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naraburns  nihil supernum  17hr ago (text post)   Edited 17hr ago   1005 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for February 2026

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

@helmut_hofmeister:

@naraburns:

@George_E_Hale:

@Rov_Scam:

Contributions for the week of February 2, 2026

@pbmonster:

@100ProofTollBooth:

@RandomRanger:

@FtttG:

@Dean:

Contributions for the week of February 9, 2026

@100ProofTollBooth:

@P-Necromancer:

@clo:

@JeSuisCharlie:

@gattsuru:

@urquan:

@oats_son:

Natalism & Co.

@LazyLongposter:

@gog:

@self_made_human:

@RenOS:

@OracleOutlook:

Contributions for the week of February 16, 2026

@RandomRanger:

@quiet_NaN:

@Closedshop:

@urquan:

@OliveTapenade:

Contributions for the week of February 23, 2026

@TitaniumButterfly:

@MonkeyWithAMachinegun:

@birb_cromble:

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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:

Of late, being an autistic weirdo male can even get you fired from your job (See: James Damore).

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 kids if he'd been more handsome and confident, but you were way ahead of me on that front anyway.

Damore should have "read the room" and understood that the opinions he expressed would get him in trouble.

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.

precisely because it seemed like an unprecedented escalation from what had come before

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.

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.

Bullying ... should be CLEAR and OBVIOUS so that the subject of the bullying can become aware of where median social boundaries are.

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.

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.

Standards inherently create good times.

Good times inherently destroy standards.

No standards inherently destroy good times.

Bad times inherently create standards.

I agree with all of the above.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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, even 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):

  • The Secret History, Donna Tartt
  • And Then There Were None and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie
  • Democracy, Joan Didion
  • Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin
  • Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
  • Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (the book which literally invented the science fiction genre)
  • To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
  • Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
  • Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell

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