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Comment by wsargent | Hacker News Reader

Also, the larger problem with debunking is that it just doesn't work all that well. It's like arguing with an antivaxxer -- they may ask for logical discussion but it has no effect. Ultimately, what convinces them is social pressure or a sudden intrusion of reality i.e. their child gets sick, they have a female friend who encounters discrimination etc.

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My view is that in the absence of accessible ways to fact-check the memo people will only see the memo and the gnashing of teeth surrounding it. That leaves a really big hole to be filled - the memo is already out there in a big way.

The is Google lol, not some guy from i hate women dot com. Perhaps based on his platform alone we can consider it an honest attempt at conversation and debate it with our own honesty.

So you assume he worked this through from first principles and is thinking critically and has checked his sources... because he works (well, worked) at Google?

I can tell you that the norm among engineers, even at Google, is to receive lore and anecdotes from people slightly more educated as if it were gospel, and to repeat it uncritically until someone else more charismatic comes along. This happens so often that someone wrote a book called [The Leprechauns of Software Engineering](https://leanpub.com/leprechauns) about the unsourced commmon knowledge that engineers will blindly repeat without thinking about it.

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