The Conversation Google Killed
by William Saletan, The Conversation:
How to talk about our differences.
Every few years, somebody gets pushed out of a job for suggesting that one group of people, on average and in part due to biology, scores differently from another group on some measure of attitude or aptitude. Ten years ago, it was DNA pioneer James Watson, who said blacks registered below whites on intelligence tests. Four years ago, it was Jason Richwine, a Heritage Foundation scholar who said whites outperformed Hispanics on such tests. Now it’s James Damore, a software engineer who was fired last month by Google for writing a memo that said women tend to be less interested than men in solitary work, such as software coding.
In a world full of prejudice—illustrated most recently by the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville—it’s healthy to be revolted by biological theories of inequality. But in Damore’s case, the revulsion has gone too far. He and his arguments have been misrepresented, and his constructive ideas have been buried. His critics have falsely pitted the moral truth of equality against the plain fact of sex differences. By firing him, Google has confirmed that what he described in his memo—a progressive “echo chamber”—would rather purge than engage dissent. An opportunity for dialogue has been missed.
I’d like to reopen that dialogue. I believe all of us could gain from it, because I’ve been through an episode like Damore’s.
Read also: Don’t Google Real Women by Dr Peter Jones, truthxchange
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