Calling it brainwashing is maybe overselling the point, but as an exmo it does feel similar to me to arguments around religious dogma, where people are already 100% certain on the only outcome/position that's acceptable to them, then go find the arguments and evidence that backs that.
It's clear to me that many social progressives find the idea that there may be average biological differences in personality between genders to be unacceptable.
> holding the opinion of biologically driven personality eats away at the concept of free will
Eh, I don't think you'll find many people who dispute that there's individual variation in personalities due to biology/genetics. Hell, "born this way" (for being gay) was practically a rallying cry on the left.
The superset is "ideology" imo. Whether the topic is supernatural or physical, people who base their lives on ideology tend to behave similarly, as you've pointed out.
I think the problem is that people like James Damore will say that women aren’t suited for work in tech, and I don’t think that’s correct. And worse, the very idea almost provides support for the abuse women regularly feel working in tech from their male coworkers.
So sure, hormone differences seem to lead to different brain chemistry. But then people draw wild and incorrect conclusions like gate keeping women out of tech. And the fact that their conclusion is wrong is more important than the fact that some differences do exist.
Edit: I worked at Google when the memo came out. Personally I didn’t think the memo was that bad... until I spoke to my female friends that worked at Google. They told me a lot about how women are treated in tech. And they showed me how things said in the memo that I thought were harmless actually perpetuated beliefs that they believed did cause them harm.
So the people saying I am misrepresenting the situation... are you a man? Maybe you can’t recognize the harmful statements the way women do and so you do not remember them being harmful? I certainly got a lesson in my own bias after that memo came out. My close friends sat me down and we had some difficult conversations about it. If you’ve never done that, consider what you might be missing.
>I think the problem is that people like James Damore will say that women aren’t suited for work in tech
That's something he never said, and even explicitly said the opposite multiple times. The fact that people like you continue to repeat lies about what he said without ever reading what he said (or worse, willfully lying in spite of actually reading it) is why we can't have honest conversations about this.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
Most people don't have a strong enough grasp of statistics.
No matter how careful one is with the wording, some can only hear what they are capable of understanding, because they lack the frame of understanding.
It wasn't Damore's wording that has created the view of his memo that is counterfactual, it was the reporting done by "reputable" journals, who blatantly lied in articles about what the memo said.
It was journals like Wired, TechCrunch, the NYT's technology board, Ars Technica, the whole tech media came out of the woodwork to create a false narrative about what Damore wrote and succeeded in getting him terminated. They may have even ruined his life, just some random autistic engineer who accidentally violated their taboo.
And Damore isn't the first person mainstream journalists have done this to, they did it with Jordan Peterson, as another example, and they'll make up all kinds of lies if it fits their ideological goals to do so.
The sooner people realize that they need to consume "mainstream" journalism with the same skepticism they bring to "alt" journalism or "tabloids," the better off we'll be.
In the meantime, the journalists I trust most are the ones that have seen through this game: Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Andrew Sullivan, Bari Weiss, to name a few.
I read it and I participated in a lot of conversations with women at Google at the time. That’s my honest recollection of what was written and how people received it.
The Damore memo sounds very different to women than to men. I didn’t see that much of a problem with it until I spoke to my female friends. And they pointed out how work like that reinforces serious problems they already have at the workplace.
Honestly I think the downvoters remember it differently because men remember it differently from women, and I am remembering all the conversations I had with women while working at Google when the memo came out.
The memo is out there for you to directly quote, easily. Feel free to quote any part where Damore said (or even made a thinly veiled suggestion that) women aren't suited to working in tech. No need to rely on memory
Ah, sorry. I guess I did not correctly recall the content of the memo. It seems instead he was suggesting that biological differences between men and women are sufficiently real that company policy should be structured in some ways around this phenomenon. I can tell you that the women of Google that I spoke to do not seem to support that or believe it is a good idea.
I would never say one gender simply "isn't suited" for a particular career type, but I do think it's likely that, if there are average sex differences in personality, there are almost certainly average sex differences in occupational preferences.
But, that doesn't preclude there also being sexism present that needs to be dealt with.
Of course you don't think that's correct. Neither does he. No one is gatekeeping women out of tech. You want to believe that, so you find reasons to explain it that put the responsibility for it on everyone except those choosing not to do it.
The problem is that people like you will say people say things they didn't say and won't acknowledge the things they actually did say.
No one is gatekeeping women out of working in coal mines or driving trucks or heavy equipment or welding or garbage collection or any of those jobs either.
Why tech?
Why? Because it's not.
There is an overabundance of oppression in the world and it has nothing to do with gender, race, class, etc. There are oppressive people and they ruin life for many of all genders, races, classes, etc. Oppressive people are going to find any reason at all to insult, degrade, and disrespect others to oppress them.
Blaming other people for your own situation that you largely control, I would argue that the individual has more control over their life than anyone yet, responsibility of the self is completely absent from the discussion.
That, itself, is a form of oppression. It is oppression that we need to focus on. Not gender, race, class, wealth, geography, nationality, etc, etc, etc.
Oppressive people need to be rooted out and removed from society until they are rehabilitated.
The creation of mass delusions that benefit powerful groups is basically the norm in human society it seems like. It used to be religion and now it's fact-free feel good wishful thinking. My lived experience. My truth. It's no different than dancing to please the sun god.
Somebody's “lived experience” is their personal anecdotes. It's often in contrast with “quantify or discard”-type bad-at-science academics who make blanket assertions about things they don't know very much about.
