Civil War on the Left, Part 46: Googly Bits Fall Off

One of my theories about the hollow and politically-correct liberalism of the tech oligarchs in Silicon Valley is that it is simply the new face of assuaging their own liberal guilt at piling up such huge fortunes so rapidly. I heard a report last year about Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt being challenged about his support for Hillary Clinton, and his reply was that Silicon Valley opposes government control of either the bedroom or the boardroom. Seriously? He’s going to go with that?

The high tech industry runs on brains, and keenly feel their lack of “diversity” that finds it overwhelmingly male, and disproportionately Asian in its workforce. So naturally most of the Silicon Valley giants make a big splash of their commitment to “diversity,” and take steps like Lyft did recently in adding Valerie Jarrett to its board of directors.

Right now a memo from a Google engineer complaining about the political correctness of Google’s diversity culture has gone viral. Gizmodo has a complete copy of the ten-page memo. Here are some highlights:

• Google’s political bias has equated the freedom from offense with psychological safety, but shaming into silence is the antithesis of psychological safety.
• This silencing has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed.
• The lack of discussion fosters the most extreme and authoritarian elements of this ideology.
• Extreme: all disparities in representation are due to oppression
• Authoritarian: we should discriminate to correct for this oppression
• 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. Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.

This is just a warmup. From here the author really steps in it:

Only facts and reason can shed light on these biases, but when it comes to diversity and inclusion, Google’s left bias has created a politically correct monoculture that maintains its hold by shaming dissenters into silence. This silence removes any checks against encroaching extremist and authoritarian policies. . .

At Google, we’re regularly told that implicit (unconscious) and explicit biases are holding women back in tech and leadership. Of course, men and women experience bias, tech, and the workplace differently and we should be cognizant of this, but it’s far from the whole story.

On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. These differences aren’t just socially constructed because:

• They’re universal across human cultures

• They often have clear biological causes and links to prenatal testosterone

• Biological males that were castrated at birth and raised as females often still identify and act like males

• The underlying traits are highly heritable

• They’re exactly what we would predict from an evolutionary psychology perspective

Note, I’m not saying that all men differ from women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.” I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.

I guess this fellow never heard about what happened to Larry Summers when he voiced something like this at Harvard.

Prediction: The identity of this engineer will be discovered, and he’ll be an ex-Google engineer by the end of the same day.

Read the whole thing if you have time.