This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
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These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.
Quality Contributions to the Main Motte
Contributions for the week of February 2, 2026
Contributions for the week of February 9, 2026
@clo:
Natalism & Co.
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Notes -
Was this gender month on the Motte? Trans month? Maybe it's just what I was looking at, but it feels like there was a lot of that recently.
trans talk ebs and flows. It's kind of evergreen because we do have a number of perspectives on it here that clash and it can always expand into general gender discourse which is even more evergreen.
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I think trans issues have largely, albeit by no means completely, supplanted homosexuality issues in the culture war meta as compared with, say, 20 years ago. And this is one of the few online spaces that enforces neither a trans-advocacy orthodoxy nor a trans-critical orthodoxy, so it's a pretty perennially popular topic here.
It is a continuing source of interest to me just how much gay issues have won completely. I still have plenty of reservations, and you can still find a handful of cranky religious conservatives saying "now it's time to overturn Obergefell", but the right as a whole just seem to have stopped caring, and in fact "trans is bad because it endangers gays" has become a sometimes run into there.
The defining social issue of the time when I was growing up has been completely abandoned.
Depending on death luck, it's quite likely that R appointed justices will dominate on the SCOTUS for the foreseeable future. Obergefell is a moral smorgasbord that essentially allows the SCOTUS to write whatever they want into the constitution. It's not going anywhere.
Even if it were overturned, I don't think it would mean anything - there is a large bipartisan majority in congress for gay marriage. I would just like to overturn it on the grounds that I think it's an indefensible reading of the Fourteenth Amendment. But then, I think that about most decisions based on the Fourteenth, which in general I think is an incredibly badly-worded amendment that has been used to justify excessive judicial overreach. It's not so much that Obergefell allows the court to declare anything it wants as that the Fourteenth Amendment itself has licensed that, even for questions which ought properly to belong to the legislature.
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To an extent, gay issues like "don't criminalize sodomy" and "gay marriage is legally defined" have won, but that's just as much due to sweeping changes in straight culture as a gay cultural victory. "Sodomy" is typically defined as both anal or oral sex, and anal sex has become aspirational in more prurient strands of straight culture, while oral sex (both ways) is exceptionally normalized to the point where I wouldn't doubt that it's more common than intercourse. Whenever our Irish friend comes out confused by the frequency of oral sex in younger generations, I have to chuckle a bit to myself. If only she knew how frequently young women demand oral sex from their partners as a feminist issue, or realized how often popular culture depicts men who don't do it well as unmanly...
It's also pretty... cheap to talk about the "sanctity of marriage" after the massive divorce-fest of the past 40 years and resulting social chaos. Young people are starting to view marriage as a legal headache rather than a social benefit, and cohabitation is skyrocketing massively. "Let's let the gays participate in the meaningless ritual that nobody takes seriously and just causes legal headaches" is incresingly the view of the young left on the issue, and most of the arguments against it stand out to the center as hypocritical.
Civil marriage hasn't even approximated the Christian view of marriage in a long time, to the extent I think it's a different institution. SSM just stands out to me as the final nail in a coffin, not a grand transgression of how sanctified marriage is in a world where the Republican president is on his third model wife after divorce. My impression is that this is generally the view of the young right, even among Christians.
That said, a decent chunk of social opprobrium continues to exist in the center, particularly oriented towards the promiscuous behavior of gay men. In a way, even out gay men understand they have to keep their full sexuality in the closet and put a face on Shoggoth. Straight men keep a respectful distance, and straight women maintain friendly relations by make-believing in their head that gay men are universally sensitive, passionate, artistic, sweet and pure love boys like in yaoi who just need a wishing well. The actual destructive elements of gay culture are rarely acknowledged except inside the LGBT umbrella, and even then usually aren't aired to outsiders for solidarity reasons.
Nothing you wrote is untrue, but. Proceeds to gesture towards a thing in concept-space that is hard to articulate
When legalization of SSM was the topic du jour, this was more or less my position. State has invented a legal concept, let the state to do with it as it pleases and let grown-up gays to engage with that legal concept, not my business to comment on that. Everyone is free to have a different opinion about gay sex in privacy of his or her own mind, it's not like they want to gay marry Christian heterosexuals against their will. However, these days I think it was and is a line of real significance. After SSM became acknowledged as a legal right, in few years any moral teaching that disapproves of SSM was no longer a conservative position but reactionary one, one opposed to a right enshrined in law. Most people in Western societies are not principled in a way that they view legislation as a minimal viable consensus contract in a repeated negotiation game; for them, the law is a convenient Schelling point for morals, and who it is against morals? Immoral people. It is suspicious if someone has an opinion against or dares to preach publicly against a perfectly normal legal right. Many are willing to go full Judge Dredd on the people who are on the wrong side of the law.
All of it makes me uneasy. I still don't really care about SSM that much one way or another, but I notice that speaking against it first slowly, then suddenly turned into a social and professional suicide. Same applies to basic definition of words, too, like "mother" and "father". You are engaging in wrong-think if you don't enthusiastically agree that a kid can have two moms. I am worried that same thing may happen to other rights I care about.
That's been my experience. When this was a live debate, prior to 2015, there were at least fig leaf attempts to say things like, "We understand the sincerely-held convictions of people on both sides", or "You are free to believe whatever you like about marriage", or some minor concession to the idea that the issue is complicated and that people of good faith might hold to a traditional view. It wasn't always the case, and a great deal of public debate was the inevitable dumpster fire of people screaming at each other, but you did find it to an extent.
Today, the position has become that if you have reservations, you are are unforgivably bigoted, and there is no possibility of a sympathetic motive on your part.
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I think that's true, but I think with a giant asterisk.
On the one hand, I do think a lot of conservatives have just flatly given up on the idea that they can contest the morality and "normalness" of gayness in a shared public square and have any hope of winning that argument for, again, some shared American political consensus, at least in the foreseeable future.
On the other hand, I have definitely gotten the impression that, for a very big subset of more traditional Christians specifically, this recognition has mostly made them read the sign of the times and recognize that broader America is overtly hostile to their values, worldviews, and especially the moral formation of their children, and that a kind of internal divorce is necessary - their immediate future, as they relate to the broader American culture, is more like the Jews in captivity in Babylon. That mindset is... not what it looks like to make peace with the new social norms. Instead, it is, I guess, exit and schism instead of voice and support.
I've recently read Aaron Renn's "Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture", Jonathan Rauch's "Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy", reread George Marsden's "The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief" (specifically the last chapter of that book about pillarization), and am now reading George Yancey's "One Faith No Longer: The Transformation of Christianity in Red and Blue America", and lurking in the background of all those works is the complexities of this split; it's hard to see how, exactly, more traditional Christians can actual participate in a shared consensus whose moral self-justification hinges, at least in part, on the public moral progress that comes with confining traditional Christian sexual ethics to dustbin of history and then social raising the bloody flag, so to speak, about that victory as a constant reminder of public moral legitimacy.
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I was enthusiastically nodding along with @100ProofTollBooth's post about bullying-as-Chesterton's-fence, until I came to this line:
I understand the point you're making. Damore should have "read the room" and understood that the opinions he expressed would get him in trouble. He should have understood that when Google created an internal forum specifically to express potentially controversial opinions, they only expected or wanted people to use it to express "controversial" opinions of the "fifty Stalins" variety. I get that.
But all the same, I dislike the framing that Damore got fired for being an autistic weirdo who expressed a weird opinion that creeped everyone out. It wasn't as if his manifesto was a spirited defense of lowering the age of consent, or normalising bestiality or incest. Rather, his manifesto boiled down to an opinion that would strike 99% of people throughout time and space as utterly unremarkable: "for reasons unrelated to socialisation, men and women tend to have radically different interests, which has obvious implications for the kinds of careers they tend to pursue".
Yes, a more socially adept person would have intuitively understood that, while this opinion would be considered obvious outside of Google, it is not an opinion that is likely to be received warmly within Google. But your framing seems to imply that Damore expressed a crazy shocking opinion, and the normies responded by firing him. I think it's a bit more nuanced than that: Damore expressed a normie opinion in a crazy space (a space in which lunatic ideas like "male and female brains are exactly the same" have significant purchase), failing to appreciate that this opinion was unlikely to be as warmly received in Google as it would be elsewhere.
I was tempted to close this by saying that Damore probably would have gotten away with it
if it hadn't been for those meddling kidsif he'd been more handsome and confident, but you were way ahead of me on that front anyway.Does anyone remember what the "room" was like back in August 2017? My recollection is that Damore's firing made such a splash in tech circles (Hacker News etc.) precisely because it seemed like an unprecedented escalation from what had come before. I feel like Silicon Valley was still riding the wave of a "move fast and break things" culture that was relatively more libertarian and less Woke than, say, media or academia. And #MeToo didn't take off until later that year.
The converse of this is that if you were following the kinds of high schools and colleges that feed into Google, Damore's point would have been obviously outside the Overton Window and dangerous to express well before 2017.
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Brenden Eich had to step down as the CEO of Mozilla in the spring of 2014 because he had donated to (according to wikipedia) $1000 dollars to Proposition 8 (anti-gay-marriage proposition) 6 years before, and had then donated $2000 dollars to the campaign of a politician who supported Prop 8 between 2008 and 2010, and then there was an extremely high profile, extremely noisy pressure campaign to force him to lose his job as a result, and it was supported by all the online goodthinkers.
I'm in tech, I'd been reading hackernews and such forever, and I watched that very closely. For me, that seemed like totally unprecedented and shocking escalation. In fact, that was really the straw that broke the camel's back for me, the event (although it took a while to sink in emotionally) where Progressives went from a "we" to a "them" for me, although there had already been a million little signals I'd been trying to ignore in the preceding few years.
I imagine everyone who cares about such things have their own memories of when a high profile scalping was the one that grabbed their attention, but I personally feel like Damore was somewhat late in the whole cycle, and the outrage over him did not seem shocking and out of left field at all. It seemed like ever more brazen versions of the same stuff that had been going on.
IMO the most egregious detail there is that Proposition 8 passed. A majority of California voters were effectively deemed to be too far-right to be acceptable leadership. Perhaps uncharitably, this policy is also vaguely racist, given the demographics on that proposition's supporters included disproportionate numbers of minorities.
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There has been an escalating trend for years by that point. It was probably the Tea Party movement that was the direct trigger. It had a cascading effect, and the Blue Tribe started radicalizing itself. See this Jezebel screed as one example. The writing was on the wall that things are about to get bad.
I still don't understand what the Tea Party was angry about, except that Barack Obama was a Democrat and the Democratic Party had a trifecta.
That was... a read. "I'm right because I'm right, if you disagree with me it's because you're wrong." Holy question-begging, batman!
You could make a ton of really good arguments about the particular issues she discusses, like arguing that employer-provided health insurance is a standard product and it's an implicit religious test for employment to provide non-standard health insurance that doesn't include certain treatments based on religious values, which discriminates against employees who don't share the owners' religious views and thus violates civil rights law.
But you're right, this is proto-woke; instead of actually making the argument, she just assumes her argument is correct and proceeds to shame people who disagree instead of trying to build a moderate coalition. This is "the OU student who wrote a college reflection assignment on how trans is demonic"-tier writing.
They were mad about what the Democratic party used that to cram through. Obamacare was a gigantic restructuring of about 1/10th of the economy, a part that basically everyone has to interact with from time to time. It also was a large tax increase for most working Americans. There was also Dodd-Frank which seized additional control over banks, ARRA which was one of the largest spending packages in history at the time, and several follow up large spending bills.
The Tea Party movement began shortly before Obama was elected, based on opposition to the 2008 bank bailouts. At that point most of the participants were Ron Paul libertarians, although the movement was nominally bipartisan (and probably actually bipartisan - I'm not sure). It got a big boost after Rick Santelli's viral rant (broadcast live on CNBC from the CME floor in Chicago) against the Obama admin's homeowner bailout in February 2009. I was watching from the London trading floor of a European bank which had not (yet) needed a bailout, and the dominant reaction was that the American traders cheering Santelli were hypocrites because they were opposing Obama's homeowner bailout at a time when the only reason most of them were still employed was Bush's bank bailout. This was also the reaction of the pro-establishment left.
In the first half of 2009, the Tea Party was a libertarian-coded anti-bailout movement, with "bailout" defined broadly to include any kind of support for troubled banks, any kind of support for troubled homeowners, the welfare state, fiscal stimulus, efforts to protect jobs at GM etc. It quickly became de facto a partisan Republican thing because a Democratic trifecta was doing the bailouts, and the Republicans who had supported the 2008 bailouts were no longer relevant. It is unsurprising that a pre-existing libertarian-coded Republican movement would lead the opposition to Obamacare.
There was a lot of anti-establishment horseshoing going on in 2009-10, with Occupy, the Tea Party and the emerging alt-right (particularly via Milo Yiannopoulos) all swapping ideas and people with Ron Paul libertarians (though not, I think, Paul himself) at the centre of the network.
I'm not sure how or exactly when the Tea Party transitioned from being a somewhat focussed libertarian movement that was only incidentally a partisan Republican or Red Tribe thing to a proto-MAGA movement of generically pissed off Red Tribers that was only incidentally libertarian and could plausibly be accused of "just hating the idea of a black President". But there is an obvious route - as the movement grew the average IQ dropped, and below a certain IQ threshold any vaguely right-coded popular movement will pick up support from confederate flag-wavers, anti-vaxxers, conspiracy-theorists etc. and at that point everyone who isn't a MAGA-type conservative started leaving.
Yes, skipped over the initial stuff that was a backlash against Bush and the Democrats doing Swampy uni-party things because it didn't really address the point he was making which urquan phrased as
But I've seen often described less charitably as "mad he was black and president."
And my point was well he was actually doing a lot of bad things.
I think this is too uncharitable to the tea partiers and FARRR too charitable to their enemies. A Democrat accusing their political opponents of racism is synonymous with them talking. The media treating these accusations as "plausible" is no different, they are largely DNC stenographers and have been for decades. Maybe there was degradation of the tea party's intellectual movement as it got larger, but mostly IMO it lost any momentum it had when Romney/Ryan lost while acting nerdy and not actually fighting during the campaign. Thats what opened up the opportunity for MAGA/Trump because the only appetite left on the right was for someone who actually fights and didn't care about fake rules made up by liberal media.
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Brendan Eich literally got punched in the face over it, it wasn't news, I only know cause the guy who did it bragged about it and considered it wasn't enough punching, and that's the background radiation.
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The Great Awokening was already in full swing by that time. Shirtgate took place three years before that already. It was also the time of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, so the Blue Tribe was even more on edge than they normally were. It is true though that culture war events tend to happen in waves, I think, and the main culture war theme by 2017 was already race, not sex.
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Morals go bankrupt gradually, then suddenly. The liberal[itarian] order was hollowing out in the late 2000s simply due to Boomers- one of the most liberal generations ever produced- retiring.
Remember, the youngest Boomer will turn 66 this year. Generally speaking, these guys retired at 55-65, so a lot of them would have been leaving the workforce in 2005-2015, most of them I suspect leaving in the 2008-2011 recession (there was a second wave of permanent retirements in 2020-2022 for the tail end of the Boomer cohort for similar reasons).
Gen X, by contrast, has hit its prime moralfag years- that's 40-50, if you're keeping score. Now, Boomers were huge moralfags, too- that's what the Religious Right was (and to a point, still is) and why it hated violent video games in particular, but you don't hear from that segment of society too much these days. It's still overly concerned about racism and sexism- but of course it would be, that was kind of their huge generational change.
But if you're wondering "wait, why did the old liberal order suddenly collapse, and why is it moralfaggy in that direction?", it was mostly just demographic replacement and listening to Boomers complain too much.
So basically the Boomers paid lip service to feminism publicly while never taking it seriously but GenX adopted it unironically?
I think more that the Boomers grew up in a world where sexual morality was a thing and monogamous lifelong marriage was normative, so the idea that a better approach to sex and marriage existed and an expansion of gay rights was a threat to it made sense, even if you disagreed with it.
Generation X grew up in a world where half their classmates' parents were divorced (if white) or never married in the first place (if black), nobody with a megaphone seemed to have a problem with this, and the whole idea of sexual morality read as elite hypocrisy. So either you support gay rights, or you don't care, or you are some kind of religious nut whose whole worldview is incomprehensible to people who grew up post sexual revolution.
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I agree with your take on this.
Remember, I like to have a little fun with most of my comments. Sometimes this means I toss out something like "autistic weirdo" that actually has a lot more nuance to it. In this case, my having fun with the Damore hubbub was too clumsy and unrefined. Damore wasn't at all expressing a strange opinion. If had been bullied more in childhood I don't think a "better" outcome would've occurred. That's my specific take on Damore.
But, more broadly, I think it's pretty easy to imagine a situation where an awkward male or female in a workplace does say or do something pretty odd that, had they been subject to a little more social pressure (bullying) earlier in life, they'd be spared from very real career consequences. This isn't a far out opinion; there are entire major network TV programs about how weirdos at work are so weird people don't like interacting with them.
This isn't about HR-style "everyone has different strengths, and we can all get along!" I am saying very much the opposite of that. Bullying is the harsh correct force of social interaction. It shouldn't be extreme, of course (hazing, real abuse), but it should be CLEAR and OBVIOUS so that the subject of the bullying can become aware of where median social boundaries are. But wait, it gets better! Like I said in my original comment, you can continue to be a weirdo even after you get bullied if you are truly committed to your weirdo-oing. In fact, this is often how the truly creative double down on what makes them unique. We, as a society, derive a lot of benefit from those who hang tough through bullying to do amazing things.
We do not benefit from zero bullying. In fact, those least capable and least prepared for life suffer the most from not getting that social feedback. The tender young man who doesn't get pushed into a locker once or twice in ninth grade grows up to be the guy who wear's the hentai shirt during an interview and has a mental breakdown over it. He didn't Do Anything Wrong (TM) - which is true. But he never learned how to avoid and/or deal with this nonsense because of the "loving acceptance" that pops up in a "zero bullying" regime.
That’s no ‘hentai shirt’. A hentai/ahegao shirt/hoodie looks something like this (Amazon URL) or this (Reddit URL). There are multiple variations and are well-known in the otaku subculture.
This shirt features simple pin-up girls (as correctly identified by Time magazine) in leather/latex, which has been a normie-adjacent heavy metal / sword-and-sorcery / fantasy aesthetic marketed to toxic white trash / working class dudebros for decades. It has nothing to do with hentai or anime for that matter.
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Well, the problem with bullying discourse is that one side talks about bullies from movies, and the other from real life.
In Hollywood, the bully is always tall blonde handsome football player from rich Christian family. Who wouldn't want to be dominated and subjugated by such awesome Chad?
IRL, the bullies (never singular, always a wolf pack) are young thugs on the way to prison, who are enjoying their 20+ second chances to turn their life around and in the mean time turn school into prison lite. You are not bullied because you did something "wrong", you are bullied because you do not belong to gang.
Bullying followed the Hollywood pattern (athletes and the children of the super-rich were the ringleaders, low-status kids were the losers, all tempered by the basic fact that older boys are socially dominant over younger boys) at the expensive British private school I attended in the 1990's. The only difference was that nerds were not low-status because the school culture valued academics and classical music as much as athletics and partying. Though when your rival for the hottest girl in the class is all of 6'2", vice-captain of rugby, solo bass-baritone in the choir, and one of the top 2 in his year in maths and physics, the precise criterion you fall behind on doesn't matter. (He personally wasn't a bully, as far as I was aware of)
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It's funny, I have the exact opposite as an impression. In Hollywood, the bully is always a complete, irredeemable asshole who ALSO is extremely privileged and from the wrong political background, making him extra-unsympathetic. The victim is always a misunderstood, gentle soul from a difficult background who will instantly blossom once given a chance. It's very obvious whom you're supposed to sympathize with.
Reality is always more complicated. Sometimes it's just two assholes trying to bully each other, and other people join in on one or the other side or even switch depending on momentary sympathy. And every time whoever is currently losing will play the victim card to authority figures.
Sometimes there just is a really self-centered, difficult kid that the others try to include, but it always predictably fails, and instead of trying to get better, the kid tries to get authority figures involved to force the others to include them.
Sometimes the bully is popular and nice in general but for some reason dislikes the victim, who is just less socially adept and so gets excluded. But the bully doesn't actually seek out and hurt the victim, he just doesn't want anything to do with him, while to the victim it feels like vicious bullying since he gets excluded so much.
And so on. Sometimes the hollywood depiction really is correct, and yours as well. But at least my impression is that on average the bully is less bad than usually portrayed and vice versa the victim is less good. Though I wouldn't quite go as far as saying that bullying is good.
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I think there are generally two types of bullying.
The psychopath / thug. They pick on weak targets and torment them for laughs, or because their social in-group has made cruelty into a status boosting activity.
And social jockeying. Where people are in a competitive social environment, and one way to get on top is to put your rivals down beneath you.
I think the useful type of bullying is the social jockeying. Since the bully is often amplifying and signal boosting the social mistakes of the bullied person.
Hollywood loves to portray the psychopath style bullies, and such bullies are the least sympathetic figures, so they just attach whatever characteristics that they want to denigrate to the bully. I have asked around before and not everyone had the psychopath/thug at their school, but enough did that I don't think it's just a fake invention of Hollywood.
I think most instances of bullying involve both those motivations to some degree and very rarely only a single in isolation.
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I think the unstated consensus among the normie masses is that being bullied is simply a sign of low status, so it's not their job to try fixing that.
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Well, that's the issue, isn't it? Because the bullying that shirt guy received definitely did not make it clear what boundaries he actually crossed. He wasn't told "Be a professional and knock that off. Have some decorum." or "You're not attractive enough to publicly confess to a low-status hobby without giving hot girls the ick. We're trying to get some hot girls in here." He wasn't even told "Fat and ugly women don't like to be reminded that even nerds are into women who aren't fat or ugly. And now they're causing a stink."
No, he was told that wearing a shirt a female friend made for him somehow meant he hated women and did not want them around.
By all means, shove the smelly nerd into the locker, if you then tell him to take a shower. If you tell him it's because he wears the wrong brand of shoes, that just makes you an asshole.
The ambiguity is by design, because this is another standard case of SJW journalists concocting arguments designed to appeal to normies and thus give them the false impression that they are culturally on the same side as these journos.
What are the normie boundaries that apply in this case? To expand on what you observed: 1. Scientists are serious people with important tasks; they should dress accordingly in public 2. Fanboying over latex-clad skimpy pin-up girls is sort of tolerable as long as you’re an unserious young dudebro; when you’re older, not so much; by that point you should marry some frumpy woman and throw such clothes into the garbage 3. Some hobbies are only appropriate to pursue in general during adolescence 4. Fat and ugly women exist and we need to tolerate them because they deserve a place in society. To rub under their noses the existence of hot women when they’re already miserable and dispirited most of the time is unbecoming of a decent man, who is supposed to be magnanimous and benevolent, not petty and snarky.
But do these journalists and bloggers actually subscribe to such norms unironically? Of course they don’t.
I think you can collapse these two into "it's culturally a blue-collar, working-class, thing to display sexuality nakedly in a workplace setting, and it violates white collar social class expectations to do it, so it signals either utter social obliviousness (which is generally strongly discouraged in white collar settings; how you comport yourself is just as important to your job as the 'work') or an active, resolute attempt to counter-signal against the taboo on sexual display in a workplace setting, which is intensely off-putting to normie women (and therefore that the counter-signal is designed to actively and knowingly repel women).
Scientists are assumed to be basically intelligent, so a big part of the feminist debate here is to shift the overton window from the obliviousness assumption to the active, resolute counter-signalling assumption.
Not quite, given that the same people lambasting shirt guy would argue that it is a "basic human right" for women to go to work in the same non-attire depicted on the shirt. Of course, there is quite a lot of tension between hot women who want to cash in on their looks and fugly women resenting them for it but duking it out openly would both fracture the coalition and give the game away. Hence the compromise of going after the men who take the hot girl faction up on their offer. See also: the Nordic model of prostitution.
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Standards inherently create good times.
Good times inherently destroy standards.
No standards inherently destroy good times.
Bad times inherently create standards.
Only if they're good standards.
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I agree with all of the above.
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Every time the mob comes for someone, there's a tendency to point and laugh at the guy, even from his ideological allies. Mostly to reassure themselves that it couldn't happen to them, partly to avoid splash from their low-status ally.
But what does it mean to be nothing like damore? To be so perfectly socialized that one never dare go against 'the room'. To be so risk averse that one gladly sacrifices personal integrity, employer's welfare, and tolerates daily injustices, just to keep one's job. Are we to bully nerds so they can become this worm of a man?
So, no matter how many times I explicitly say "I don't support extreme bullying" people are going to write versions of "BUT WHAT ABOUT EXTREME BULLYING."
Can't win 'em all.
My objection wasn‘t about extreme bullying, I just don't think turning everyone into turbo-normies with your extra mild, 100% less abrasive, I-can‘t-believe-it‘s-not-real-bullying bullying is a good thing.
Sure, some nerds could use a primer on how normies function, how they communicate, and what lies they expect. In many ways normies are better adapted, and wiser, than bullying victims. Some of the lessons imparted by bullying may serve a useful social purpose, like hygiene preventing epidemics.
But by and large I can't sanction your blatant normie apologism. Most normie norms are zero sum social games, and quite a few discourage truth-telling. Which though personally beneficial, is just damaging on a societal level.
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So given that my reply above could be reas as me restating your point but acting as if you missed something, let me explain the psychology behind the scenes. When I wrote that comment, my state of mind was not "I need to correct 100ProofTollBooth", it was "I want to rant about bullying being wrong when my enemies do it, and this as good an excuse as any".
So perhaps your question should not be "Is this guy lacking in reading comprehension?" but rather "What is that guy's hobbyhorse?". Does that mean a reply is warranted? Well, it would effectively result in two people who mostly agree with each other hashing out minutiae. Which may or may not be valuable.
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The answer to this is simply not to dignify it with a reply [because it would be beneath yours to do so]. This is why apologies don't work either.
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I agree that it is possible to get so good at "reading the room" that you forget how to "write" and just mindlessly go along with local consensus. Ideally, we would like people to be Kolmogorovs who are adept at reading the illegible social reality and know when to pick their battles, rather than wasting social capital on pointless battles they can't hope to win.
I agree with the point Damore made, and I don't think he should have lost his job because he expressed it. But if he'd been a bit more socially adept, he probably would have understood that losing his job was a foreseeable consequence of expressing that opinion in that place at that time. If he'd understood the social rules and played the game a bit better, he might have been able to navigate himself into a position where he really was able to make proactive changes to Google's hiring policies (in particular, avoiding hiring policies based on nakedly pseudoscientific premises). But instead he was a naïve Kantorovich, and suffered for it.
This never happens. People who keep their head down and parrot the stated platitudes to survive never reach a point where they feel safe and confident rocking the boat. They either internalize their own helplessness and learn to submit for the rest of their lives, or, more likely, they start to believe to the ideology they are forced to repeat, the way people are likely to convert to a faith whose church they physically attend.
Being forced to tell obvious lies every day kills the soul. Nobody with courage and integrity thrives under such a system.
Damn, dude! This place is called "The Motte" for a reason.
Neither I nor @FtttG is saying that kids should be trained to "tell obvious lies every day." This is so close to straight up bad faith arguing.
But FtttG did say "he might have been able to navigate himself into a position where he really was able to make proactive changes to Google's hiring policies", which is the part he was addressing.
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I agree that parroting the demanded platitudes ultimately kills the soul. "We are who we pretend to be, so we must be careful who we pretend to be." I'm not suggesting that Damore should have explicitly claimed to believe that men and women are exactly alike until such time as he could admit that they aren't without facing negative career repercussions. Rather, I'm suggesting that had he been more selective in how he presented his opinions and loudly announced how much he supported a bunch of adjacent opinions (such as his support for women who sincerely wanted to pursue a career in tech, or his opposition to sexual harassment), he might have been able to manoeuvre himself into a position in which Google's hiring policies could be changed and made less pseudoscientific. All without once telling an explicit lie.
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One thing I am confused on google culture is I would assume the best programmers are autistic in the way I am autistic. Most of the best programmers would kind of just notice that men are better at certain things. I could see how the mba corporate types go with the current things.
Maybe google has been less of an autist place and more of ad selling machine for a long time.
If I am being honest I can’t think of a girl I’ve ever met who truly impressed me with her mind. Most of the books I’ve read have been written by white men. Ayn Rand is the only female author I have read and remember. Damore’s autism is actually the exact type of person I would expect most programmers to be like.
I once went out with a woman who I thought was smarter than I was, in spite of the fact that she was an avid believer in astrology.
In no particular order, some novels I have enjoyed by female writers (I'm excluding The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged from the below list because you're already familiar with Rand):
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Glad that @TitaniumButterfly post made it in, it didn't get enough attention at the time.
Some guys (hell, myself included) could do for printing that out on a poster and using it as a mantra.
I missed it the first time around so I'm happy that @TitaniumButterfly's post is getting the signal boost.
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Hmm...
Jokes aside, well deserved!
Thanks. It does feel a little like that, sometimes. But I do not nominate AAQCs, I only winnow them down from among those nominated by the userbase. So it's more like a whole bunch of people giving each other awards while I wander about snatching most of them back...
Upvotes, by contrast, are immune from my penurious pilfering.
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