Former Google engineer James Damore's memo signals the emergence of an astounding social trend away from truth and facts toward the preferred comforts of idealizations rooted in untested fantasies about the way the world should operate over the pursuit of understanding how and why it operates conversely today.
What's more, it seems as though some intellectuals' contentions are more or less equal than others, as the ensuing ridicule of Damore as an "ass hole" qualifies as allowable humor, while his own honest opinions on a subject intimately important to him are sexist or "bull shit."
Fortunately or unfortunately, depending upon one's agenda or point of view, the world fails to operate on the basis of any single individual's determination of "bull shit."
The world operates the way it does because of individuals pursuing their own maximum advantage while weighing marginal benefit against marginal labor along the way.
All of these many incremental transactions and expressions of preference then materialize into measurable aggregates that the statistician or critic is able to leverage to construct a cohesive narrative, occasionally wrapped in a warped philosophical paradigm motivated by one's own preference for different outcomes.
In the case of hard sciences, men have perennially scored higher than their female counterparts on the SAT, where the evincible gender gap ranges from 30 to 40 points in mathematics.
And while women have earned nearly 10 million more college degrees than men since 1982, the female gender still constitutes less than one-fifth of all degrees earned in engineering and computer science.
At this point, the conversation transforms into one of form over substance, whereby a distinguishable participation gap exists between the two genders, despite the relative dearth of female-specific demand for those positions and the fact that one of the two genders demonstrates a simple competitive advantage in, and affinity for, the field.
What's more, Damore staked a scientifically-valid claim about women being particularly neurotic, proving a relatively organic obstacle to their placement in, or pursuit of, fields deeply entrenched in the relatively more rigid and uncompromising frameworks of the hard sciences.
The facts even bear out the more wildly unpopular contention, "Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things."
Take, for example, the automotive industry, where women constitute less than two percent of all mechanics and auto technicians in the United States.
In that same industry, women comprise 21.2% of automobile dealers, 7.3% of automotive and maintenance employees, and broadly one-quarter of the whole automotive workforce.
In this case, most of the population would more than happily admit that men and women, on average, value cars and trucks differently.
In fact, the data also bear this out, revealing that women tend to prioritize safety and affordability when shopping for a new car, while their male counterparts prioritize exterior styling and reputation.
The female affinity for safety and affordability is also reflected in the average woman's financial literacy, work placement, negotiation practices, risk tolerance, participation in commissions-based roles, and investment in the stock market and household financial affairs.
Meanwhile, their preference for dramas, such as The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, juxtaposes against their male counterparts' intimate attachment to action and risk-taking at young ages, when they're becoming more widely acquainted with sports and taking risks to impress their friends and the neighborhood girls.
Men also have a preference for machinery, video games, history, guns and action-packed films, such as The Fast and the Furious, a series which cinematically represents with impunity nearly every one of the gender-specific preferences which pervade the Western world.
Somehow, though, when real actors in the real world speak real truths about real phenomena, the zealots of the church of drama and imaginary grievances will rally to sound nearly every reachable alarm and chirp every available buzzphrase at the complete expense of truth and any remaining drop of respect for opposing opinion.
Men and Women are Different
The world tends everywhere toward some semblance of equilibrium.
Men and women, though on average valued nominally differently in terms of executive commercial and professional function, operate within the realm of trade-offs.
This often takes the form of male earnings to enable female, or family, expenses or to cater to the cultural-, relational-inertial forces of gender-specific responsibility and those executive qualities which are, primitively speaking, characteristic of a qualified mate and consensually and conveniently assumed by each member of the household.
Psychologist Adrian Furnham contends, “Boys negotiate pocket money and allowances with the father, though girls may be encouraged to charm their fathers into opening their wallets. Hence some girls come to believe that financial wheeling and dealing is a masculine activity and shun all money matters for fear that it renders them somehow less feminine.”
The author continues, “Various considered the differing attitudes that males and females have toward money and concluded that females regarded money as being of less importance than did males.”
Vivian Lim and Thompson Teo, in the Journal of Economic Psychology, similarly conclude that males and females differ in their attitudes towards money with regard to obsession and power. Males were more likely to demonstrate obsessive and power attitudes toward money than females.
The measurable gaps between men and women, on the whole, may after all be the mere manifestation of the specific pressures applied to males in their respective roles as the anticipated providers of their respective households, a set of outcomes supported by the market for courting women.
Meanwhile, women are rewarded for distinctly different traits which are not necessarily inclusive of their respective capacities to generate income for the household.
The general market outcome — that is, those discernible averages and perceived imbalances based on gender — may spawn from the ubiquity of academically-repugnant, yet privately-desirable preferences which are mutually expressed, desired, perpetuated and encouraged by men and women in their private relationships.
So while Damore's promulgation may appear to merit sharp scrutiny on the surface, the shrewd investigator will first explore the depths of his argument and the expansive sea of information to personally determine whether "the differences in distribution of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don't have 50 percent representation of women in tech and leadership."
Damore concludes, "Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive and bad for business."
In separate context, Damore's opponents would surely agree that gender- or race-specific discrimination practices are ill-suited for the workplace; however, it seems as though their contentions would reach only so far as the standard proves advantageous to their own demographic.
As soon as anyone challenges policies that disrupt the generation of these narrowly-distributed advantages to a group who intends to unwittingly condemn the customs of the average American woman, that individual is set to become the freshest target for character assassination and the next poster child for white supremacy and white privilege.
For the intents and purposes of this rally, truth will hardly interfere with the concoction of the better narrative.
What's more, it seems as though some intellectuals' contentions are more or less equal than others, as the ensuing ridicule of Damore as an "ass hole" qualifies as allowable humor, while his own honest opinions on a subject intimately important to him are sexist or "bull shit."
Fortunately or unfortunately, depending upon one's agenda or point of view, the world fails to operate on the basis of any single individual's determination of "bull shit."
The world operates the way it does because of individuals pursuing their own maximum advantage while weighing marginal benefit against marginal labor along the way.
All of these many incremental transactions and expressions of preference then materialize into measurable aggregates that the statistician or critic is able to leverage to construct a cohesive narrative, occasionally wrapped in a warped philosophical paradigm motivated by one's own preference for different outcomes.
In the case of hard sciences, men have perennially scored higher than their female counterparts on the SAT, where the evincible gender gap ranges from 30 to 40 points in mathematics.
What's more, Damore staked a scientifically-valid claim about women being particularly neurotic, proving a relatively organic obstacle to their placement in, or pursuit of, fields deeply entrenched in the relatively more rigid and uncompromising frameworks of the hard sciences.
The facts even bear out the more wildly unpopular contention, "Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things."
Take, for example, the automotive industry, where women constitute less than two percent of all mechanics and auto technicians in the United States.
In that same industry, women comprise 21.2% of automobile dealers, 7.3% of automotive and maintenance employees, and broadly one-quarter of the whole automotive workforce.
In this case, most of the population would more than happily admit that men and women, on average, value cars and trucks differently.
In fact, the data also bear this out, revealing that women tend to prioritize safety and affordability when shopping for a new car, while their male counterparts prioritize exterior styling and reputation.
The female affinity for safety and affordability is also reflected in the average woman's financial literacy, work placement, negotiation practices, risk tolerance, participation in commissions-based roles, and investment in the stock market and household financial affairs.
Meanwhile, their preference for dramas, such as The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, juxtaposes against their male counterparts' intimate attachment to action and risk-taking at young ages, when they're becoming more widely acquainted with sports and taking risks to impress their friends and the neighborhood girls.
Men also have a preference for machinery, video games, history, guns and action-packed films, such as The Fast and the Furious, a series which cinematically represents with impunity nearly every one of the gender-specific preferences which pervade the Western world.
Somehow, though, when real actors in the real world speak real truths about real phenomena, the zealots of the church of drama and imaginary grievances will rally to sound nearly every reachable alarm and chirp every available buzzphrase at the complete expense of truth and any remaining drop of respect for opposing opinion.
Men and Women are Different
The world tends everywhere toward some semblance of equilibrium.
Men and women, though on average valued nominally differently in terms of executive commercial and professional function, operate within the realm of trade-offs.
This often takes the form of male earnings to enable female, or family, expenses or to cater to the cultural-, relational-inertial forces of gender-specific responsibility and those executive qualities which are, primitively speaking, characteristic of a qualified mate and consensually and conveniently assumed by each member of the household.
Psychologist Adrian Furnham contends, “Boys negotiate pocket money and allowances with the father, though girls may be encouraged to charm their fathers into opening their wallets. Hence some girls come to believe that financial wheeling and dealing is a masculine activity and shun all money matters for fear that it renders them somehow less feminine.”
The author continues, “Various considered the differing attitudes that males and females have toward money and concluded that females regarded money as being of less importance than did males.”
Vivian Lim and Thompson Teo, in the Journal of Economic Psychology, similarly conclude that males and females differ in their attitudes towards money with regard to obsession and power. Males were more likely to demonstrate obsessive and power attitudes toward money than females.
The measurable gaps between men and women, on the whole, may after all be the mere manifestation of the specific pressures applied to males in their respective roles as the anticipated providers of their respective households, a set of outcomes supported by the market for courting women.
Meanwhile, women are rewarded for distinctly different traits which are not necessarily inclusive of their respective capacities to generate income for the household.
The general market outcome — that is, those discernible averages and perceived imbalances based on gender — may spawn from the ubiquity of academically-repugnant, yet privately-desirable preferences which are mutually expressed, desired, perpetuated and encouraged by men and women in their private relationships.
So while Damore's promulgation may appear to merit sharp scrutiny on the surface, the shrewd investigator will first explore the depths of his argument and the expansive sea of information to personally determine whether "the differences in distribution of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don't have 50 percent representation of women in tech and leadership."
Damore concludes, "Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive and bad for business."
In separate context, Damore's opponents would surely agree that gender- or race-specific discrimination practices are ill-suited for the workplace; however, it seems as though their contentions would reach only so far as the standard proves advantageous to their own demographic.
As soon as anyone challenges policies that disrupt the generation of these narrowly-distributed advantages to a group who intends to unwittingly condemn the customs of the average American woman, that individual is set to become the freshest target for character assassination and the next poster child for white supremacy and white privilege.
For the intents and purposes of this rally, truth will hardly interfere with the concoction of the better narrative.
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