold is a fine example of stereotyping. Perhaps I should have chosen a gender-neutral monicker, and then we could have seen if you could work out that I am male, and in doing so provide evidence for the existence of gender differences.
I understand the argument, but I do not see a solution for this:
But at some point, he will have refined his pitch enough that a bystander not having heard the history will say, “Why are you refusing to debate him? That seems like an entirely reasonable thing to talk about.”
The problem remains that the nonsense person A has shot down a thousand times is the argument that person B hears for the first time. Then there is the other problem that if it is legitimate to Not Have A Discussion and Not Even Going to Answer To That about a topic because it is offensive and/or solved, people will start claiming the same about a topic they want to shield from legitimate criticism. None of this is easy.
@Eric:
Pay attention. I’m discussing your apparent (or possibly deliberate) misunderstanding of Pietri’s argument, not the Idiot’s Charter. Really, this is telling-people-off-on-the-internet 101: stick to the argument.
Well no, the problem is objectively with you because it’s an argument and you don’t understand it. Your lack of understanding is the thing that’s wrong here, regardless of whether the argument has any merit.
Knock yourself out. Believe whatever you like. But if you want to come across with even a veneer of logic, scientific understanding and basic human decency, you need to dig deeper. You still seem unable to look past this particular case and investigate the context in which this mess nestles. Failing to do so is lazy and stupid. Consequently, lazy and stupid is how you’re coming across.
ROFL. I get it. Saying that half the population is not fit to grace the innards of Google is actually doing the broads a favour! Why didn’t I see that before! They’ll be so much better off when they’re doing proper lady things like making babies sandwiches.
No, you stated it outright, as seen in the quote I highlighted. Seriously, dude, you spend ages arguing that not not saying someone is a nazi is saying they’re a nazi then shit the bed when someone calls you on your not not saying oppression is a thing of the past.
Yes it is. So?
Thanks for this. It has allowed me to update my guess of your demographic to include the prediction that you are eight fucking years old.
This will never end, will it?
You can fight with logic, you can fight with data, you can plead to their humanity or hold yourself, and others, up as shining examples of exceptions to their idiotic conclusions, but as long as they can find women who want to spend their time doing anything the dudes think is inferior, we will always be inferior.
All of us.
And they’ll tell us that over and over and over again. From the cradle to the grave.
I have struggled to master the ‘soft skills’ to lead a team of IT guys, many of whom have very few soft skills, and were downright non-functional as a team when I stared. I didn’t really have the skills, but someone needed them, and they resented the intrusion. All that time I was working on teamwork, I wasn’t putting into the ‘hard skills’, so now I’m behind in that regard, but folks have (finally) appreciated my efforts.
Now, here comes google-bro to tell us that I took over the soft skills because of, what? Estrogen? I’m more interested in people than things?
I’M NOT FUCKING INTERESTED IN FUCKING PEOPLE. I’M INTERESTED IN GETTING THE FUCKING JOB DONE!
I swear there are days I want to pack it in and turn small farming, where I can spend my days whacking the heads off of roosters.
No, it will never end.
No, it will never end.
The reasons outlined in Pietri’s article are why scientists do not accept “debates” with creationists, flat earthers, climate change deniers, homeopathy “experts”, anti-vaxxers… Evopsychos (especially of the Tarzanist persuasion) should have been added to the list long ago. Such “debates” imply there is even a shred of credibility to the “alternative” and gives them undeserved visibility and the opportunity to sealion/strawman.
And yes, it’s exhausting and dispiriting to be constantly subjected to the drizzle of belittling harassment. Women are so Harrison-Bergeroned that sometime I wonder how we keep getting up and going each morning.
I suggest you go back and read at least a handful of the reams that have been written about Mr. Damore and his manifesto. Ophelia has refuted his arguments. PZ has refuted his arguments. Ophelia has posted links to other people who have refuted his arguments. Other people have refuted his arguments. Cordelia Fine has refuted his arguments. I have refuted his arguments (but I’m really no one, just a stupid female scientist who no doubt cannot do math or science right, and only got into that spot because of some ridiculous idea of gender balance, at least if you pay attention to what Mr. Damore said – but I don’t, so I digress). My dog, my cat, and my hamster (if I had one) could refute his arguments. They are that old, that tired, and that worn out. He may think they are shiny and new, but he is wrong about that.
So don’t come in and tell us we need to refute his argument. We have been refuting his argument, and you have not noticed. So now I deem you are probably not noticing by choice, and that nothing I can say will change your opinion on the subject. Therefore, this post is directed only to those that might think that you said something so right, and so clever, and so important that they will go out to the world confused about why we won’t refute his argument, and using that argument themselves. And no, I am not going to provide links, because all you have to do is click through this site for the past couple of days, and you will find links to numerous refutations of his arguments.
Thank you, latsot, for doing that with eloquence and authority. Every time I see an “Eric” in these conversations I just want to weep. Over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over.
Thanks for this. It has allowed me to update my guess of your demographic to include the prediction that you are eight fucking years old.
Eric raised some interesting points that you simply won’t or can’t address. You can’t refute, so you simply insult.
But to suggest that the evils perpetrated by the Nazis somehow have some bearing on the apparent underrepresentation of woman at Google (which Damore also sees as a problem) is just silly.
Yes it is.
Every time elitists like latsot are rendered speechless by arguments they can’t counter they have no choice but to attack the individuals making such arguments.
Your arrogance, your condescending airs and your total lack of basic civility, latsot, make you a case study in ‘progressive’. Team Trump 20/20 salutes you.
Google employs shitloads of male soft-ware engineers from South Asia. They’re brought in as cheap labour under the H1B work permit programme. On average they’re only paid about 60% of what their native-born co-workers earn. Thanks to ‘diversity’ in the workplace programmes, some are paid even less. Why would any IT manager, male OR female, managers whose continued employment is tied to the bottom line, sacrifice such profitable and advantageous wage rates just to hire a few women?
And shit! If you dare attack their misogyny, they’ll counter by calling you an anti-immigrant racist and an enemy of diversity.
So you have a choice between enhancing female empowerment or shifting that Overton Window.
I swear there are days I want to pack it in and turn small farming, where I can spend my days whacking the heads off of roosters.
Do you even know WHY there are roosters on farms?
By all means, lets debate Damore’s points. Like, perhaps, the way Nassim Taleb has been debating Mary Beard’s points? It’s interesting that a lot of the people who back Damore are the same ones who back Taleb, ain’t it?
Pastry Chef: So, I see the cake got burned. Weren’t you supposed to take it out of the oven when the timer went off?
Assistant: Well, I agree that the cake is burned. But I believe that we need to investigate the role of sugar in this.
Do we really?
Oh, absolutely. You see, this cake recipe uses a full cup of sugar, but I found a couple of recipes on the internet that only use 11/12ths of a cup. Sugar tends to burn. That’s just science.
What time were you supposed to take the cake out of the oven?
2 o’clock. But, really, the sugar content…
And what time DID you take it out?
3 o’clock. But I think you’re focusing too narrowly on a single issue here. Look, nobody’s denying that cooking time and temperature play a role in baking a cake, but you’re showing an appalling disregard for science in claiming that the chemical make-up of the cake batter has no effect.
Well, I’m NOT claiming that. I just think that the fact that the reason the cake is burned is almost entirely due to the fact that it was in the oven for an extra hour; whatever contribution an extra 1/12th of a cup of sugar might have made is pretty negligible compared to that. So our focus should maybe be on following the recipe and taking the cake out on time. If after that, we still have a problem, then maybe we can tinker with the sugar level. And by the way, top culinary schools and cookbook authors have tested this issue and found that a cup is correct.
But I have Google links! You are refusing to discuss ideas! Ignoring SCIENCE!
(sigh) Look, just make up a fresh batter according to the recipe, and remember to take it out on time this time, ok?
(surly expression) Whatever. Maybe
Fine, you’re fired.
YOU ARE AFRAID OF MY IDEAS ABOUT SUGAR!
Snerk!
That window smashed because it’s glass. It’s in the nature of glass to smash. My throwing a brick through it only served to point out the inherent fragility of glass.
[…] a comment by Screechy Monkey on Let’s debate his points, so his bad ideas can be […]
Well, John, it’s nice to see you again. And it’s nice to see that you are as able an arguer as our friend Eric. In short, you are arguing by saying we can’t refute the arguments, so we call names. Which might indicate you can’t read, but more likely indicates you choose not to read what we are writing, but only what you want to see.
Perhaps you should call the Labor Board, and let them know you have all the employment statistics they need, since they have found a gender gap in pay, but are still struggling to get all the records they need. I’m sure your analysis would be of great help in dealing with the Google case. They could just throw the gender issue out the window; it’s obviously irrelevant, because you say so. And you apparently have facty facts, which they could greatly use.
It ain’t to produce eggs, John. Hens do well without them, that’s why 99.9% of male chicks wind up live in a grinder, so don’t go crowing just yet.
(Of course, that’s factory farming, things are a little brighter for the few roos that wind up in small farms. But more than 1:20 is a hazard to your hens, so for the rest it’s straight to the table. Are you getting the point here, John? Are you?)
John –
I’m not going to approve your latest venomous comment, and I request that you stop making them. I have kept on approving most of your comments, but the venom of some of them keeps making me hesitate. If you can actually converse, I’ll approve your comments, but if you just empty your bile, I’m not interested.
Especially not today.
Hey, I’m an elitist!
Awesome.
This is hilarious:
Yeah, John, I do. So, I suspect, does cazz. You? Really not so much.
But then I’m an elitist farmboy, what would I know?