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Comment by notacoward | Hacker News Reader

What I find frustrating is that so few people on either side of that one point seem able to separate that from the rest of the memo. There only seem to be two camps here.

(1) The biological-differences part is wrong, therefore everything else based on that is invalid.

(2) The biological-differences part is right, therefore everything else in the memo is also right.

Why do so many people who condemn (1) as unscientific then resort to (2) which is illogical? Conflating one part of Damore's argument with the whole is fallacious, and just as stifling as anything being done on the other side.

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Sure that is true. But any public debate always reduces a topic to its least complex form.

The core question really is: do meaningful biologist differences exist?

I see this as a scientific question, it has metrics, and we already have the answer. It is yes.

From there you can have a discussion about the nuances, but in regard to those people who do not believe the answer is Yes, there's no more point in validating their arguments than those of creationists or communists. Sometimes they'll bring up interesting perspectives maybe, but they are basically just wrong.

If somebody brings up six points, addressing points two through six doesn't validate anyone's point on one. Refusing to engage on those is just way of running away from parts of the debate where you're less sure. Damore said far more than that there are biological differences. He made unfounded assumptions about how those differences apply to software engineering, and further about how they apply to software engineering at Google which is pretty obviously a special case. He made false claims about the motivations behind existing policies, and proposed alternative policies for which there is either no evidence or strong contrary evidence. And more. But nobody wants to talk about those flaws, because they know they can't. It's better for the anti-diversity agenda to keep the focus on the one part that they can hope to defend. Unfortunately, too many pro-diversity advocates are playing right into that.

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