I've always had my suspicions about that damn ACM!

In a pathetic article article entitled How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution, Stephen Mihm, a professor of history at the University of Georgia, writes:

Why aren’t there more female software developers in Silicon Valley? James Damore, the Google engineer fired for criticizing the company's diversity program, believes that it’s all about “innate dispositional differences” that leave women trailing men. He’s wrong. In fact, at the dawn of the computing revolution women, not men, dominated software programming. ... Who wrote the first bit of computer code? That honor arguably belongs to Ada Lovelace, the controversial daughter of the poet Lord Byron. When the English mathematician Charles Babbage designed a forerunner of the modern computer that he dubbed an “Analytical Engine,” Lovelace recognized that the all-powerful machine could do more than calculate; it could be programmed to run a self-contained series of actions, with the results of each step determining the next step. Her notes on this are widely considered to be the first computer program. ... [Later, m]en from established fields like physics, mathematics and electrical engineering [made] the leap to a new one that had no professional identity, no professional organizations, and no means of screening potential members. They set out to elevate programming to a science. By the mid-1960s, that led to the rising influence of professional societies for programmers, including the Association for Computing Machinery, or ACM. The leadership of these groups skewed heavily toward men, and they began building barriers to entry in the field that put women of this earlier era at a distinct disadvantage, particularly a requirement for advanced degrees. [emphasis added]

Oh, now I finally understand why the ACM selected Don Knuth as their Turing Award Winner in 1974! It was because he was a white male! And now I know why C. A. R. Hoare, another white, male Turing Award Winner, used his Turing address to criticize the Ada programming language for being overly complex and hence unreliable. It was because the language was named after a damn woman! I've always had my suspicions about that ACM!

On a serious note: Professor Mihm insinuates that the attempts to "elevate programming to a science" consisted largely of the machinations of a bunch of white males to set up a men's club that excluded women. Professor Mihm thereby dismisses all the efforts of computer scientists to build the modern edifice of algorithmic knowledge as just so much white male sexism. This tells you all you need to know about the quality of thinking among the post-modernists who walk the halls of humanities departments of our universities today.

The distinguished engineer vs the Supreme Court Justice

Yonatan Zunger, a former distinguished engineer at Google, wrote an open letter to James Damore, commenting on James' memo criticizing Google's ham-handed attempts to engineer "diversity." Yonatan wrote:

Do you understand that at this point, I could not in good conscience assign anyone to work with you? I certainly couldn’t assign any women to deal with this, a good number of the people you might have to work with may simply punch you in the face, and even if there were a group of like-minded individuals I could put you with, nobody would be able to collaborate with them. You have just created a textbook hostile workplace environment.

Imagine the following scenario. Suppose I were working at a Silicon Valley company. Suppose it became known that I believed that marriage was an institution between a man and a woman (a view that until very recently in human history was for all intents and purposes universal). Suppose that my belief became known not through any agency of my own, but because someone looked in the LA Times database of Proposition 8 donors, found my name, and outed me to other employees in the company. My only "crime," therefore, would have been that I exercised my constitutional right to make a donation in support of a state ballot initiative; I had not injected my personal views into the workplace, but had made every effort to keep them to myself. Would this constitute a case of me having created a "textbook hostile workplace environment." Or has the hostile workplace instead been created by those who are unable to tolerate my diverse views?

Would my co-workers be justified in wanting to "punch me in the face." Would they be justified in refusing to work with me or in not co-operating with me or in forcing me out of the company? This is, of course, what happened to Brendan Eich, who was forced to resign from his position as CEO of the Mozilla Corporation after he was outed as a Prop 8 donor.

Recall that in his majority opinion in the Obergefell decision, which legalized same sex marriage, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote:

Finally, it must be emphasized that religions, and those who adhere to religious doctrines, may continue to advocate with utmost, sincere conviction that, by divine precepts, same-sex marriage should not be condoned. The First Amendment ensures that religious organizations and persons are given proper protection as they seek to teach the principles that are so fulfilling and so central to their lives and faiths, and to their own deep aspirations to continue the family structure they have long revered. The same is true of those who oppose same-sex marriage for other reasons. In turn, those who believe allowing same sex marriage is proper or indeed essential, whether as a matter of religious conviction or secular belief, may engage those who disagree with their view in an open and searching debate.

Does forcing the founder out of the company for his views on marriage constitute engaging in an open and searching debate? Is threatening someone with punches in the face for his views about human nature an adequate defense of his First Amendment rights? In brief, were Mozilla and Google acting in the spirit of Justice Kennedy's admonitions when they jettisoned Brendan Eich and James Damore for their views about marriage and human nature?

Although he is a "distinguished engineer," Yonatan Zunger is obviously a complete dunce when it comes to thinking about morals, ethics, politics, and human nature. At the very moment he thought he was refuting James Damore, the "distinguished engineer" was simply proving James' point: Silicon Valley is an intolerant, illiberal, mindless echo chamber, filled with fascists like Yonatan Zunger, who are willing to be tolerant only of those who agree with them. Everyone else can get punched in the face.

More just

The Human Resources (HR) people have seized control. They have all been trained in the Eric Holder school of diversity thinking. And, just as they were installed in prominent positions in academia, so now are they likewise being installed in similar prominent positions throughout Silicon Valley. They are like Comrades Yeltsin and Kaprugina, the stern-faced, yet petty, political officers of the Communist Party, in Doctor Zhivago. They do not actually contribute anything to the productivity of the organization. Instead, as Uri remarks, their purpose is to enforce the party line in order to make things "more just."

Their increasing influence is symptomatic of the sclerosis that is taking root throughout companies in Silicon Valley. Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw the process with startling clairvoyance even in the 19th century:

After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

KD, I love you, man

Kevin Durant, I love you, man.

The way to stop discrimination is to stop discriminating

In an article in The New Yorker entitled The Uncomfortable Truth About Affirmative Action and Asian-Americans, Jeannie Suk Gersen, a professor at Harvard Law School, writes:

The truth is that, in addition to a holistic review of each applicant that considers race as one factor, colleges undertake some amount of balancing so that they do not end up with a class that is swamped by members of any particular race ... The problem is not race-conscious holistic review; rather, it is the added, sub-rosa deployment of racial balancing in a manner that keeps the number of Asians so artificially low relative to whites who are less strong on academic measures. It is also time to look seriously at the impact on Asians (many of them immigrants or the children of immigrants) of the advantage enjoyed by legacy admissions and wealthy families who are likely to give significant donations. ... I would not relish seeing the nation’s most élite colleges become majority Asian, which is what has resulted at selective high schools, such as Stuyvesant, that do not consider race in admissions at all. ... ... What is needed ... is race-conscious affirmative action, to address the historic discrimination and underrepresentation of blacks and Latinos, in combination with far less severity in the favoring of whites relative to Asians.

Several comments.

I share Ms. Gerson's concern about "legacy" applicants. My preference would be that no weight be given to a "legacy" applicant simply because his family made a "significant donation" to the university.

Unlike Ms. Gerson, I have absolutely no objection to "seeing the nation's most elite colleges become majority Asian" if that is the result of a strictly meritocratic admission process. I live in a city (Fremont, CA) with an exceptionally high number of high-achieving Asian and Indian students. Their impressive performance is the result of their native intelligence and hard work and of the strong support and encouragement they receive from their families. I always told my (white) sons when they were growing up: "If you can't compete with the Asian and Indian kids, don't come whining to me. You need to work harder. And your mother and I will do everything we can to help you." In other words, I learned from my environment and became a white tiger dad. And the accomplishments of my sons (of whom I am very proud, one a grad student at Stanford, the other a grad student at UC Berkeley) show that I was right to be that way. I firmly believe that America would be a much better place if more white families (or black and Latino families, for that matter) placed as much emphasis on academic excellence as Asian and Indian families in Silicon Valley do. If the white kids in Silicon Valley find themselves "less strong on academic measures," they need to shape up! And their parents do, too!

In her last sentence Ms. Gerson resigns herself to the ongoing existence of discrimination (dressed up in the fancy phrase "race-conscious affirmative action"). All that is needed, she insists, is that universities merely adjust the mix of discrimination; they should discriminate less against Asians, discriminate more against whites, and continue to discriminate in favor of blacks and Latinos. What a wonderful world it will be! Does she not realize the balkanizing effect that discrimination per se has? How about not discriminating at all? How about not bending the ruler at all?

I take my lead from SCOTUS Chief Justice John Roberts, who famously wrote: "[T]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." This same principle applies to all different forms of discrimination. Let the open competition of meritocracy determine results. And let the chips fall where they may.

James Damore's epiphany and mine

Here is an interesting video interview with James Damore, the young man fired by Google for writing a memo criticizing Google's approach to hiring more women and minorities.

A couple of preliminary comments.

First, the article in which the interview is embedded is just vile. The ad hominem smearing by the Left has begun: obviously, James was a "sexist" even during his time at MIT; after all, he participated in an "inappropriate" (one of the Left's favorite words) skit that embarrassed a couple of professors (themselves probably members of or cowed by the diversity Stasi).

Second, the interviewer, Stefan Molyneux, seems like he has a right-wing axe to grind. Stefan, shut the fuck up and let James talk.

Update: James is allowed to speak more in the interview here with Canadian psychologist Dr Jordan Peterson, who seems to have less of an axe to grind.

To me, the really interesting part of the interview came at about minute 16:55, where James described what motivated him to write his memo:

I went to a diversity program at Google and it was all … it wasn’t recorded at all; it was totally secretive. I heard things I definitely disagreed with in some of our programs, and so I had some discussions with people there. There was a lot of just shaming and ‘no, you can’t say that, that’s sexist’ … There’s just so much hypocrisy in a lot of things they are saying.

Déjà vu. I was magically transported back to the day I realized that something had gone terribly wrong in academia. I was a first-year grad student at UC Berkeley and a group of us new TA's had been brought together in a "TA orientation meeting," whose ostensible purpose was to provide us with helpful information and methodological tips about how to be a good TA. After the leader of the meeting had made some perfunctory introductory comments, the meeting was turned over to a woman whom I can only describe as a raving, lunatic, Berserkeley feminist.

As she harangued us, I remember getting the distinct impression that I had already been tried and convicted in advance. The charge? I was a male. All males are predatory, I was told. Since this was the case, we should, she directed us, write the telephone number of the rape hotline on the whiteboard at the beginning of every quarter and encourage all our female students to call that number if we harassed them in any way.

I remember wanting to stand up and object to what she was saying, to tell her and the rest of the group that it was unfair to prejudge all the male TA's in the group. But I remained silent, realizing that, if I should speak up, serious consequences for my position at the university and for my social status among grad students could ensue.

I changed that day some 40 years ago. I recognized that academia had been taken over by intolerance, dogma, and ideology. I have been a different person ever since. I had experienced my moment of epiphany, just as James would eventually experience his.

One of the main differences I must acknowledge between you and me, James, is that you were brave and stood up. Congratulations! I didn't on that day 40 years ago, and here I am still hiding behind my pseudonym.

James Damore is only the latest casualty of the attempts by Silicon Valley and the Left to purge real diversity

Over the weekend, James Damore, a senior software engineer at Google, was fired because he dared to circulate a memo criticizing Google's use of authoritarian methods to hire more women and minorities, as the company is being strong-armed to do by the liberal diversity Stasi.

Damore's memo is available online. IMHO, the memo was well-argued, supported with abundant evidence, and well-written. It was clear that Mr Damore made an enormous effort to maintain a cool and detached tone throughout and that he was trying not to be incendiary. If you look at Damore's LinkedIn profile, you can also see that he appears to be a serious person, with some background in the biological sciences, which may qualify him to express opinions on human nature.

Nevertheless, his memo has been subjected to a withering attack both within Google and on social media for the supposedly troglodytic views expressed by its author. One sentence in particular has been attacked and mocked as a blatantly ridiculous and gross generalization:

Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things.

As evidence for this assertion, Damore linked to an abstract of a scholarly article written by a psychology prof at Cal State Fullerton, Richard Lippa. OK, you say, this prof is probably a right-wing nut. I mean, Cal State Fullerton??? Come on! Besides, he got his PhD from some two-bit institution called ... Stanford. Hmmm. Take a look at his curriculum vitae and judge for yourself.

But wait. It turns out that Damore's assertion has also been discussed by Steven Pinker, the MIT professor who is perhaps America's most famous and respected cognitive scientist. Here is a quote from Pinker's book, The Blank Slate.

The most dramatic example comes from an analysis by David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow of a sample of mathematically precocious seventh-graders selected in a nationwide talent search. The teenagers were born during the second wave of feminism, were encouraged by their parents to develop their talents (all were sent to summer programs in math and science), and were fully aware of their ability to achieve. But the gifted girls told the researchers that they were more interested in people, “social values,” and humanitarian and altruistic goals, whereas the gifted boys said they were more interested in things, “theoretical values,” and abstract intellectual inquiry. In college, the young women chose a broad range of courses in the humanities, arts, and sciences, whereas the boys were geeks who stuck to math and science. And sure enough, fewer than 1 percent of the young women pursued doctorates in math, physical sciences, or engineering, whereas 8 percent of the young men did. The women went into medicine, law, the humanities, and biology instead.

Pinker, Steven. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Kindle Locations 7992-7999). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

In other words, Damore is not just pulling his assertion out of his ass. Rather, this assertion has been the subject of serious scholarly discussion for quite some time now. On the other hand, the assertion may turn out to be incorrect (as I'm sure Mr Damore would concede). But, at least we have the duty to investigate and reflect on his claim. Instead, for daring to write his memo, Google fired him. (And, btw, Mr Damore will likely find that his job prospects in Silicon Valley have become very limited. Unless, of course, he is willing to go to work for Satan incarnate, Peter Thiel.) Being fired for expressing his views was exactly the kind of problem with the "Ideological Echo Chamber" that Damore was complaining about.

Update: Apparently, James is getting flooded with job offers. Good for him!

The Damore case joins the growing list of incidents that demonstrate clearly that Silicon Valley not only is not promoting diversity of opinion, but actively working to purge opinions judged not to be politically correct by the mandarins of liberal ideology (who now are increasingly being installed in influential positions in HR departments across the Valley, as they were previously in academia):

• Brendan Eich, the creator of the JavaScript programming language, was forced to resign as CEO of the Mozilla Corporation and also from the board of the nonprofit foundation which wholly owns it because it became publicly known that he had contributed $1000 to support Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative which sought to create a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman.
• Ellen Pao, CEO of reddit reported that she had passed on hiring candidates who don’t embrace her priority of building a gender-balanced and multiracial team. “We ask people what they think about diversity, and we did weed people out because of that,” she said.
• In the days right after The Donald was elected, Matt Maloney, founder of GrubHub, sent out an email declaring that anyone who shared the views of Donald Trump should be "immediately terminated."
• According to Bloomberg, Uber recently hired Eric Holder, US Attorney General under President Obama to help conduct a probe into the company's culture:
  Arianna Huffington, an Uber board member, said Uber will begin to improve its work environment by eliminating "brilliant jerks," while Lianne Hornsey, the company's senior vice president for human resources, portrayed a problem with the "cult of the individual."

  As I wrote in an earlier blog post:

  The suggestion that Silicon Valley companies can achieve diversity by eliminating individualism would be chilling if it weren't so laughable. As for brilliant jerks, anyone who works in an engineering role in Silicon Valley knows that the brilliant jerks (also referred to as "prima donnas") are often the most important people in the company. In a startup would you rather have a team of brilliant jerks or a team that was racially diverse as judged by Eric Holder? In fact, you could even argue that the very definition of a Silicon Valley startup is: an aggregation of brilliant jerks. It is often their obstinate, eccentric, even aberrant way of seeing the world that founds entire new industries. What were Steve Jobs and Bill Gates (or, say, Vincent Van Gogh) if not brilliant jerks?

In all of these cases, the company claims to be upholding the principles of diversity at the very moment that it is purging people with truly diverse opinions and personalities from its workforce. The result is not diversity, but liberal, HR-pleasing homogeneity. (The real ones we should be carrying off in the tumbrels are the HR people.) At the same time these excommunications are taking place, respectable scholars like Charles Murray and Heather Mac Donald are being shouted down and even physically attacked on college campuses across the country and no voice from the Left is raised in their defense. Instead they are merely added to the Liberals' blacklist.

This is the vision of diversity that the Left and its acolytes in Silicon Valley are giving us. If you disagree with it, off to the reeducation camp with you, or more effectively, to the guillotine.

It is liberals, not conservatives, who use Asian Americans as "tools"

In a column in The Washington Post, entitled Don't use Asian Americans to justify anti-affirmative action policies, law professors Nancy Leong and Erwin Chemerinsky write:

Given the many ways that affirmative action benefits Asian American students and their communities, we should see conservative solicitude for Asian Americans “harmed” by affirmative action as strategic rather than genuine. Conservative opponents of affirmative action have not, generally speaking, taken an interest in other issues that affect Asian American welfare in unique ways, ranging from employment discrimination to health care to immigration.

So why the conservative concern when it comes to affirmative action? The answer is that Asian Americans provide a convenient tool for opponents of affirmative action. By framing opposition to affirmative action as concern for Asian Americans, opponents of affirmative action can protect the existing racial hierarchy — with white people at the top — while disguising their efforts as race-neutral rather than racially motivated.

If affirmative action policies "benefit" Asian Americans so much, why did the Asian American community in 2014 oppose State California Constitutional Amendment 5 (SCA 5) so strongly that it had to be tabled? At the time, the Mercury News, in an article entitled California affirmative action revival bill is dead, reported:

A bill that would have let California voters reconsider the state’s 16-year-old ban on race-conscious college admissions is off the table, its author announced on Monday. Constitutional Amendment 5 passed the state Senate in late January on a party-line vote [Democrats all yes, Republicans all no] but ran into an unexpected wave of resistance — mostly, from Asian-Americans concerned that affirmative action policies would unfairly disadvantage Asian applicants to the intensely competitive University of California system. After an about-face by three Asian-American senators who voted for the bill in January, Sen. Ed Hernandez, D-West Covina, is putting the bill on hold — and making no promises about its revival.

Obviously, it is not conservatives, but rather liberals, like the leaders of the California Democratic Party and professors Leong and Chemerinsky, who think that Asian Americans are such stupid "tools" that they are unable even to recognize what is in their own best interest.

To understand the real situation, all Professor Chemerinsky, the dean of the UC Irvine law school, needs to do is step outside his office and take a walk around his campus. According to the website collegefactual.com, Asian students make up 40.7% of the students at Irvine, a wonderful testimony to the vibrant diversity on his campus (like many liberals, Professor Chemerinsky is likely unable to recognize "Asian diversity" as real diversity). This impressive number is not the result of affirmative action policies, but rather of the academic excellence and hard work of Asian American students and of the strong support and encouragement they receive from their families. This strong showing of Asian students would only be reversed if the affirmative action schemes of the Left were revived in the UC system. It is almost criminal that liberals continue to urge Asian Americans to behave in a way so detrimental to their interests.

Dark matter in the universe

The other thing that drives me crazy is the use of the adjective "dark" to describe anything related to Trump. There are too many links to cite; just do a google search for the terms "Trump" and "dark" and you will find a plethora of articles. (Hmmmm. As a matter of fact, I can probably increase the number of hits my blog gets just by including the terms "Trump" and "dark" in this post. Bingo!)

Nietzsche wrote in The Antichrist (Chapter 9):

Whatever a theologian feels to be true must be false: this is almost a criterion of truth.

The same can be said of your average liberal these days: the fact that he uses the adjective "dark" to describe all things Trumpian is almost proof that everything he says is biased.