> This example is completely made up and does not appear on the memo. There is no reason to think Damore was thinking about examples like this when he was talking about "lowering the bar", nor is it clear what he meant by "reducing the false negative rate". "Reducing the false negative rate" in a way that doesn't involve "lowering the skill bar" is either an admission that Google hires its applicants in a completely nonsensical way past a certain interview stage and that doesn't transpire at all from the memo. It could be true, but there's no reason to think he thought this, at all.

I'll give an example of this that I've encountered at several companies. We tag women and URM candidates as "diverse". For entry level candidates from non-traditional backgrounds (majored in something other than CS, EE, Math, etc. or learned coding in a boot camp) interviews are only given to diverse candidates. Non diverse candidates need to come from traditional backgrounds. For phone screens, we broadly grade on a Non, Maybe, and Yes scale. For diverse candidates if a candidate gets a second chance at the phone screen if they scored a Maybe. But the on-site interview remains the same.

So does this system discriminate in favor of diverse candidates? Absolutely, at several stages of the interview process candidates' chances at progressing are directly reduced by a non-diverse status. But does it affect the strength of recruited candidates? No. We don't generally consider the phone screen to be useful beyond assessing a coarse grained litmus for whether or not the candidate has a chance to succeed at the onsite. The final offer decisions is made based solely on the one-site interview performance.

It "lowers the bar by reducing the false negative rate" without affecting the quality bar because it only increases the rate of false negatives - that is, the people who could have passed the onsite interview but failed. Asian and White men who came from non-traditional backgrounds or fumbled the first phone interview but could have passed a second and the subsequent on-site are excluded. Diverse candidates, which includes all women as well as men that come from URM do not get erroneously excluded at those stages, thus reducing the false negative rate. The false positive rate remains unchanged: nobody gets a free pass at the stage that is used to test qualification for the job. I really hope I've made this point clear because you really do think that any lowering of the false negative rate necessarily results in lowered caliber of hires, then this is a statement that applies to many of my co-workers.

There are some that don't think the interview process should be discriminating on the basis or race or gender, but that's it's own conversation. The point remains, that what Damore wrote did not imply that these women were less skilled. He was pointing out the existence of policies like these.

As for the exact policies, remember that the intended audience for this memo was Gooogle employees and we read it in the context of being leaked out of this intended audience. From the footnotes of this memo

> Stretch, BOLD, CSSI, Engineering Practicum (to an extent), and several other Google funded internal and external programs are for people with a certain gender or race. (next bullet point) Instead set Googlegeist OKRs, potentially for certain demographics. We can increase representation at an org level by either making it a better environment for certain groups (which would be seen in survey scores) or discriminating based on a protected status (which is illegal and I’ve seen it done). Increased representation OKRs can incentivize the latter and create zero-sum struggles between orgs.

I know that he's talking about with respect to OKRs: orgs were assigned "representation OKRs" that set a goal of achieving specific percentages with regards to race and gender. He's saying that this has the potential to cause discrimination, and that a better way is to try and target positive responses for inclusion on employee surveys. I don't know what "Stretch, BOLD, CSSI, Engineering Practicum" are but the intended audience probably did.

As for the science, why are you emphasizing the opinion of biologists on how he applied psychology research? Biology is the study of organic life. Everything from how proteins are made, to how fish get oxygen from waters, to things like pediatric biology studying children's development. Some biologists study human behavior, but most don't. By comparison psychologists study human behavior and interaction. And Damore was discussing sex differences in human behavior, so this is much more applicable to the realm of psychology than biology.

> If you can't possibly imagine why saying "people with an innate quality you possess are more likely to be bad" could be offending, you probably need to hone up on your social skills. If someone explains over ten pages how people with innate quality X are more likely to be bad, with only a little disclaimer that the magical words "statistically" and "populations" make it all okay to say, and it doesn't raise any red flags, you definitely need to pause and ask yourself: "Is everyone collectively mad and only I am correct, or did I mess something up?" I mean it, sincerely.

At this point I am genuinely wondering whether this conversation is in good faith, and I am not ashamed to say this to a 2 day old account.

If someone points to the fact that close to 100% of the people incarcerated for rape are men as evidence of sexism in the justice system, and another person objects and points to the fact that higher male sexual aggression are observed universally across all civilizations and that there is strong evidence that this behavior is largely the result of men's own actions rather than state injustice is the latter the bad guy? This is just absurd. Men do commit rape drastically more often that women, it's an unambiguous fact and I most of my co-workers would agree with it without. I'm a man in control of my own body and impulses. All I need to do to avoid being a rapist is to not rape anyone. I don't find it particularly hard. While I'm disappointed by the behavior of other men demonstrated this statistic to a degree, it does not make any statement about the character of those men that don't rape.

The words "statistically" and "populations" aren't just disclaimers made to make otherwise sexist statements okay. It means that the statements in question are about the aggregate behavior of many people. Saying that statistically women are less likely to commit violence than men isn't making any sort of statement about individual women or individual men. Women commit ~5-10% of murders last time I checked. So there definitely are some women capable of committing acts of violence, but the point remains men still commit the majority of violence by a factor of 3-5x at the least. And most importantly, it doesn't say anything at all about the overwhelming majority of men and women that don't commit acts of violence.

And you should take your own advice as far as that last sentence goes. Polls of the general adult population showed that 61% of Republicans, 50% of Democrats, and 56% of independents responded that Google was wrong to have fired Damore [1]. Along racial lines this wasn't much different either. 58% of whites, 49% of Hispanics, and 55% of Blacks responded that Google was wrong to have fired him. The memo was definitely controversial, but the majority of the population thought the memo did not justify firing.

1. https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/HHP...