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naraburns  nihil supernum  17hr ago (text post)   Edited 17hr ago   1011 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).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

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 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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