by zahlman | 2025-11-12 16:00:58+00:00
I know I said I was done, but I do review my own comment history and what you've said (to a third party) here is so fallacious I feel compelled to interject.

Zeroth, statistical results like this are not at all like the "scientific racism" of the past. They are well accepted across a broad field of study and have shown themselves to be useful in understanding human behaviour. (Admittedly, a psychiatric evaluation is not a precise measurement. But it is not fundamentally based on a flawed assumption, and it is not being conducted by people with an axe to grind.)

First, OCEAN traits are basic material in psychology. By your argument, nobody with a relevant degree should be allowed to be employed anywhere; but they learn (not "believe") these things exactly because it makes them more qualified for their intended career path. It's the same as how doctors nowadays are expected to understand how culture mediates responses to pain, or how men's and women's health care facilities have proven themselves necessary (as has the need to disentangle what's caused by physiology or hormones from what's caused by psychology).

Second, Damore obviously understood the material he presented reasonably deeply. Nobody who looks into the psychiatric tests on that level would misunderstand what they mean. And, I mean, really, this is such an incredibly tangential thing to actual work. If I thought you belonged to a group with more propensity to self-doubt (I'm still not exactly being scientific here, but that's closer to what I've understood from my own reading), are you really saying that this would prevent me from fairly "evaluating your behaviour or performance"? The quality of your code doesn't change because of how you felt about it when you committed it.

Third, this is a claim that Damore fully understands as a statistical claim about the general population. He knows very well, and he makes it very clear that he knows very well, that this does not transfer to "women on one's team"; and furthermore he didn't argue that trait neuroticism makes people unfit for purpose (as above). The entire point of the argument is to explain why women disproportionately don't apply for the job, and thus relieve Google of the moral burden of correcting for that. (But he even offered suggestions for what they could do instead!)

Throughout all of that, Damore makes it abundantly clear what he's trying to debunk — the idea presented in the tl;dr: "Extreme: all disparities in representation are due to oppression". If disparities in representation aren't caused by something purely external to the group (what "oppression" means), then they must be caused by something at least partially internal: i.e., a statistical group difference. And Damore is really making the mildest possible arguments about such differences. If you consider this objectionable, then logically you require everyone to believe that every group is statistically identical to every other group in every aspect except the one that defines the group (or at least: in every aspect relevant to performance in any job, etc.); that this is something that must be true a priori and cannot in principle be falsified even by actually doing the statistical work; and that disagreement is thoughtcrime. This is not a strawman; your argument requires this level of absolutism, because otherwise it is not fairly engaging with what Damore actually said.