Race is real. It's obvious when you look around. The major continental races show up on any k-clustered human genomic analysis. And any competent forensic anthropologist can identity race from skeletal remains.

We should treat people with equal dignity. Race should not be a factor in individual decisions. Left doesn't stop there, though. They go further, insisting that race is not only irrelevant, but unreal. They step beyond fairness and into propaganda and lies. It's why the left is now on the retreat in every institution of power.

I'm not the only one who's sick of having to parrot lies. By alienating people like me, people who would ordinarily be sympathetic to the left's causes, the left is guaranteeing a conservative backlash of biblical scope.

People used to say that the GPL was illegal, unacceptable, immoral, and all sorts of other things. Then, gradually, everyone started using it, and copyleft became an acceptable software licensing strategy. I hope that BSD + Patents also achieves gradual acceptability.

People started using the GPL because it works fine for software that isn't distributed to consumers, e.g. on servers. Those uses have subverted the entire intent of he license, however.

> Those uses have subverted the entire intent of the license

You're reading too much into the intent of the license. GPLv2 being used on servers is a valid use case.

Tivoization is indeed subverting the intent of GPLv2, which is one of the reason for GPLv3. But in the case of Tivoization, you _are_ distributing the code to end users, rather than just running it on their behalf, and hence, in my eyes, violates the intent of GPL (that end users you distribute your software to should be allowed to modify the software).

Hosted software isn't like tivoization, in that the host doesn't distribute, and so no GPL issues whatsoever.

The more conditions we apply the less usage it will get. But adding conditions like everyone can share in the changes provides a different value and encourages more changes.

GPL works because it forces the source code to remain open allowing everyone to enjoy all new changes.

BSD works because you are free to repackage and resell with bsd code. This code can be used in an existing product.

> this employee stated, bluntly, that they don't believe many of their colleagues should be there because of their sex

Did you read the essay? He certainly did not make that claim. Population averages are not statements about individuals. This is pure censorship.

Um, so? I censor myself at work every single day. If I routinely said some of the not so polite things that I sometimes think about my colleagues and (especially) customers I'd be fired. This is called "playing nice with others" and I learned it as a child.

I also sometimes think about topics that would be inappropriate in an office environment (such as sex) and I censor myself by not saying what I am thinking. We even have an Internetism for that concept - NSFW.

None of this is new - we are expected to conduct ourselves appropriately for the current situation. It's just how society works.

I didn't even read the document in question, I just have a very hard time with people getting riled up about being "censored" at work. It's work, what exactly do you expect?

I agree. It's a job, you're there to work. A workplace isn't a venue to stand on your personal soapbox and air your opinions, be disruptive and waste company time.

I swear I read exactly that in a job posting for diversity director...

Diversity is good for companies. Diverse companies are more profitable.

Regardless, your clever analogy doesn't apply. Companies are welcome to be political in their own environment. They own it. Employees are not. They're employed at-will.

Maybe, but that doesn't immunize them from criticism, especially when they purport to value diversity and free speech but silence critics.

Anyway, the financial benefits of diversity are almost certainly overstated. I don't know why we can't just say, "we're hiring diverse people because we think it's the right thing to do".

In a thousand years archaeologists will write papers on our civilisation and the god we worshipped called Market. About how we obeyed the laws of Market, appeased the Market when it was unhappy, and how we had faith that Market could solve all problems.

As a society we've been trained or perhaps tricked to suppress our sense of justice and fairness In Gabor of money.

Seriously, what does this have to do with anything?

People are hesitant to publicly say that the right thing to do is the thing that should be done so they bring financial arguments into it.

Hence the studies promoting the idea that diverse companies are more profitable, as if that should make any difference. It's a sick obsession with viewing just about everything through a financial lens even when money shouldn't come into it.

I agree. It is a venue for the personal soapbox and airing of opinions of the CEO.

I agree.

However, I sympathize with younger people because it's a double-edged sword at places like Google, where your work and your life are very intentionally blurred. You eat breakfast, lunch and dinner at work. You go out and socialize with your friends from work. You do laundry at work (I'm not sure if Google still does this or not). It's not like the 1980s where people check in at 9am and leave at 5pm.

>I didn't even read the document in question

Then why are you assuming you know what it said?

I am not. I am replying strictly to "this is pure censorship." So fucking what? At work we are absolutely expected and required to censor ourselves, that's practically the definition of "work."

---

I did skim it and it seemed like the pseudo intellectual mumbo jumbo people who think they are being really smart but really are just being obnoxious write; since I read way to much of that sort of thing already I didn't care to read further.

So you still haven't read it, then? And you still think it prudent to label it dismissively?

This is the kind of behavior that woke me up (in my early teens) to the dangers of adopting my values from my religious background/peers. I never thought I'd have to deal with witch hunts for wrongthink in tech.

I am not dismissing it because it is "wrongthink" I am dismissing it because it's incredibly boring, uninteresting, and extremely tiring. I went into it expecting to read something worth reading but stopped when I realized it simply wasn't worth my time.

> The harm of Google’s biases

> I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more. However, to achieve a more equal gender and race representation, Google has created several discriminatory practices:

> * A high priority queue and special treatment for “diversity” candidates

> * Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate

^ Isn't that exactly what the author is saying?

He's criticizing discrimination on the basis of race (and gender), not advocating it.

I think you're doing contortions here.

He says that Google 'has created' (past tense) a discriminatory hiring practice.

Presumably his coworkers were hired in the past and not the present or future.

Thus, the hiring practices that prevailed when his coworkers were hired were discriminatory, per the author.

Discriminatory hiring does not imply that under-qualified workers are hired. In fact, the author takes case to specifically mention that these discriminatory practices resulted in a higher false-negative rate for non-diverse employees - not a higher false-positive rate for diverse employees.

There is no question that Google has discriminatory hiring practices. The only question is whether you think discrimination is a good thing. Apparently you do.

There's a lot to be said about the current trend of privileged (read Western, perhaps wealthy, perhaps white, perhaps male) people to bemoan whatever concessions are made to the minority group but I'll leave that aside.

I believe that everyone should have a fair shot at a good career. I can't even begin to talk about how that is not the case in America - if we disagree here, I'm not sure we'll ever come to agreement.

It's not clear that the workers favored in this alternate pipeline are incompetent (which is really the implication that everyone is making). What is clear is that people with their perspectives are not as prevalent in the technology field.

Perhaps companies are recognizing a) the value of multiple perspectives or b) the structural difficulties that deny some people the same 'fair shot' we all have.

I'll leave you with this. The SAT should be a test of one's aptitude, perhaps readiness for college. If some individuals receive years of tutoring, but others have to go to the library to get test preparation, is our metric for college readiness fair? Maybe you'll say yes, but if we were talking about any other thing (cars, experimental models, you name it) we would clearly recognize these two groups had different pre-test levels of preparedness.

I'm downvoting this because I'm tired of the implication that anyone who disagrees with some liberal policy or value must be doing so for sinister motives (and for the highly offensive implication that sinister motives are the purview of whites/males/Westerners).

If you must spew hate, could you at least choose a more interesting criteria than skin tone or genitals? These have been done to death.

> This is pure censorship

No, it is not censorship. He can say those things. He just can't pretend to be an effective team member if this is what he believes about his coworkers and he is unwilling to learn from others.

I'll half agree in that you are right, it is not censorship. But I think the caustic judgement of him and his words don't seem to match up with the text that I've read.

Which demonstrates something interesting, here: It's clear this essay is a Rorschach test.

For some, it's simply a critique of ineffective hiring practices.

For others, it's veiled sexism dressed up with statistics to lend it an air of legitimacy.

Seen that way, this is a pretty interesting social science experiment, albeit at the expense of his job (if not his career)...

To be clear, he said nothing of the sort.

You are looking only at the words in document.

What about the behaviour before / during / after publishing it?

This exchange is unreal. You made a false claim about what Damore wrote. Another poster refuted you, explaining that Damore never wrote those things. And then you defend yourself by explaining that the person who refuted you is wrong because he's looking only at what Damore wrote?

What kind of post-truth, post-logic universe is this? I want off this fucking planet.

Take a deep breath.

I understand you would like to live somewhere that context does not matter and documents are self-contained.

Until you live in that world, please consider that there is an external world relevant to what an author's intentions are, whether they are lying or exaggerating, whether they are deliberately misleading or naively misinformed.

Does he have good intentions or bad intentions? Well, you would want to look at the other opportunities available to him to reason about that.

"This is what he believes about his co-workers" You: He did not write this

If he did not think that the performance of the women around him was holding back Google, then he wouldn't write the memo.

Can you give an explanation of how this was the best choice available to him if he did not think this was the case?

"He is unwilling to learn from others" You: He did not write this

Is it your position that he did not have any options for taking his opinions to others inside the company and getting feedback before circulating broadly?

He knows that this is sensitive - that definitely gets mentioned in the document - but there is no indication that he has gone to the people responsible for diversity policy to discuss the intentions, metrics or organisational concerns that shaped the policy.

If you don't know the functional and non-functional requirements for a system, you should find them out and if you disagree go to the stakeholders. Choosing not to do so is not high-performing employee behaviour in any organisation.

He's implicitly claiming some of them shouldn't be there, or he believes that miraculously every single women at Google clears the bar for desirable traits in a programming without affirmative action.

Come on now, which one do you think he believes? He made it pretty clear, clear enough that pretty much no one would want to work with the dude.

I'm sorry, you can't just say the man is "implicitly claiming" anything. Espectially when his career was so negatively effected. Support your claims with direct quotes or keep your slander to yourself.

The man in question claimed that some large portion of folks are hired under diversity programs which supposedly “lower the bar”. That is, those people don’t deserve to be at Google, and he doesn’t believe that they are qualified.

That’s in his own words, and I would have fired him a hell of a lot faster than Google did, because I will not have my team disrupted by a prima donna.

This is not what the document stated. Here is the quote about "lowering the bar" in its original form:

> Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate

The author deliberately narrows the scope of this sentence stating that the hiring practices decrease the false negative rate, not increasing the false positive rate. Stating that the false negative rate is lowered for diverse candidates is to say that qualified, non-diverse, candidates are rejected at a greater rate than qualified and diverse candidates. It is not stating that unqualified, diverse, candidates are accepted at a greater rate.

I have little context here, but from a statistics point of view, this statement is... odd:

"...decrease the false negative rate, not increase the false positive rate."

The interaction between type I and type II errors virtually always have an inverse relationship. You cannot decrease one without increasing the other. It is, for example, one of the difficulties in making good medical diagnostic tests.

without dumping in a lot more money or w/e...

Dumping a lot more money is what my company does. Normally, we do one phone interview and one onsite session which consists of multiple interviews. We perform multiple phone interviews if a diverse candidate fails the first (or, occasionally, the second).

The final hiring decision is almost entirely entirely on the on-site interview, the phone interviews essentially act as a first-pass filter. And we don't do any sort of weighting of diversity in the final hire decision. From my experience, the phone screen has the highest false-positive rate. In this system the false negative is reduced considerably for diverse candidates, while the false positive remains mostly the same (since the on-site is pretty rigorous).

For what it's worth, while I can understand the author's opposition to this system I think it's an okay way of increasing diversity. I don't think this system has ever caused us to take on a diverse candidate of insufficient skill or experience. Does it mean that non-diverse candidates get filtered out on the phone interview step at a higher rate? Yes. But not so much that I'd consider it an issue - and this is coming from a (mostly) non-diverse guy. And while it does cost the company more money, in the sense that we spend more time interviewing some candidates than we normally would, it's money well spent.

He literally says that those hiring practices can effectively lower the bar.

Sure, maybe he's saying that the bar for white/Asian men is higher than intended rather than that the bar for women and minorities is lower than intended, but you can't honestly argue that he isn't saying that women and minorities could be clearing a lower bar than white/Asian men.

> Sure, maybe he's saying that the bar for white/Asian men is higher than intended rather than that the bar for women and minorities is lower than intended, but you can't honestly argue that he isn't saying that women and minorities could be clearing a lower bar than white/Asian men.

This is not necessarily the case. This is a vast oversimplification of a tech company's hiring process, but for the sake of simplicity let's say that phone interviews have a 50% rate of generating a false negative and on-sites have a 0% error rate.

Say a company does one phone-interview, and if passed, moves on to on-sites. But for diverse candidates they do two phone interviews and if either passes they move on to on-sites.

* Unqualified candidates always fail, since neither phone interviews or on-sites have a false-positive rate.

* Qualified non-diverse candidates have a 50% chance of getting the job.

* Qualified diverse candidates have a 75% of getting the job.

At no point do any unqualified candidates receive offers. But at the same time, qualified non-diverse candidates are still rejected at twice the rate as diverse candidates.

The "bar" so to speak isn't always something that people have a higher chance of passing the better their skills are. A working knowledge of data structures and concurrency is all that's necessary to pass all of my company's coding interviews. Practice and luck is probably a greater asset than skill in many interviews. But getting into the efficacy of technical interviews is opening a whole 'nother bag of worms.

I had to read this a few times, but I think I get it now. The original manifesto author means that the "bar is lowered" for diverse candidates because they're scrutinized more carefully and fewer qualified candidates are eliminated? If you're good enough and diverse, you're more likely to be hired than if you're good enough and ... whatever the word for not-diverse is? The original author is not claiming that more unqualified diverse candidates are hired, just that it's easier to get hired if you're qualified and diverse?

If I've understood that correctly I really appreciate your effort in explaining it. Your comment should be higher so more people could see it :)

Also, if I understand you correctly, the phrase "lower the bar" might have gotten him fired for something he wasn't intending to say.

That's exactly right. Thanks for taking the time to read my comment thoroughly.

I also agree with your point around phrasing. I agree that lot of people took away the wrong meaning due to the phrase "lower the bar" (which is a very loaded phrase). This piece probably could have been better received if the author sought out proof-reading with trusted co-workers and friends beforehand. In particular the author should have:

* Dropped the awkward and monolithic generalizations of "Left" and "Right" at the beginning.

* Stayed way the hell away from talking about biological differences, just say that men and women have different preferences for working hours, fields, etc. and don't touch on possible causes.

* Don't emphasize on the benefices diversity initiatives have on diverse candidates, but rather the possible negative effects for the group as a whole. The point about OKRs contingent on hitting a certain percentage of diverse team members turning hiring and transfers into a zero sum game was actually a really good point that potentially hurts diverse groups themselves by limiting cross-team mobility.

* At the end, don't try to turn this into a Conservative vs. Liberal issue. Just point out that affirmative action is not nearly as uniformly supported as people make it out to be. For reference 42% of the population opposes affirmative action for race in the workplace, and 33% for gender [1].

[1] http://www.gallup.com/poll/184772/higher-support-gender-affi...

He might have planned all this. He was apparently chess champion as a child.

* Mentioning of left echo chamber was pandering to the right. And he got huge support form right leaning and centrist media and personalities.

* Biological differences he mentioned were sourced, so not his personal opinions. He knew this will trigger outrage from pro feminist camp that will start witch hunt against him, based on unproven accusations that he holds misogynistic beliefs.

* Emphasize on the benefices diversity initiatives have on diverse candidates, was another passive aggressive attack on one of SJW/PC/regressive-left sacred cows.

I dont really know if he planned this, but if you spend any time following anti-SJW sphere, then you should agree that reaction was totally predictable.

Basically he just said that google created environment where people who dont perfectly align with left leaning echo chamber agenda (here he was pandering to anti-SJW anti-PC / centrists, conservatives...) cant safely express their opinions anymore. And he was fired for doing exactly this. Proving his point on himself. Google HR had two bad choices, not fire him and cause outrage among many of their left leaning (snowflakes); or fire him and prove his point that they re indeed left leaning echo chamber.

I base my speculation on fact that he put his full name on memo, instead of pseudonym and this quote:

> Damore plans to sue Google; he had previously complained to NLRB and wants to argue that his dismissal was a revenge which would be illegal. See a Damore's defiant answer to Reuters.

Then why is he using the phrase "lower the bar"?

If he wants to argue that Google should lower the false negative rate for men too, I am totally on board with that! They should lower the false negative rate for everyone. They are bad at high-signal interviewing.

But the meaning of the phrase "lower the bar" is that less-qualified people are being let in, that people are being held to lower standards, etc. The entire point of the phrase "lower the bar" is to convey that the bar should have been be left where it was.

Honestly even if he wrote something like "Hiring practices which are more likely to improve outcomes for individual 'diversity' candidates by decreasing the false negative rate" I'd have much less of a problem with it. (I called out this specific sentence on Twitter yesterday; it was one of the things that particularly bothered me about the document.) But he used words with a specific meaning.

If he used words by mistake that his colleagues reasonably interpreted to mean that he thinks they're unqualified, that's all the more reason he shouldn't have his job. At a company at the scale of Google, a huge portion of effective engineering is effective communication.

Answering myself in part: I'd read the copy of the essay on Vox Day's blog (since I like to see opposing ideological opinions just to make sure I still disagree with them), which, like most other copies, did not have links.

The copy on the documentcloud link floating around this thread shows that "effectively lower the bar" is a link to an archived thread from the internal Google Group "coffee-beans-discuss".

I am curious if that post, or a summary thereof, has been leaked: I find the use of this phrase just baffling and technically incorrect (in addition to being insulting) and it seems like the author did have some specific intention here. Is he quoting someone else who's arguing that false negatives "effectively lower the bar"?

> That is, those people don’t deserve to be at Google, and he doesn’t believe that they are qualified.

You should read what he wrote more closely. He said that Google was creating hiring practices that "lowered the bar by decreasing false negative rate." That last bit is important because it fundamentally changes what he's asserting and means you've entirely misrepresented what he was saying.

Anyone familiar with the Google hiring practices knows that, unless you're famous to some extent, there's an element of luck to getting hired. A lot of qualified candidates get rejected because Google just gets a lot of applicants and they can't hire everyone that's qualified. Those candidates are the false negatives...people they could have hired without making a mistake but didn't.

What he's saying is that while a white male needs to be qualified, pass his interview and not be one of these false negatives, the minority candidate just needs to be qualified and pass his/her interview. That is a lower bar for entry, but it isn't what everyone is accusing him of having said...that his minority colleagues aren't qualified or are less qualified. They still passed all the merit parts of the process, they just never had to undergo the arbitrary part of the process that non-minorities are subjected to.

yeah, the entire screen against women in tech is not claiming anything about any women he works with, no siree

> He's implicitly claiming some of them shouldn't be there, or he believes that miraculously every single women at Google clears the bar for desirable traits in a programming without affirmative action. Come on now, which one do you think he believes?

He believes neither. We don't need to speculate, because the author writes quite deliberately to communicate his point. Here's the quote you're likely referring to, the one that mentions "lowering the bar":

> Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate. (emphasis mine)

The author is not stating that Google's hiring practices result in unqualified diverse candidates receiving offers at a higher rate than non-diverse candidates. The author is stating that a greater portion of qualified, non-diverse, are being rejected. In other words, the author is not stating that diverse employees at Google shouldn't be there. Rather he's claiming that there are a substantial number of non-diverse candidates who should have received offers, but didn't.

This same reply was posted to several of my comments, this is my response: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14954138

Affirmative action policies by definition change hiring in order to increase the number of minority candidates. That's why we progressives support them!

Are you saying he's wrong for pointing out that Google has affirmative action policies? Or that the policies themselves are bad? I don't understand.

I'm not sure I understand you. He's trying to make a statement about Google's hiring practices. The obvious discussion would be about whether he's right or wrong, and I don't know if that's the case. You seem to care that he's making the claim at all. It really feels like you're ashamed that he's telling the emperor that he has no clothes.

> The author was trapped. He shared the document to the "skeptics" internal group asking for feedback. He didn't realize that the skeptics group had been infected by SJWs for years.

Sounds like a company sponsored honey pot, even more ammo for an unfair dismissal lawsuit.

yeah ok, this is not really the fault of the author then.

sharing idea's on a small scale is good for everyone, sharing controversial or reprehensible is inadvisable but forgivable.

Those that went public with it, or spread it in outrage need a damned good talking to at least.

but really, I'd say the guy has learned a lot.... it may even make him a better person, isn't that everyone's desire?

Yes! Men and women are of course equal. They're just different, and different people choose to do different things. Why is that so fucking controversial?

> I don't think evolution would necessarily favor specialization between the sexes.

Why wouldn't it? Other primate species are very sexually dimorphic, both physically and behaviorally. Why should humans be so fine-tuned that there are no sex differences at all in behavior?

I meant across all species. I do acknowledge sexual dimorphism among humans, and provide a mechanism for this happening based upon the effective population sizes of mating humans.

I just think the top level post's claim should be reeled in a little bit to not imply that all species that manifest sex should result in sexual specialization beyond the reproductive system.

The entire human body is a reproductive system. That's what life is. Evolution optimizes for behaviors as much as it optimizes for gonads.

The Google memo author did reference similar material. The fucking Gizmodo leak stripped out all author's hyperlinks. The hyperlinks were how he cited his sources. This fact keeps getting lost on people: the document was not only well-written, but also well-supported!

I don't buy that argument. Referencing work doesn't mean you just slap a bunch of links and call it good. Build up of context; heck even just mention Google Project Aristole. Are you saying Gizmodo stripped links and all paragraphs that provided reference context and explanation of said material?

Sorry, I think perhaps to me his writing style came off as amateur at best to me. It seemed rushed, wavering, and made irrelevant arguments without proper build up or context. It wasn't until the very end that he even decided to state the context of mountain view to begin with. Reading it made it sound like over generalizations and frankly just a long reddit rant.

Reading through this article linked here, nothing came off as especially controversial to me. Seeing that the author of the memo seems to have some professional background in the field of biology I would of expected better; at least check for typos.

I'm also a Googler. Unlike you, I'm forced to comment anonymously, using a throwaway I just created using Tor. Why? Because I'm a member of one of the "privileged" groups that many think make up too great a portion of Google's employee base, and because some people (especially the ones graduating from college these days) think I'm an oppressor just because of my race and gender.

Nevertheless, I need to pipe up and express that g/yes-at-google makes me feel terrified. I'm not alone either. Some people have expressed that they plan on discontinuing all non-work communication. I've done the same, but not announced it. I've also started scrubbing all my technical communication. Anything I say might be interpreted in the worst possible light as taken as evidence of deep-seated bigotry and bias. I've never had to be this paranoid before in my life.

The scariest thing is that I've seen people "called out" for comments that would have passed even my paranoid-mode filter, even on purely technical subjects. At this point, I'm scared of making too much or too little eye contact. (Either one might be a micro-aggression.) I feel that no matter how careful I am about what I say and no matter how little bias is in my heart, it's only a matter of time before I land in front of HR for something I didn't intend to say.

Programs like YAG sensitize people to these sorts of uncharitable interpretations of others' speech. They encourage a kind of paranoid bunker mentality when it comes to social interaction. They teach people that their experiences are particular to their identity, not universal among their colleagues. They teach people to punish the wicked, not work together to solve problems.

Is this the kind of company we want to have? Is this the kind of culture that any organization should foster?

I'm truly sorry you feel this way.

I'm another white man who works at Google. I don't feel this way. You see me here commenting using a username that's easily traceable to my real identity. So we are reacting to a similar situation quite differently. What's the difference between us? I don't know.

I also think that your having this feeling is not WAI -- Google has been pretty clear that they want everyone to feel psychologically safe at work.

Ultimately what you have is a feeling -- it's not a fact, or even an opinion. I can't argue you out of it. But feel free to reach out to me IRL if you want to talk about it. I am easy to find.

Another throwaway here. Let me explain why I'm afraid.

Discussion that I've seen around microaggressions seems to land on the idea that, much like sexual harassment, one can be guilty without intent or awareness. This is a difficult to balance situation because, on the one hand, you have the fact that we as white men do not know what it feels like to be "othered" or harassed every day of your life, thus making our own judgment of what constitutes fair and unfair treatment somewhat skewed. On the other hand, this can lead to the infliction of the "perpetrator" status in situations that, to my honest attempt to calmly and thoughtfully analyze the circumstances, grant too much power to the accuser.

Prior to the current email list under discussion, there was a web app internally for tracking microaggressions. I remember reading it and being horrified at the treatment that non-white people in general, and women in particular, endured - story after story of degradation, insults and bullying. Referring to these actions as "micro" aggressions was comically understating their magnitude. However, I did see one or two stories that I thought were an extremely uncharitable interpretation of a normal, everyday situation. I vividly recall one - let me attempt to retell that story here: "One day I was waiting for the bus to ${SOME_DESTINATION}. The bus stop was unusually busy, lots of people were around. Somebody said out loud 'Wow, looks like everybody is going to ${SOME_DESTINATION} today'. This comment was aimed at me because I was not white."

In the above scenario, I acknowledge the possibility that the speaker was aiming a negative comment at the reporter...but surely it is also possible that a non-biased person would make that comment innocently, perhaps even without knowledge that the non-white person were present? The reason I am afraid is that I can imagine myself making an innocent comment like that, bereft of any bias (implicit or otherwise), and I am afraid of what the consequences might be. Having a discussion about the comment would be fine, but what if I were to be brought in front of HR and have it formally recorded in my employee file? What if I received explicit disciplinary action? Could I be fired in circumstances like this?

As I've said, I recognize the legitimacy of the vast, vast majority of these grievances as well as the need to share them. What scares me is the absolutes with which they are spoken about, in that the accusation of having committed a microaggression or act of bias always means the accused is guilty. Without acknowledgement that communication is challenging and an innocent comment can be interpreted uncharitably, I am afraid of the potential consequences.

> What scares me is the absolutes with which they are spoken about, in that the accusation of having committed a microaggression or act of bias always means the accused is guilty.

Can you handle a little guilt, though? It sounds like you can -- you're saying, I know I'm not perfect, I know I can be better.

I think that is, to a first approximation, the standard applied to employees at Google.

> On the other hand, this can lead to the infliction of the "perpetrator" status in situations that, to my honest attempt to calmly and thoughtfully analyze the circumstances, grant too much power to the accuser.

In the story you relate, does the accuser actually have any real power? They told their story, and...that's the end, right? I think you're assuming somehow that every time someone says "someone did this shitty thing to me," they want HR to fire that person. I know from talking to people who have had shitty things done to them that that's not true. People -- victims, HR -- have a sense of proportionality.

And I'm sure someone here can come up with an anecdote that shows someone acting without proportionality. But the fact that the system isn't perfect doesn't mean it's wrong as a rule, and consider that for every one accused who is acted upon disproportionately, there are surely many more victims who never seek or see justice. So if the system seems more imperfect to you lately, perhaps what is actually happening is that the imperfections are being felt more equitably.

If Google fired every white man who referred to a group of people men+women as "guys", there would be very few of us left. I don't mean to say that stuff like that isn't important and that we shouldn't change our language, just that degree of harm and intent are important. I have never heard anyone from HR suggest otherwise.

If I can make a guess as to where this fear might be coming from: A friend at another company related a story to me about how she tried to gently correct a coworker's microaggression. He blew up at her, angry that she was making a big thing out of a little thing. Which she wasn't, objectively or in intent. But then she took the blowup to HR.

So that's what happened, but I have to imagine his story is going to be, I made this innocent comment, and then I got taken to task with HR over it.

I'm sure many people have stories like that, where they completely miss the point about what they're actually talking to HR about. And then maybe these stories make their way to you, and you conclude, "gosh, I'm terrified of stepping out of line, look at the awful thing that happened to person X for doing basically nothing. And this other thing in YAG, I did that myself recently. I am terrified." But I suggest there's a different way to look at the same data that paints a quite different picture.

I replied to you an hour ago attempting to explain why I, a white man who works at Google, was also somewhat afraid. I made an effort to explain my feelings constructively while recognizing the existence of my privilege and the necessity of an outlet for people not like me to speak up.

The comment was flag-killed.

I can't speak for the other commenter, but I would never risk attaching this opinion to my real identity, and thus I'd never come to you IRL to discuss this.