Brief thoughts on the “Google memo”
> However, his overall claim that there exist personality differences between genders that differentially affect men’s and women’s interest in and aptitude for tech jobs, is what people are mostly getting mad at. And that’s a claim that seems plausibly true. Not obviously true, but also not a claim you would be justified in emphatically dismissing as false, as many people have, including Google, who called them “incorrect assumptions.”This is quite well-put, and gets at the heart of what pisses people off.There exists a large set of hypotheses which are plausible, and not just "spaghetti-monster God" plausible, but "> 20% chance this is the case" plausible.Many of those hypotheses, however, are shouted down as "racist", "sexist", or some other "ist" when they come up, and all of their possible costs are then listed in a litany, with all possible benefits ignored.It's intellectually stifling, and I'm no longer interested in enabling people who use that kind of rhetoric.