What other things did he do to make you believe he was “kind of unhinged”? I know about the memo thing, but I think it was covered in an inflammatory way because the press loves to play up a controversy. What else besides the memo incident did he do that merits his firing?
Damore had been aggressively arguing about this stuff internally for some time in advance of his doc. The doc was consistent with a pattern of "makes a huge stink of things in every training and refuses to back down."
Okay, here's what I still don't understand. Were the things he was “making a huge stink about in every training” true or false? Reports at the time claimed that he was ”perpetuating harmful stereotypes,” but other reporting claimed that he was pointing out facts that inconveniently challenged the cultural orthodoxy and then wrote the doc to clarify his feedback, and so he became a target for internal activists. Are you aware of any specifics that would allow a reasonable person to lean one way or another as to the reality?
> It is only a true value if you are willing to do the right thing when you cannot get away with doing the right thing.
In reality, neither corporate nor personal values are binary, all-or-none propositions. They are more like springs that push you in the right direction. But if something pulls hard enough in the wrong direction, a spring can be overpowered.
Do they still have the "Stump The Experts" event at WWDC? You know, where you ask Apple engineers a technical question about their work and, if they can't answer it, you win a t-shirt with tree stumps on it.
I made a quick web app that lets me easily perform Bayesian evidence updates for a set of competing hypotheses. You drop your hypotheses into rows. Then for each piece of evidence, you add a column and fill its values with the odds of observing the evidence given that the corresponding hypotheses are true. The app then computes the posterior odds on the competing hypotheses, given the complete set of evidence. You can also import/export your results as CSV data.
I suspect that someone at Google has read economist Albert O. Hirschman's treatise on Exit, Voice, and Loyalty [1]. The central idea is that when people are unhappy with a relationship between themselves and, say, a firm, they have basically two options: (1) Exit, that is, leave the relationship; and (2) Voice, signal their unhappiness. Hirschman argues that encouraging one option reduces the inclination to exercise the other option. Further, he argues that when people Exit, the firm has little opportunity to understand what motivated the people to leave, so it is advantageous to shift people toward the Voice option, which conveys that precious information readily. So, by allowing Memegen to exist and be used, Google management gives employees a way to exercise Voice instead of Exit, and management learns more about what people are upset about on the margins of the employee base, giving management an opportunity to respond (which they are free to ignore if they want).
On top of what you wrote, Memegen is not representative of opinions among Googlers. Memegen, like most social media, focuses on the extremes. You'll see a lot of spicy takes, but that's not what the typical Googler thinks. For a more realistic view, the comments on Memegen are better but, again, unlikely to represent the views of most Googlers.
So this article boils down to "On a site that focuses on extreme positions drawn from a very large population of people, we found extreme positions about this product." Doesn't really tell you much about the product or the very large population. You can make the same statement about most products and most very large populations.
Good luck with that. I work in classical music and we can't post anything because it gets automatically flagged as copyrighted. They couldn't fix it then and they certainly won't fix it now.
This already happens on Hacker News. People frequently flag comments they strongly disagree with, rather than just downvoting them. Despite the fact that the "flag" was originally introduced to flag spam.
For context, here is the first paragraph of the book's preface:
How best to perform construction work and what it will cost for materials, labor, plant and general expenses are matters of vital interest to engineers and contractors. This book is a treatise on the methods and cost of concrete construction. No attempt has been made to present the subject of cement testing which is already covered by Mr. W. Purves Taylor's excellent book, nor to discuss the physical properties of cements and concrete, as they are discussed by Falk and by Sabin, nor to consider reinforced concrete design as do Turneaure and Maurer or Buel and Hill, nor to present a general treatise on cements, mortars and concrete construction like that of Reid or of Taylor and Thompson. On the contrary, the authors have handled the subject of concrete construction solely from the viewpoint of the builder of concrete structures. By doing this they have been able to crowd a great amount of detailed information on methods and costs of concrete construction into a volume of moderate size.
What statistical argument did Damore make?
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