See also: Damore’s Defenders.
Scott Aaronson is a distinguished professor of computer science at the University of Texas. I ran into his blog a while back, when someone sent me to his muddled defense of Damore and the Google Memo – a defense in which he essentially called Damore critics hysterical and anti-science. For example:
And therefore I say: if James Damore deserves to be fired from Google, for treating evolutionary psychology as potentially relevant to social issues, then Steven Pinker deserves to be fired from Harvard for the same offense.
Really! This week, I see Professor Aaronson is defending Robin Hanson for asking why liberal do-gooders don’t offer the same sympathy to “incels” that they offer to the poor and why those liberals don’t call for redistribution of sex. Look I’m not making this up. Hanson, a Professor of Economics at George Mason University wrote an essay that is skin crawlingly creepy. Read it yourself. But my issue here is not with Hanson or Damore, it’s with Aaronson and his claim to be a nice, liberal, enlightened fellow, in favor of women’s rights and gender equality, but compelled by intellectual rigor and, you know, science and stuff, to defend these creeps, who he takes as iconoclastic truth tellers. Here’s Aaronson explaining how he first fell in love with Hanson’s take on the world despite an initial distaste for it:
Alas, back in 2003, I hadn’t yet been exposed to the epistemological revolution wrought by the 280-character smackdown, so I got the idea into my head that I actually needed to prove my objection was as devastating as I thought.
Before we go any further, let me give you some of the evolutionary biology from Mr. Damore. Damore claims to be in favor of diversity, but says even the most
limited mentoring program to increase the representation of women programmers at Google is discrimination against white men and morally unacceptable. He says:
In addition to the Left’s affinity for those it sees as weak, humans are generally biased towards protecting females. As mentioned before, this likely evolved because males are biologically disposable and because women are generally more cooperative and agreeable than men.
and
Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of humanities and social sciences lean left (about 95%), which creates enormous confirmation bias, changes what’s being studied, and maintains myths like social constructionism and the gender wage gap. Google’s left leaning makes us blind to this bias and uncritical of its results, which we’re using to justify highly politicized programs.
Wow, myths like the gender wage gap, because, according to Damore:
Yes, in a national aggregate, women have lower salaries than men for a variety of reasons. For the same work though, women get paid just as much as men. Considering women spend more money than men and that salary represents how much the employee sacrifices (e.g. more hours, stress, and danger), we really need to rethink our stereotypes around power.
and he explains feminism as a marxist ploy:
As it became clear that the working class of the liberal democracies wasn’t going to overthrow their “capitalist oppressors,” the Marxist intellectuals transitioned from class warfare to gender and race politics. The core oppressor-oppressed dynamics remained, but now the oppressor is the “white, straight, cis-gendered patriarchy.”
This is what Professor Aaronson describes as: “treating evolutionary psychology as potentially relevant to social issues“. You might think, this is not evolutionary biology, it’s standard men’s rights misogyny, but Damore is way ahead of you
when a man complains about a gender issue issue affecting men, he’s labelled as a misogynist and a whiner
Well, imagine that! According to Aaronson, Damore was was advancing “the hypothesis of an evolutionary reason for average differences in cognitive styles between men and women” and the negative reaction against him is an example of more of that social media shallow emotion: “Let that be the measure of just how terrifyingly efficient the social-media outrage machine has become at twisting its victims’ words to fit a clickbait narrative—a phenomenon with which I happen to be personally acquainted.”
Here’s more Damore:
The historically higher variance of outcome can also be seen in our genetics; we have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors. As a corollary, if Googlers are only from the top of the curve, then this may cause us to have more men than other, less selective, tech companies.
Aaronson is strikingly consistent about never quoting or naming any of the terrible people who participate in “clickbait narratives”. Never. He barely even quotes Damore. The basis of his argument is essentially nothing more than a presentation of himself as an Olympian truth seeker, batting away anonymous social media critics. But, as shown above, Damore is a right wing polemicist, not an evolutionary biologist. Hanson, who has resurfaced in the longtermism cadres is even worse. Aaronson’s defense of Hanson (who is also a men’s rights ideologue as well as being an advocate of many other loathsome causes) is that he is perhaps not as diplomatic as he should be but basically a brave iconoclast, willing to bravely say things that the major donors to his University and foundations will love, no matter how creepy they sound to those liberal do-gooders. I mean, someone who will bravely line up to get paid by Peter Theil! What an intellectual daring-doer.