What Medium Can Teach Us About The United States’ Political Climate
First let me provide some context, and in the second half we will get to the point I am really trying to make here. I also want to point out my bias here is as an empiricist.
The election was only shocking if you weren’t paying attention.
I subscribe to Medium’s Daily Digest which features articles that are recommended by Medium Staff. Today’s headliner is a screed written by EricaJoy entitled, “I am disappointed but unsurprised by the news that an anti-diversity, sexist, manifesto is making the rounds at Google.” I knew exactly what piece of writing the EricaJoy was referring to because I had the, apparently rare, opportunity to read it first hand — Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber by James Damore. Here is a link and I would suggest reading to article yourself for a bit of perspective.
Having access to the primary source allows us to evaluate secondary sources. For those unfamiliar with this terminology, a secondary source is what somebody writes about an original work. In this case the primary source is “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber” and the secondary source would be “I am disappointed…”
In section three under the heading “Possible non-bias causes of the gender gap in tech” Damore states,
At Google, we’re regularly told that implicit (unconscious) and explicit biases are holding women back in tech and leadership. Of course, men and women experience bias, tech, and the workplace differently and we should be cognizant of this, but it’s far from the whole story.
On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. These differences aren’t just socially constructed because: ….They often have clear biological causes and links to prenatal testosterone.
Here is a link to a published scientific study available on the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) website. NCBI is part of the United States National Library of Medicine, a branch of the National Institutes of Health.
This study essentially supports the claim that Mr. Damore is making. However, it is also these claims that have been labeled as sexist, bigoted, racist, etc. by the commentariat — see EricaJoy’s work for reference. If you are interested in a more comprehensive analysis of the available evidence, and a decent helping of logic, please see this piece written by Scott Alexander.
What Damore seems to be doing is taking to task the leadership who focus on “diversity” while ignoring what is referred to as “Deep Diversity”, and he provides a rational and respectful argument for what he thinks might actually be going on. Here is an ugly truth about people, the only way we figure out our own bullshit is when we are exposed to differing perspectives and can reevaluate our own belief systems. There is a lovely little book titled, Freedom for the Thought We Hate by Anthony Lewis which makes the point better than I ever could. I would also recommend reading some of John Stuart Mill’s work, even if the language shows how long ago it was written:
They are adduced to show, by admitted and multiplied examples, the universality of the fact, that only through diversity of opinion is there, in the existing state of human intellect, a chance of fair play to all sides of the truth. When there are persons to be found, who form an exception to the apparent unanimity of the world on any subject, even if the world is in the right, it is always probable that dissentients have something worth hearing to say for themselves, and that truth would lose something by their silence. — Mill
Now for the point that I am really driving at:
During the last election season — which felt like it started circa 2012 — I became aware of just how distorted the media was in its bias. Full disclosure, I identify as a leftist and am strongly anti-authoritarian, also militantly pacifist ;). I thought the phrase “liberal media” was a complete joke. I thought you had to be out of your mind to believe it. Until all the media I was used to consuming started to make Fox News really look “Fair and Balanced”. I remember watching Donald Trump talk about Russia producing the “missing emails”. The headline to that article is: Trump urges Russia to hack Clinton’s email. Watch the clip, that is literally not what he said. Perhaps a less disingenuous headline would have read, Trump urges Russia to release any hacked emails they happen to have. You know, the one’s Hillary can’t turn over like she is legally supposed to?
So what do Trump and Hillary have to do with this? By the way, it is not about Trump wanting to deport criminal immigrants and Hillary Clinton wanting to bring black youth “to heel” somehow empowering racists and sexists. My point is, look at the comments section in EricaJoy’s piece — the piece itself is an emotionally driven character assassination full of slurs. When I first read it I had two questions: 1.) Did the author actually read Damore’s piece, and 2.) if yes, has the author ever had their reading comprehension tested, because what the author is talking about has almost nothing to do with what Damore wrote. However, this kind of hate mongering outrage porn is so prevalent these days. It requires an absense of logic and evidence. Leni Riefenstahl’s work, “The Triumph of the Will” — for those not familiar, was commissioned by Adolf Hitler as propaganda for the Nazi Party, and it ran continuously in everything movie theater until the end of the war — is not a coherent and logical rational for why the Nazi’s would be a a good party, it was actually the opposite. There was no argument made, it was all emotional appeals. Now my point here is not to say that EricaJoy is on par with the Nazi’s, those comparisons have been thrown out far too often. My point here is that appeals to emotion and outrage will usually trump appeals to logic and evidence in capturing the attention of people.
Here is where things get really interesting though. The author get’s a lot of likes for her piece, but the top comments are all counter arguments to her claim. Medium is literally promoting this piece that factually misrepresents the original work the author claims to be commenting on, and the readers aren’t buying it. I saw many thoughtful pieces promoted on Medium during the election that made claims that amounted to, “America hate’s women because they don’t support Hillary”. Take for example the piece titled, “My Default Person”. I thought the author of that piece made some excellent points until I got half way through it and it turned from a philosophical eye opener into, If only America could see Hillary as a human being, then they would like her. To which I found myself thinking, actually the reason I don’t support Hillary is because I believe she is a unique human being with a certain disposition (that being a warmonger) and a long history of actions that I do not want to see continued by a President of the United States. (Hint, I did not vote for Trump) My point is not to pick on the authors of these two Medium pieces, as they were just the most salient at the time of this writing, I have read so many more over the years.
Medium absolutely promotes a certain viewpoint, but that viewpoint is clearly not shared by many of the readers. Take the top comment from EricaJoy’s hit piece at the time of this writing:
The same type of sentiment is repeated in comment after comment. I also noticed it in article after article on Medium. Medium Staff promote content with a noticeable bias, and that content is taken down in comment after comment. The incongruity between what is being promoted by media outlets, and what is being said by people in response to that is what clued me in to how the election was going to turn out. The election was only shocking if you weren’t paying attention. Or should I say, if you were only paying attention to the content promoted by the media organizations, and not what was being said by the proletariat.
Outrage pieces like that written by EricaJoy can serve their author’s well with regards to their own notoriety — and depending on the medium used, money— but they do little to advance us towards a better future for everyone.
Google proved Mr. Damore’s point by firing him, and in all likelihood, Mr. Damore will walk away millions of dollars richer when his lawsuit concludes, thanks to California’s progressive employment laws.
