RR Phantom
Location : Wasted Space Job/hobbies : Cayman Islands Actuary
| Subject: Don’t Even Think About Being Evil Sat Sep 02, 2017 7:32 pm | |
| Corporate America has managed to make higher education look like an open marketplace of ideas.
‘Just wait till those campus snowflakes enter the real world—that’ll shape ’em up!” So goes a typical response to totalitarian hysteria at colleges. The firing of a Google engineer last week for questioning the company’s diversity ideology exposes that hope as naive. The “real world” is being remade in the image of college campuses with breathtaking speed.
A conveyor belt of left-wing conformity runs from the academy into corporations and the government, so that today’s ivory-tower folly becomes tomorrow’s condition of employment. Google’s rationale for firing James Damore perfectly mimics academic victimology—the equation of politically incorrect speech with violence, the silencing of nonconforming views, the refusal to hear what a dissenting speaker is actually saying.
After attending a diversity training session, Mr. Damore wrote a 10-page memo titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber.” He observed that “differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership.” Among those traits are assertiveness, a drive for status, an orientation toward things rather than people, and a tolerance for stress. He acknowledged that many of the differences in distribution are small and overlap significantly between the sexes, so that one cannot assume on the basis of sex where any given individual falls on the psychological spectrum. Considerable research supports Mr. Damore’s claims regarding male and female career preferences and personality traits.
Mr. Damore affirmed his commitment to diversity and suggested ways to make software engineering more people-oriented. But he pointed out that several of Google’s practices for engineering diversity discriminated in favor of women and minorities. And he called for greater openness to ideas that challenge progressive dogma, especially the “science of human nature,” which shows that not all differences are “socially constructed or due to discrimination.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-even-think-about-being-evil-1502750235?nan_pid=1861689871 |
|