A normative Google against a descriptive Damore

After James Damore was fired from Google for pointing out how their ideological echo-chamber was preventing them from effectively addressing issues of diversity, there was an outpouring of thoughtful commentary adducing the extensive corpus of scientific evidence supporting Damore's position as well as an outpouring of emotional effluvia criticizing Damore for questioning the received ideological wisdom despite the fact that the received wisdom was unsupported by evidence.

This included an article in The Economist attempting to undermine Damore's original evidence. Sadly, the Economist has fallen far from its intellectual libertarian heyday in the 1980s and 1990s. Then, it was noted for its fine writing, wittiness, evidentiary substance and consistent classical liberal positions.

In the 2000s, much of that has disappeared. The insidious infection of postmodernism critical theory has driven a sharp decline in intelligence, wit, and evidentiary rigor. The saving grace for The Economist is that all the other mainstream media has declined even faster so that The Economist, though much reduced, remains one of the best news sources.

The Economist joined most of the other emotional know-nothings in attempting to undermine Damore's argument by proffering a letter of how founder Larry Page ought to have responded to Damore.

Fortunately for all of us, Patrick Lee Miller has taken the time to dissect The Economist's poorly structured and weakly supported argument in The Google Memo: The Economist On Nothing by Patrick Lee Miller.

He does a pretty good job.

As I mentioned yesterday, postmodernist critical theory is driving a resurrection of the distinction between totalitarian utopianism in the form of normative philosophy and the tolerant classical liberalism of descriptive philosophy. Damore's memo was a descriptivist slap in the normative face of postmodernism and could not stand unchallenged. The Economist did its best to undermine the descriptive science science in service of it's normative postmodernism. But the editorial staff have gotten rusty over the years and have lost the ability to create robust arguments for their preferred ideology. Their Larry Page response was very weak tea and Miller shows how and where they fall down.

An interesting philosophical fisking.