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naraburns  nihil supernum  22hr ago (text post)   Edited 22hr ago   1118 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 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.

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?

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.

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.

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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