You don't know why Damore was fired and neither does anyone else publicly know. His 'manifesto' is a poorly written rant that leaves holes for people to project their ideology onto, like you are right now. What he wrote was neither progressive nor even conservative, but a naive, meandering diatribe with cherry-picked evidence, all of which would have been water under the bridge if it wasn't blown up by a slow press cycle.
The evidence is not 'cherry picked'. It is abundant, comprehensively researched, and well replicated. Take a trip to Google Scholar yourself. It is certainly not 'fringe'. That's why the public reaction was so absurd. Damore was fired for exactly the type of phenomenon Sam Altman is talking about in this post.
Neither of these links you provide have to do with Damore's rant, nor are they mentioned in his claims.
Damore wasn't arguing that men's and women's bodies were different - he was taking papers about biological differences and stretching them to supporting his unfounded claims that social differences are based on biology, not social constructs, because he was upset at Google's programs that fight social biases. Some of his citations are cherry picked nonsense, for example the big five analyses saying women are neurotic [1], which have been discredited as being weak lexical factor analysis that can't be attributed to biology [2] (like gender).
The fact that you think these papers are relevant to Damore's memo just further proves the vagueness of his diatribe, and demonstrates your own willingness to project your own views onto it.
The first link is an article from Stanford Medicine on the overwhelming evidence for the evolved biological cognitive differences between men and women, how this shapes their interests and average cognitive strengths. It's not a paper, it's a comprehensive review of the research presented to inform the public. Did you even read it?
> There was too much data pointing to the biological basis of sex-based cognitive differences to ignore, Halpern says. For one thing, the animal-research findings resonated with sex-based differences ascribed to people. These findings continue to accrue. In a study of 34 rhesus monkeys, for example, males strongly preferred toys with wheels over plush toys, whereas females found plush toys likable. It would be tough to argue that the monkeys’ parents bought them sex-typed toys or that simian society encourages its male offspring to play more with trucks. A much more recent study established that boys and girls 9 to 17 months old — an age when children show few if any signs of recognizing either their own or other children’s sex — nonetheless show marked differences in their preference for stereotypically male versus stereotypically female toys...
The second link is about the advantage men have in mechanical reasoning and how it likely contributes to their representation in STEM fields. It's the title of the paper.
Observational correlation != causation. If you had read the articles you'd posted, you see that neither of them claim attributable biological causes to differences in gender behavior and social biases.
From the Stanford article (which is not peer reviewed):
>Trying to assign exact percentages to the relative contributions of “culture” versus “biology” to the behavior of free-living human individuals in a complex social environment is tough at best. Halpern offers a succinct assessment: “The role of culture is not zero. The role of biology is not zero.”
Yet again, Damore's paper wasn't making the argument that observational biological differences exist, the point of which you've missed because you're eagerly still trying to prove it right now. Damore's diatribe was that Google's combating of social bias was wrong, and he cherry picked specific data and stretched evidence to falsely support his viewpoint. Which, in context to this thread, is still neither progressive nor conservative and continuing to be proven vague.
> Damore's diatribe was that Google's combating of social bias was wrong
No, it wasn't. In fact, the exact opposite: he literally says "I hope it's clear that I'm not saying that ... we shouldn't try to correct for existing biases".
Damore didn't reference your [1] to quote that "women are neurotic", he used it to quote that "greater nation-level gender equality leads to psychological dissimilarity in men’s and women’s personality traits".
Your [2] doesn't even cite [1], and in any case, [1] has almost 800 citations, while [2] is only cited by the author herself in her other papers. Seems like a stretch to call [1] "discredited".
[2] is the one of the most recent criticisms of the Big Five method, which is the crux used in [1]. If [2] cited every paper that used the Big Five method incorrectly as biological factor analysis, it would be in the hundreds.
Number of citations is terrible metric to defend a paper because the reason [2] has less citations is because [2] was published 3 years ago, while [1] was published almost a decade ago.
Appeals to popularity are logic fallacies for a reason.
[1] had almost 100 citation in its first 3 years, while [2] still has no citation by anyone else other than its author. If [2] really had discredited an entire field of research, I'd imagine that anyone at all would talk about it even once.
You are bringing up paper which had literally zero impact in 3 years it's been out. Why should I waste time reading it? Clearly, no scientist who has ever read it has found it worth to even mention it. The burden to show that it is relevant is on you.
I really wish Silicon Valley was a place where a man's ideas could be critiqued without the need to attack the man.
You have the base for a really good argument that could sway people who are on the fence about the issue but when you say things like "vagueness of his diatribe" you alienate the people you want to change the most.
