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.