Al Korvus
Al Korvus
Aug 9, 2017 · 2 min read

one central crux of your argument is actually a logical fallacy, and I cannot believe that a mighty tech giant such as yourself actually fell hook, line and sinker with the mainstream media and joined in on it. You say that Damore’s comments are harmful and he was right to be fired because they were a direct attack on his female peers at Google. When you actually re-examine what he wrote, you will see that it’s not as simple as you claim.

Damore was making comments about men and women “on average”, saying that “on average”, women tend not to prefer information technology. Regardless of whether you believe that to be true or not (and I will argue it is at least currently), it is a stretch to accuse Damore of claiming that female colleagues already working at Google are not suitable for tech, because these two groups are distinct, assuming that the company doesn’t just hire any average person, man or woman, off the street to work for them.

Rather, anybody working at Google will most likely be the best of the best (i.e. not average). If he were to expand on his original statement he could easily have said that most AVERAGE men are not Google material either. What the “average” comparisons do infer is that there will tend to be somewhat fewer women who are both interested in the tech industry AND up to the very high standards of Google compared to men, based on the bell curves that he displayed on the memo, studies related to mechanical reasoning, and even data on Math SAT scores among male and female testers as recently as 2016. Based on this, can you honestly and ethnically still claim that Damore’s comments were threatening to his former female peers?

Ultimately of course, all of this is meaningless as all action has been taken, the memo has already been misrepresented and misinterpreted by the media and the man has been thoroughly demonized. But I still contend that anybody who actually understood his arguments will agree that he was coming from a good place, and it was simply that he failed to convey his message to the masses. And perhaps individuals who took such pleasure in castigating the author of this memo can take some time to consider whether they may in fact have misunderstood the point.

    Al Korvus

    Written by

    Al Korvus