This essay is weird. The author lumps James Damore, rank-and-file software engineer, in with Marc Andreessen and Mark Zuckerberg. Damore hasn't updated his LinedIn since 2018 - he might not even work in tech anymore?
It closes saying they need to stop reliving their glory days and be good fathers and not the town drunk. Those are serious accusations - being a bad father and a drunk. The author doesn't give any evidence for either.
The author is pretty upfront that the conclusion was meant as a reference to a character in the movie "Hoosiers", not that any of the personalities named were literally drunks or bad fathers.
IDk, I feel like they're doing the thing where you list people they don't like, then list other worse people and kind of imply the first set are related / just as bad as the second set.
It's a motte and bailey where if people accuse you of doing that you retreat to saying "no see they're separate lists".
Maybe the author just forgot which three interchangeable white guys he named at the top of the article, up there with the DEI topic that he broached but then never came back to. Maybe he thought he had written "Elon Musk", about whom the bad father parallel is a little easier to insinuate from the public record.
Or maybe whenever he reads a headline about a billionaire, he just files it under one golem in his head called Zuckermuskezosdriessen. A golem which also includes James Damore (???).
After all, we're dealing with someone who writes sentences like, "the vast majority of your fellow students were men, and they were more or less all the same person as you." This is not an author who sees two people of the same demographic as separate individuals whose sins need to be litigated individually. If Musk is a bad father, what should it matter that Zuck seems to be a fine one?
Yeah that was weird. Has Damore ever contributed anything to the industry? Never heard of them in the open source world. The way I read their arc, they went directly from cosseted upbringing to finding out that they weren't anywhere near as gifted as they'd been told their entire life and shifting from trying to actually compete in the industry to being a paid podcast guest in the grievance-sphere.
I think that's uncharitable. He was a regular SWE who got cancelled. Granted I have not followed him closely but I haven't seen him claim to be a genius or special. Sure he went to Harvard, maybe he had wealthy parents (IDK his background) but neither of those are crimes.
I don't think he's the activist people make him out to be. He went on a few podcasts early on but has generally kept a low profile. I'm not under the impression he's doing the paid speaker / podcast circuit. Probably just living his life.
After he was cancelled probably nobody wanted to hire him, maybe he left tech completely.
But yes, agree it was weird to include him next to the other names. He's not like, a billionaire founder.
> was a regular SWE who got cancelled. Granted I have not followed him closely but I haven't seen him claim to be a genius or special.
He did more than that. It wasn’t that he had the opinion that women were innately less qualified but that he tried to repeatedly discuss that at work after being told not to. It wasn’t just that he was wrong about the biology (to be clear, he was[1]) but that he wanted to have a public forum where he could say that some of his colleagues were less qualified.
If he’d just been some guy wrong in the internet on his own time, he almost certainly wouldn’t have been fired. Doing it at work in public changes things because any future lawsuit alleging discrimination could cite that as tacit approval. Whatever Google’s senior management felt about the merits of the piece, I’m sure their lawyers were saying it’d be a lot cheaper to hire another early-career engineer. The NLRB upheld the firing, too, so it’s not like good lawyers haven’t reviewed it.
(To be clear, I don’t think he’s Satan or anything - just some young guy who got some bad science out of the manosphere and had an unfortunately high-profile learning experience about why boundaries between your personal and professional lives are important)
>He did more than that. It wasn’t that he had the opinion that women were innately less qualified
He never said that in his letter. The memo was published unredacted. You can definitely disagree with what he said and there are many reasons to do so, but you should at least reference his actual statements and arguments when doing that.
> but that he tried to repeatedly discuss that at work after being told not to.
That is also not true. My understanding is the memo was a report in response to a request from a committee he was part of and wasn't intended to be more widespread. It was leaked inside Google and then outside Google and then people demonized him and he got fired. That's pretty much the high-level set of events. He definitely did not write this after being explicitly told not to, especially "repeatedly" per basically every piece of evidence about the entire kerfuffle.
I'm not a Damore apologist either, but like the sibling it really pisses me off when I see someone just straight up strawmanning or lying about what someone else did to smear them. The man was already blackballed from the entire tech industry and had to leave the country after being fired, mostly for saying factually true statements that are controversial because of the color he (and others) added to them. Isn't that enough? Do you have to lie about what he said, when it was published publicly and anyone can read it for themselves?
> The entire rest of your comment is pure fiction, by the way.
What part, specifically? The part where he's living outside the US (in Luxembourg per an article linked in another comment in this larger thread)? The part about him being fired from Google? The part about him being blackballed in the tech industry?
Seriously, the dude is as cancelled as it is possible to get, what more do you want? Argue against his actual statements, if you choose to do so, but don't be a blatant liar. This is the Internet, the Internet is forever, anybody can look this stuff up.
Damore is not the one that leaked the doc to Gizmodo, as far as I am aware. The controversy that ultimately lead to him being fired, cancelled, blackballed, and literally leaving the country were directly a result of the internal memo intended for an internal audience becoming public. It would seem the height of stupidity for him to leak the memo himself. He confirmed its authenticity because he was given the opportunity to provide a public response to the comments people had made on it, which is posted at the end of the version I linked.
What's your claim here? That the published memo is fake? That Damore didn't write the things he said that he wrote, and that he suffered serious consequences for having written?
What? The outrage was caused by the leaked memo. If it were fake...why would he have gotten fired to begin with? You seem to be intimately aware with the 'real' memo, care to link some evidence to what was in it? Person who replied to you is consistent with my memory of the events at the time.
Man, I really don't want to be a Damore apologist, but-
"that women were innately less qualified"
He never said that, though. If you have to grossly misrepresent his argument like that, you've demonstrated that you have no good faith retort and have lost the argument at the outset.
His paper was about on the average traits. That if you've split humans into various subsets -- for instance ethnicity, sex, age, etc -- each group has average and percentile traits on a variety of axes, whether it's aptitudes or intelligence spread (e.g. the variability hypothesis), musculature, long distance running, etc. These traits have negligible applicability to any individual person or subset, but if you're selecting from the whole set for exceptional extremes, you likely will get a set that doesn't demographically represent the whole.
NBA/NFL/NHL/MLB players. Nobel prize winners. Top mathematicians. Long distance runners. And so on.
Damore's mistake was that a) there was no value in publishing this, b) he is on the spectrum and didn't realize how dangerous this absolute statement of fact was.
You say that he had bad science, but then you link to a piece that says that it's "politically naive, and at worst dangerous". Which is precisely the sort of tired "but it isn't socially acceptable" sort of response that is just boorish and unproductive.
I get why Google fired him. They pretty much had to (though I would argue that he could have contested it as punishing his handicap). But for all his folly, when people have to misrepresent what he said, or do the "it's bad science because I don't like it"....meh.
The problem with the averages argument is not that it’s wrong but that the established biological causes have been for basic low-level things like grip strength but not for higher level cognitive behaviour, especially at the level of software engineering at Google which combines a number of different advanced skills – and there’s a fair variation in the mix of skills equally successful people use, too. Running is a much simpler, highly physical skill which was highly relevant to our evolutionary history whereas being a senior engineer involves a mix of cognitive skills developed over a longer time in a highly social environment, and there just isn’t high-quality data linking those skills to innate biological traits at the level needed to explain the current outcomes.
Complex behavior is very hard to link to underlying biology because our brains are incredibly plastic and actual researchers spend a lot of time looking for ways to tease out the complex interplay between genes and training. I used to support some neuroscience labs which studied things like this but the researchers were careful to note the difference in confidence between the effects they measured and the attempts to identify the underlying biology (e.g. maybe undergrad men could track more moving objects than women, but if monkeys didn’t show an effect you might want to check things like how many hours they spent playing ball sports or video games). Everyone was generally of the opinion that there were innate differences, but that they couldn’t be anywhere near the magnitude we see with athletic performance because too many well-crafted studies have been done to miss something big.
When you’re looking at those bell curves, it’s important to remember that even if you ignore the questions about the methodology for things like personality traits the overlap is tighter than shown, and contrary to one of his foundational claims, there’s enough cultural variation to suggest that the effect is not biological in origin. The first piece I linked discusses at some length how he was thrown off by the Wikipedia summary of a meta-analysis paper on personality traits which found very limited effects, with one analysis within the margin of error. That pattern continues for the few claims he makes in enough detail to assess: inconclusive data, mistakes cribbed from intermediary sources, or failing to link a very low level behaviour to success at a company like Google.
That last part is really important to think about with all of the evo-psych stories which claim our social dynamics of today are based on our evolutionary history without considering just how different the skills we use to work in offices developing software are from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle – anyone at Google is working with more people than was common in most of our evolutionary history!
Hey, just wanted to say thanks for this comment. This is a substantive rebuttal that doesn't make any claims of what he said that are untrue, and I pretty much consider it also a response to my sibling comment in reply to you. I also agree with pretty much everything you said here.
>Has Damore ever contributed anything to the industry?
It seems you've contrived a strawman that unless you know what they've done specifically in open source, they don't matter. I assure you that almost no one agrees with you.
This and the other post of yours about Damore are super weird, and you seem incredibly bitter about the guy. Weird stuff.
Damore's appearance in this piece is bizarre. He was an SWE at Google that made speculations about diversity targets, not realizing, courtesy of being the spectrum, that it was a massive taboo. For this guy to lump him in with Andreeson and Zuckerberg in his bizarre ageism screed is absolutely bizarre, and makes it seem like it was some LLM generation or something.
Where does this "they" come from? You seem to know a lot about the guy. Do you have some information about his gender that's not public to the rest of us?
You comment seems pretty hostile but since prescriptive English usage is the greatest of all possible topics, I choose to view your question favorably. "They" is accepted in written American English with a singular antecedent when gender is irrelevant, unknown, or when gender neutrality is preferred by the referent.
Hmm, so which of those three cases are we in? To his critics, his gender sure doesn't seem irrelevant, and in fact the whole gist of his odd appearance in TFA is to lump him together with all males, who the author sees as "more or less all the same person". And his gender is certainly not unknown.
Which is why I ask, do you know something different about what gender this referent prefers?
Or, did you just trot out this overly academic tripartite definition out of pure snark, with no intention of defending your asinine usage of "they" as a valid instance of any of the three cases?
HTH indeed.
FWIW, I don't love what Damore did, and I think he was sort of naive and inconsiderate. But if his critics can't be bothered to go further than ad hominems and passive-aggressive misgendering, as you've done here, it feels like a point in his favor.
I really enjoyed both your blog posts. You've clearly thought about this a lot and explained things well. I'd love to subscribe to be updated on your next post (even if it's not for months/years). Any chance you could add an RSS feed to your blog?
The book Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers explores this question. It was written in the 80s as an anthropological study of the ethics of middle managers at large companies. It still holds up today!
The book is descriptive - describing the ethical norms in large corporations, but it doesn't make a value judgement on whether those norms are good or bad.
A fascinating read of you're curious about the structural reasons for this sort of behavior. Really interesting to see how people act by different ethical codes inside vs outside of work.
It's not ideal, but also not likely to change. Understanding the structural reasons why it is the way it is has helped me to be less surprised / angry by things like this which I can't change.
Makes sense. They want customers to browse using the Netflix app where they can promote their own content. If customers get in the habit of browsing in Apple TV, Apple can promote their own shows and eventually cut Netflix out.
Same reason when you open Netflix it shows new recommendations first, with the option to continue in-progress shows below. Most users will choose the latter, but they don't put it first because it hurts product metrics.
>> but they don't put it first because it hurts product metrics.
It's so depressing that instead of making products be the best product they can be for users, we inconvenience users at the expense of 'metrics'. It's a pervasive attitude at tech companies. Apple used to be _mostly_ an exception but even they are doing it now.
Considering how much producing the content costs, it’s baked into all showbiz to try and get as much of the audience hooked on the same thing at the same time by design.
How the UI gets everyone watching shows A, B, and C but not the hundreds of others is a real thing I believe. Part of the “product” if you think about it.
(I’m not a fan of their product and it’s all TPB for me so I’m a cynic)
>it’s baked into all showbiz to try and get as much of the audience hooked on the same thing at the same time by design.
Yes, and that's why a la carte streaming of pretty much any media was a mistake. It's an open secret that none of them are profitable. But everyone was chasing that 2010's ZIRP with no plan whatsoever on how to actually recoup those costs. crashed the market before it really began. So the only answer was to enshittify the service once they had the numbers but not the money.
That's why I really hope games resist this model. It's the exact same honeytrap.
Is netflix profitable from income gained, or from expenses "saved"? As Zazlov has shown, you can "make money" if you simply slash a bunch of contracts, layoff employees, and writeoff stuff for tax instead of releasing products. That's pretty much what all companies have done for the past two years
It's not profitable in a way that can work for a decade. It's like cutting off your arm and saying you "lost weight".
> Is netflix profitable from income gained, or from expenses "saved"
Profit = revenue minus expenses, so not sure what this could even mean. It is a function of both variables.
> As Zazlov has shown, you can "make money" if you simply slash a bunch of contracts, layoff employees, and writeoff stuff for tax instead of releasing products.
WBD has yet to show a profit since Zaslav got involved. He has personally lost a ton of wealth due to declining prices of the equity. But, of course, WBD is not a simple case of a media business not being able to sell media, it is a complicated due to the extreme debt it has, which doesn’t say anything about streaming businesses in general.
> It's not profitable in a way that can work for a decade. It's like cutting off your arm and saying you "lost weight".
Back to Netflix, their financial trends show a very successful business. Just check their growth in revenue, profit, and profit margins, for 10+ years.
They might want me in their app but I swear the content Netflix actually encourages me to watch is maybe a hundred titles or so and maybe they rotate in and out a few, but what they want to sell me on always feels the same regardless of my preferences.
They also suffer from "Oh you liked that high quality classic western? how about some garbage westerns?" No man....
I feel like I have to hunt for content on Netflix and I'm boxing with Netflix's suggestions.
Not passing any judgement on this specific comment, but I've seen a fair bit of what you describe in other comment threads on HN as of late, and I can't help but wonder — why? I get that some people bot on Reddit because you can sell the accounts to spammers and such later, but here? I just don't get why anyone would do it on HN, but it's definitely a thing.
Same! The fact that it's cross platform helps a lot to ensure commands aren't missed. If I'm switching while one computer is off, the other can still send the command.
FTX was insanely profitable (100s of millions in revenue, low expenses). If SBF hadn't have taken customer money they'd still be around. Even now the CEO overseeing bankruptcy has recovered 90 percent of customer assets. Their downfall was absolutely accounting shenanigans, not an issue with the core business.
Their product was letting people take leveraged gambles on crypto, so arguably not a social good.
Exactly. It was an illegal casino dressed up as "investment", while also ignoring the regulations on investment. Part of their explicit plan was to use the house rake to give enough money to politicians that they'd retroactively legitimize themselves. It was an enormous social negative.
I'm not sure it's so simple. There's a strong case to be made that Alameda was losing money as FTX's liquidity provider and without the alameda money FTX would have much, much lower revenue. I think it's hard to look at just one side of the business because they were so intertwined.
Check to make sure your windows are properly sealed. If it's an old apartment you might need to redo the calk or add weather stripping. A good seal makes a huge difference. Rule of thumb is if air can get through, sound can.
I also wear noise canceling headphones while working, usually without anything playing. They do wonders to muffle outside noise.
When I listen to music while working it's usually brain.fm - music specially designed to help you focus. Anacdotally I've found it useful, and they also have a whitepaper going into the science behind their approach.
It closes saying they need to stop reliving their glory days and be good fathers and not the town drunk. Those are serious accusations - being a bad father and a drunk. The author doesn't give any evidence for either.
reply