2017/08/08: James Damore and his Google Memo on Diversity (complete)

Hello. So, some of you may have heard about the leaked Google memo that has been circulating virally around the internet for the last couple of days that was written by James Deore, who was fired for it last night. A colleague of his reached out to me and put us together, and so I’m going to talk to James today about exactly what happened and why, and perhaps what should be done about it. So that's what we're going to do, and the interview I had with him, which finished at about 3:00 on Tuesday, August 8th, follows immediately after this introduction.

Hi, everybody! I'm speaking today with James Deore and an unidentified Google employee who wishes to remain anonymous for reasons that I think are obvious. James, last week, put his hand in a blender by circulating an internal memo that I would say has become somewhat infamous. So, James, let’s start with a bit of discussion about you. Tell us who you are, about your background, and about what you were doing at Google.

I yes, so I was actually just, you know, really interested in science and psychology and stuff. I really liked puzzles, and that's how I got into Google, actually. I did one of their coding competitions. They just recruited me out of that. And so at Google, I was mostly working on search and image and video search in particular.

And so what's, tell us about your educational background a bit.

Uh, yes, so I just did a random science and math undergrad, and I ended up with a—I didn’t really know what I was going to do—so I started doing research at MIT, and then I went to systems biology at Harvard. I initially wanted to work with Martin Noc; he's really great in evolution and game theory, but then I started working on other things.

So tell us a bit about systems biology. What is that exactly? What kind of research were you doing at MIT?

I yes, so systems biology has many different meanings, but it's generally just mathematical biology and, I guess, seeing biological systems as a whole rather than just individual molecules. And so I like looking at populations, and so my interest in evolution.

So why did that make you a viable candidate at Google, do you think?

Uh, I think they just saw a smart guy that could code.

Fair enough. Now, you've been there three years, is that correct? But also as an intern before that?

Yeah, so about four years total.

And so how would you say you've performed as an employee at Google? Have people been happy with you, or have you been in trouble?

No, I got promoted twice. My last review was the highest possible, superb, which is the top few percentile. So I definitely wasn't fired based on performance.

And have you enjoyed working at Google? Has it been a good experience?

Yeah, I mean, I love Google. That's the horrible part! Like, I've always been the biggest Google fanboy! I've never had an iPhone. I've always tried to convince my friends to use Android and all these different things, and yeah, I mean, this just puts a sour taste in my mouth.

Okay, so you've got a good educational background, you were interested in things that Google would be interested in, you're a good coder, you've worked with them for a number of years and done an excellent job, and you're pretty pro-Google. That's basically the background.

Yeah.

Okay, now last week, you wrote a memo which has attracted a tremendous amount of attention. In that memo, you made a number of claims, and the claims were—and please correct me if I've got this wrong or if I'm not summarizing this properly—you were attempting to describe reasons why a lack of gender parity might exist within Google, for example, and within engineering more broadly, but also in occupations more broadly. You laid out a very elaborate document and I reviewed it, and as far as I can tell, your opinions are well supported by the relevant psychological science. I think what I’ll do in the description of this video, when I link it, is put in the references so that people can decide for themselves. I want to put up a webpage about gender differences in general, but I’ll try to hit the highlights for this particular document.

So why did you do this?

Uh, yeah, so about a month and a half ago, I went to one of our diversity summits, all of it unrecorded and super secret, and they told me a lot of things that I thought just weren’t right.

Okay, what do you mean unrecorded and super secret?

Well, I mean, they were telling us about a lot of these potentially illegal practices that they've been doing to try to increase diversity.

And what kind of practices?

Well, basically treating people differently based on what their race or gender. Racism.

Yeah, basically.

I see. And so it was ultra-secret and unrecorded in what manner?

Yeah, so I mean, most meetings at Google are recorded; anyone Google can watch it. We're trying to be really open about everything, except for this. They don't want any paper trail for any of these things.

Okay, why?

Because I think it's illegal. And I mean, as some of the internal polls showed, there were a large percent of people that agreed with me on the document. So if everyone got to see this stuff, then they would really bring up some criticism.

Yeah, well, a large number of people in Google and a very large number of well-informed biological scientists, we might also add. So, I mean, I was quite struck by your document given that, you know, it would have been a decent document for a well-informed psychologist, research psychologist, to write, but you're somewhat of an outsider. But you got the highlights accurate as far as I’m concerned.

So, okay, you went to this diversity meeting and you weren’t happy with the sorts of things that you were being told and with the practices. Is that both correct?

Yeah.

And what were you being told?

Uh, well, there’s a lot of ways in which they pressure people to increase the diversity of their team, and you know, there’s no way to do that besides actually choosing someone based on their race or gender.

Right. What do they mean by diversity, precisely?

I mean, more women or underrepresented racial minorities.

No, can I jump in?

Yeah.

Um, I would hesitate to say that that's 100% true across 100% of teams. The organization that I'm in, I have not personally seen anything that I would call crossing the line. Um, you know, I personally believe that there are a good amount of synergies to be found if you can combine, you know, slightly different ideologies into a room. And that is the thesis that some groups are working towards.

Um, obviously, there's going to be a distribution of how people follow the rules, and you know, it's unfortunate to hear that it could be that some people fall to the wrong side of that distribution. But um, that certainly wouldn’t apply to everybody.

Well, it certainly also, it certainly also distressing to hear that there is acceptance of the idea that diversity can be mapped onto race and gender, especially with regards to performance. Because there’s no evidence for that whatsoever.

So, okay, so you went to this meeting and then you decided to write this document, and um, how long had you been working on it before you released it?

Uh, yes, so I was doing it like throughout my free time. I just wanted to clarify my thoughts on this and I really just wanted to be proven wrong because, you know, if what I was saying was right, then something bad is happening. And so, yeah, about a month ago, I submitted feedback to that program, and you know, I saw that people looked at it, but no one actually said anything.

And what sort of feedback did you submit?

Uh, I mean, I basically said what I said in the document and then I linked to the document itself, and so I actually published this about a month ago. And it was only after it got viral and then leaked to the news that Google started carrying.

Okay, so how did it go viral, and do you know how it was leaked?

Uh, yeah. So, there was a group at Google called Skeptics, and so I was like, okay, maybe they'll be able to prove me wrong in some way. Like, they're skeptical about things, right? I don’t know, I was naive, I guess. And so I sent them a message like, okay, what do you think about this? Is Google in some sort of echo chamber, or am I in an echo chamber? And, you know, then it just exploded after that, and you know our internal—it was just spread throughout all of Google.

Do you know, was it the Skeptics group that started to spread it around?

Yeah, and then there were a lot of upper management that, you know, specifically called it out and started saying how harmful it is and how this sort of viewpoint is not allowed at Google.

Yeah, what sort of viewpoint exactly?

The idea that there are differences between men and women that actually might play a role in the corporate world—that's an opinion that’s not acceptable.

Yeah, it seems so. Well, I mean, you know, understandably it is—these issues are tricky morally and politically. But the thing that was disturbing to me about watching the response to you is that, as far as I can tell, there isn't anything that you said in that paper, first of all, that is in fact biased in a manner that should open you up to the sorts of charges that have been opened up against you or that violates the scientific literature as it currently stands. So both of those are rather distressing.

Yeah, and there's a lot of misrepresentation by upper management just to silence me, I think.

Yes, and why is that, do you think? Like, why is it that Google couldn’t have actually—do you think that Google couldn’t have come out and had an intelligent discussion about this instead of, well, first of all, releasing—like, Dan, I read Danielle Brown's response to you, which I thought was absolutely appalling, ill-informed, and painful. And then they fired you, which seems to be like a really bad PR move but, more importantly, doesn't actually deal with the issues at hand. You know, they’re basically saying something like—well, what was their rationale for firing you exactly? What was the excuse that was given?

So the official excuse was that I was perpetuating gender stereotypes.

That you were perpetuating gender stereotypes?

Yeah.

And did they say anything else about your performance or about anything else that you had done?

No, that was the only reason.

And who fired you, technically?

It was my HR representative and my director.

Okay, and do you have any idea on whose orders they were acting or if this was something that they conjured up themselves?

I'm sure it probably went from higher up than that because this is a huge PR move, so they would need approval from right up. And I think the CEO actually made some comments about the issue today, which I'll probably cut into this video as we edit it.

So, yeah, okay, all right. So the first question is how are you doing?

I'm doing okay. There are a lot of messages that I'm trying to sort through and just trying to figure out what I should do now.

But, yeah, you've been given some interesting job offers, as far as I can tell.

Yeah, I've gotten a surprising amount as a part.

Yeah, well, I suspect—in fact, I'm virtually certain—that you have a majority viewpoint. It’s just that the people who hold the alternative perspective, which are the radical social constructionist types who insist that everything is a consequence of socialization, they’re a little bit more organized politically. But they're clearly wrong scientifically; they're wrong factually; they're wrong ethically, for that matter.

So you probably have more support than you think, and it'll be very interesting to see how that turns out.

So, what do you think about having written this? I mean, now your life is going to be turned upside down for quite a while, I suspect. I mean, you put yourself out on the line doing this, so what do you think about that?

It definitely sucks, but I mean, at least I was proven right, you know.

When do you mean by proven right?

Well, just that the whole culture just tries to silence any dissenting view and that we really need some more objective way of looking at these things.

Yeah, well, I felt the same way when the University of Toronto decided to, you know, attempt to shut me down after I made my videos. I thought, well, that just proves my point.

Yeah, 'cause I mean, I made the videos saying, well, I don't like the climate that's developing. It's making it very difficult to have conversations about certain things, and your example is even more egregious, I think because, you know, I at least objected to a piece of legislation that in principle would have been of benefit to an identifiable group—let’s say the transgender group. I don't believe it is of any benefit to them, but you could make a case that it was. But you—all you did, as far as I can tell, is review the modern personality literature and the literature on individual differences relating to men and women and other groups, and there's actually not very much opinion in your piece at all.

So what that means is that it is not possible to actually have a discussion about the scientific literature on these issues without putting yourself at risk, and that's a hell of a thing for an engineer. Because, I mean, an engineer isn't relying on the facts as far as I can tell—and one of the things I like about engineers is that they tend to stick fairly closely to the facts. They're not a very political group, you know, generally speaking; they're much more practical.

Yeah, I don’t know how they can expect to silence so many engineers and intelligent people and just deny science like this.

Yeah, well, the question too is what are your supporters within Google going to do? Because, you know, I would say you're a great warning man because you showed what happens if you have enough, I don't know what you'd call it, curiosity and courage, I suppose, but mostly curiosity to lay out what you think for discussion.

I mean, even when you opened this conversation, you said that, you know, you weren't jumping up and down and insisting you were right; you were trying to lay out what you understood from doing a fair bit of reading and and make the case that these facts—the facts about the differences between men and women and employment choice and and payment and all that—aren't being discussed, and they're not being discussed.

I mean, we know, for example—and I'll put this citation in the description—it's been very difficult for the Swedes, for example, to flatten out the gender distribution for engineers in Sweden, and in the Scandinavian countries in general, despite their advanced social engineering, let's call it. And they also can't get male nurses. You know, I think it's four out of five nurses in Scandinavia, if I remember correctly, are female and the reverse number are engineers are male. And you know, that seems to be associated with this quite well-founded scientific observation that women tilt towards interest in people and men tilt towards interest in things, and that that's associated with testosterone exposure in utero—this is solid science, you know?

And it isn’t anybody beating an ideological drum because most of the people, I would say that most of the people who are publishing this would have been even happier had it turned out the other way. You know, the findings actually run contrary to their biases because academia is generally full of people whose biases are laugh-

And now, and then, you know, scientific findings emerge to dispute an ideological proposition. That was certainly the case with the role of biology versus society in establishing gender differences.

So, the science is very credible. It doesn't mean it's completely beyond dispute, but that's not the point either because your survey was actually a pretty decent survey of the current state of affairs with regards to individual differences. That doesn't mean it's right.

So, okay, so what are your—what are your what does your family think about all this?

Yeah, they definitely support me, but they don’t really know what I should do from here. They don’t want me to, you know, just go to a ton of news corporations and do all these interviews and stuff because they just want to twist whatever I say towards their agenda too. It's not really clear what I should be doing.

Yeah, well, there’s certainly no shortage of people that want to talk to you. I mean, I've been contacted by four or five journalists who would like to speak with you.

Um, we can talk about that afterwards; I can let you know who they are. But, yeah, well, you've got a conundrum on your hands, you know? I mean, you're a very straightforward person, and you're obviously not grinding any axes, at least not in any obvious way. So my suspicions are that talking to the right people could be of substantial use to you, but I guess it also depends on what it is that you want.

I mean, and that's something we could talk about. Now you've rattled up the cages of a fair number of people and a fairly large organization. Interestingly enough, just on the heels of Google and YouTube's announcement about their new free speech restrictions on YouTube, you know, and their incorporation of NOS into that censorship process.

So it's been quite a week for Google, I would say! So you've opened up this can of worms. What is it—so imagine if you're looking six months down the road, saying things happened that were good because of what you did. What is it that you would like to have happen?

At the very least, I want—because I do still care about Google—I want some conversation to be had and for the ideologues to not just have their way. But, yeah, I don't have a clear vision on how exactly this will happen.

Yeah, well, how—how this can spread farther than just Google.

Well, I mean, you'd spread it farther than just Google, that's for sure, you know? I mean, I would say my experience is with the Press that the first thing that happens, that will happen is that you'll get jumped on by people who call you the sorts of epithets that would be appropriate if you were a bad guy. And you should just shut up and go away.

Okay, that's already happened. But I think you're going to get through that real quick because I went through your, um, your writings, which are not a screed, by the way, and are certainly not an anti-diversity screed. I went through your writings, and I can’t see anything there that identifies you as the sort of person that can be easily and permanently tarred with a hateful epithet.

But, you know, it's logical for the public, let's say, including the media, to jump on someone like you when they blow a whistle because the first thing that you might presume if someone’s causing trouble is that there’s something wrong with them. And so then you have to sort of beat them a while with the idea that there’s something wrong with them to see what happens.

And so the first thing is you have to withstand that. But there don’t seem to be any smoking pistols in your background. So, for example, you were an ideal Google employee.

Well, that probed you a lot. And you don’t have a history of any sort of troublemaking, and you have a solid educational background, and you're clearly a reasonable person.

And so the first thing is just to steel yourself to get through that. And then what will happen, I think, if you do talk to media organizations, and especially if you talk to them the way that you're talking to me, which is extraordinarily calm and composed, then you're going to reveal yourself even more as a reasonable person.

And the Press overall will start to shift behind you, and I think the reason for that is one thing you got to remember about the Press is that when push comes to shove, they’re actually rather in favor of free speech.

Yeah, given that without it they would be dead. So I don’t think like—I don’t think that you have to worry about being exploited and twisted by media sources. I actually think that it might be to your advantage to talk to people.

You know, you can figure out who those people are, but you're just not the kind of person that can be easily transformed into a villain. And the more that you can demonstrate that, the better it might be, you know, for the cause that you're engaged in but also for yourself.

Yeah, so what—like how are you feeling about this emotionally? You must be in a bit of a state of shock, I would think.

Yeah, it's been a stressful week for sure, but I'm not feeling too negative about it yet. It hasn't fully hit me, I don't think.

Yeah, well, it won’t because God only knows what's going to happen to you over the next few weeks, right? It's going to be a real roller coaster. And you know, you know, the other thing that you might consider is that it’s possible that this will turn out extraordinarily positive for you.

You know, it's going to be a rough ride, but to the degree that you are accurate in your observations, then you know, it’s not that easy to—it’s not that easy for the opponents of Truth to have a battle with truth. It’s not easy to have a battle with reality, you know? You tend to lose.

So can I just go over some of the things that you said so that we can discuss?

Yes, sir.

Okay, so I’m going to take a look here. So you started with a pretty good solid statement. I would say Google's political bias has equated the freedom from offense with psychological safety, but shaming into silence is the antithesis of psychological safety.

Well, that seems even more relevant now in your situation! The silencing has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed.

Well, we can check that one off too, right? Firing certainly seems to indicate that that was the case. The lack of discussion fosters the most extreme and authoritarian elements of this ideology. Some of the extreme—the extreme is all disparities in representation are due to oppression. That's a good one, right? That's a univariant hypothesis. It's very, very simple-minded.

And then the authoritarian element you defined as the idea we should discriminate to correct for this oppression. Great. And then you make a claim: differences and distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don't have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership. Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.

Okay, so that’s your thesis. And then you go along and try to justify it. So the first thing you do is talk about left-wing versus right-wing biases. And I should point out that you don’t concentrate on the left biases or on the right biases. You're completely even-handed with regards to laying out the pros and cons.

So the left is compassion for the weak, disparities are due to injustices, humans are inherently cooperative, change is good, unstable, open, and idealistic. Fair enough. Man, you’re dead on with regards to the relevant psychological literature, where we see that political correctness is motivated by agreeableness and that liberalism is fundamentally predicted by openness.

And the right biases respect for authority. Disparities are natural, just humans are inherently competitive, change is dangerous, stable—that would be high conscientiousness and low openness—and they're closed rather than open and pragmatic rather than idealist.

Yeah, well, I don't think any reasonable person could read that column and say that you were coming down hard on the side of either part of the political spectrum!

Yeah, Dr. Peterson, can I jump in with a question? Um, it appears from my interactions with many people that they are rejecting words that were not written onto the paper, and would you be able to elaborate on the schemas that people develop and how they classify information in their minds? Because this is very much how stereotypes form, I would think, by kind of just grouping a bunch of disparate but semi-related people or things together and then projecting an idea that may or may not pertain to that.

Yeah, well, it's a low-resolution thought. What happened to James is that he, you know, he put up his hand and said, wait a second, I don’t agree with the diversity ideology, and he was immediately classified essentially as a misogynist and bigot, and that's the simplest thing to do, right? Because misogynists and bigots will hold viewpoints that are anti-female and racist.

And so it's a lot easier just to paint someone with a broad brush, especially if they're violating the tenets of your implicit temperament, let's say, than it is to dive into the details where real thought occurs. And I think one of the sins that James committed was that he actually dared to make this about details rather than about vague hand-waving ideology.

That’s very annoying to people who don't want to think, because in order to analyze his claims, you’d have to go through, well, let's say 20 or 30 scientific papers and actually understand what they mean, and that's very annoying, especially if you're pursuing a given agenda.

So, okay, so then you say neither side is 100% correct and both viewpoints are necessary for a functioning society—or in this case, company.

Yeah, well, I think the data is solid there too. I mean, our research has indicated that open people who are primarily liberals start companies, and the more closed people, the conservatives, the traditionalists, are good at running them. They're better at being managers and administrators, and that's associated with high conscientiousness.

So you've got it right there. A company too far to the right may be too slow to react, over-hierarchical and untrusting, and a company too far to the left will overly diversify its interests, overly trust its employees and competitors, and change perhaps too rapidly.

Yeah, great, fine, perfect. Nicely balanced as far as I can tell. Only facts and reasons can shed light on these biases, but when it comes to diversity and inclusion, Google's left bias has created a politically correct monoculture that maintains its hold by shaming dissenters into silence.

Well, that certainly seems to be the case.

Yeah, okay, this silence removes any checks against encroaching extremist and authoritarian policies.

All right. 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 in the tech and workplace differently, and we should be cognizant of that. But it's far from the whole story. On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. These aren't just socially constructed because they’re universal across cultures.

Clear biological causes, links to prenatal testosterone. Biological males castrated at birth and raised as females often still identify and act like males. Traits are highly heritable, and they’re exactly what we would predict from an evolutionary psychology perspective. Note I’m not saying that all men differ from women in the following ways or that these differences are just—

And then you put in a nice chart indicating that the amount of overlap between men and women per trait is greater than the amount of difference, right? And so you state that directly—that's perfect. That’s a very good way of defending your thesis and also of not overstating the case.

Then you do a nice job of also graphically indicating what happens if the distribution is ignored and people are just treated as if they’re unipolar representatives of a given group—which is kind of what the D—what the people who are predicating the push for diversity on gender and race are assuming, right?

Yeah, which is really so funny because it's really a biologically essentialist argument, much greater than the argument that you're making, which is that men and women and members of different races are so different that in order for a full diversity of viewpoint to be achieved, you have to pull in people by race and gender—which implicitly states that the differences are so great that the distributions don’t overlap.

Yeah, right! You couldn’t make a more racist and misogynous statement than that. And it's also technically wrong because men and women are more alike than they are different. Maybe if you summed up all the differences, you could absolutely differentiate between them. You know, in all likelihood, you could, but some of those differences are clearly irrelevant to the workplace.

Yeah, okay, then you go through the personality difference literature and you're exactly right on that. I see that the CEO took you to task for using the word neuroticism; however, that is the technical term in the personality literature, and there are historical reasons for that. A better word might be negative emotion, but it's clearly the case that women are higher in negative emotion than men, and that means that they are on average less tolerant of uncertainty and stress. They suffer more psychologically for the equivalent levels of uncertainty and stress, and that is also why cross-culturally, women have more depressive disorders and anxiety disorders.

And the research on that is rock solid! Rock solid! Men have their own problems, right? They’re more likely to be antisocial, they're much more likely to be imprisoned, they're more likely to have learning disabilities. So it's stating that there are differences in the rates of certain kinds of psychopathologies doesn’t put either gender into a position of relative inferiority.

So, and then you quote research that suggests that greater nation-level gender equality leads to psychological dissimilarity in men’s and women’s personality traits? Absolutely! That's what the Scandinavian studies indicate! There’ve been a number of them and they're very large studies, so you got that right.

What this—what the researchers demonstrated was that as countries move to flatten out the socioeconomic playing field and remove discrimination, the differences between men and women—or many of the differences between and women—maximize instead of minimizing. And in Scandinavia, you really see maximization of the difference in men and women with regards to interest in people versus interest in things. A major issue! Men's higher drive for status!

Yeah, well, we know that women are hypergamous and that they choose men on the basis of their socioeconomic status, right? Well documented cross-culturally and also just rational because women have to make themselves dependent when they are pregnant and when they have infants. And it makes perfect sense for them to seek out the most competent person they can manage—the most competent and generous person they can manage in order to help them bear the burden.

So, so not—no dispute there at least, no, you're not um diverting from the central tenets of evolutionary psychology and biology. People will dispute those findings, but you're not conjuring this out of thin air. There's a nice solid scientific literature behind you.

So, and you know, it's also very interesting to look at the US labor stats on gender differences in occupations. You know, because it’s so funny to watch the radical feminists only go after the high-status occupations. It's like 100% of bricklayers are men; we don’t hear that being complained about. And of course, men occupy most of the outside jobs—they move more and they do more of the dangerous jobs as well.

Um, so these are all factors that are relevant but completely undiscussed, as far as I can tell, by the sort of ideological types that have been going after you.

So, women are on average more cooperative, especially with members of their in-group. Whether they're more cooperative with members of their out-group is a different story, right? Because agreeable people are in-group oriented and very hard on out-group members, which I think is partly why the PC types are so hard on their enemies because, you know, they regard them as predators—predators on infants essentially – something like that.

Women on average are more prone to anxiety. Yes, that’s true. Women, on average, look for more work-life balance—that seems to be the case. I don't know if the literature on that is as tight, you know, but it’s certainly the case that law firms, for example, have a hell of a time keeping their women in partnership positions because most of them don’t want to work the 60-hour work weeks—60 to 80-hour work weeks that are necessary to perform at that extremely high level.

So, Dr. Peterson, for anybody who might be new listening in, you mentioned that a lot of women might not be interested in working those, you know, 60 to 80-hour work weeks. Do you think it would make sense to stand upon that just a little bit? I know you talk through hypergamy, but you've also mentioned the thing about why would anybody want to do that, no matter what their gender is?

We got to get the mystery right here. The mystery isn’t why there are a bunch of people who are low status, because almost everyone’s low status comparatively speaking, right? Men and women alike. It's a small P minority of people who are high status on any dimension, and they tend to be hyper-successful, and they tend to be men.

So you see this in scientific publishing, for example. So the median professor male publishes as much as the median professor female, but the vast majority of the high-publishing people are males. And that seems to be because there are a small percentage of males who are very status-seeking, very focused, very energetic, and very much prone to put their career first.

And part of the theory for why that is is that the evolutionary and sexual trade-off for men with regards to high status is much higher than it is for women. So there's good documentation and I can find these references too that the number of sexual partners or opportunities that a man has in the previous year is tightly associated with his socioeconomic status, whereas the number of partners or opportunities for partnering that a woman has is negatively correlated with her status.

And that might be partly because high-status women, who are looking for either even higher-status men, price themselves out of the mating market, and there’s actually pretty good documentation of that as well.

So you're fine with all of that? The harm of Google—by Google's biases to achieve a more equal gender and race representation, Google has created several discriminatory programs: mentoring classes only for people with a certain gender or race, a high priority queue, special treatment for diversity candidates, hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for diversity candidates by decreasing the false negative rate.

Yeah, that's a big problem. You either have standards or you don't. The problem is, is that if the standards produce a non-equitable outcome, then what happens is people criticize the standards. And that would be fine if the standards bore no relationship to the job, but the problem is that if you have your hiring practices set up halfway intelligently—and it's never perfect—you’re actually hiring for attributes that would make job effectiveness much more likely.

Yeah, so how did you come across all this information?

Part of it was through that diversity summit and just looking through all the stuff that we have online or through our internal sites.

Yeah, so you've been doing a fair bit of literature review.

Yeah.

These practices are based on false assumptions generated by our biases and can actually increase race and gender tensions.

Yeah, well, the whole unconscious bias thing is a great example of that. It’s like, first of all, those tests—the implicit association test—are nowhere near reliable or valid enough, so nowhere near the quality necessary to diagnose anyone as having an unconscious bias.

Second, second, the data relating those so-called unconscious biases to actual behavior is weak. Third, there's no evidence whatsoever that anti-unconscious bias training programs have any positive effect whatsoever; in some, they have a negative effect, partly because people don’t like to be called racists and marched off to forced re-education training.

So suggestions: demoralize diversity.

Yeah, that would be good!

And start to define it more appropriately, right?

Yeah, and to start having a real conversation on what proper hiring practices should be, which should be objective standards universally applied without bias because that's the best we can do. That's still going to introduce some non-equal outcomes, but of course, hiring practices are designed to do that.

For example, they're clearly designed to reward more intelligent people, given that IQ is highly heritable—that's actually a real problem.

Yeah, definitely! And we definitely set up hiring practices to reward conscientious people.

So, what about propensity to negative emotion? It seems to me that screening for stress tolerance is a reasonable thing to do in high-stress jobs unless you want to put the person in a position where they're likely to collapse, to be miserable.

I don't see any utility in that.

Dr. Peterson, I had a question actually relating to that. Um, from an employment standpoint, is there an optimum sensitivity to stress that you've seen from the most economically productive employees? By that I mean I feel like there's a middle ground between people who are laidback versus people who are probably overstimulated by external factors that make them self-conscious. And these people, I think, at least at the lower mid-levels of many companies, actually have a little bit more anxiety that powers their ascension through the dominance hierarchy.

Yeah, well, it's a tricky issue because you're probably—the sort of negative emotion that might be useful in motivating you is probably more associated with conscientiousness than with neuroticism. Like neuroticism seems to be linked pretty tightly to anxiety and emotional pain—frustration, disappointment, grief; those all sort of fit into those categories—whereas the negative emotion perhaps that’s associated with conscientiousness and industriousness in particular seems to be more something like self-contempt and disgust.

And so conscientious people are made uncomfortable by their lack of productive effort, but that doesn’t seem to be associated with trait neuroticism—it’s a different thing. So that’s partly why it’s so necessary to get the psychometrics right, right? And to get the measurement right.

So the best hiring—the best hiring screeners are like a Big Five personality test, roughly speaking, especially weighted towards conscientiousness and for complex jobs, a general cognitive ability test, although there's some question about the legality of those in the current political situation.

So, alienating conservatives is both non-inclusive and generally bad business because conservatives tend to be higher in conscientiousness, which is required for much of the drudgery and maintenance work characteristic of a mature company.

Yes, absolutely.

So now here's what you suggest: confront Google's biases.

Well, you’ve done that. We've seen how that went.

I would start by breaking down Google's scores by political orientation and personality to give a fuller picture into how our biases are affecting our culture.

That's a fine idea!

Stop restricting programs and classes to certain genders or races.

Yes, well, obviously!

Have an open and honest discussion about the costs and benefits of our diversity programs.

Well, I guess that's what we're trying to do right now!

Discriminating just to increase the representation of women in tech is as misguided and biased as mandating increases for women's representation in homeless work-related and violent deaths, prisons, and school dropouts.

Yes, it's the same thing, and it's the same issue as the bricklayer issue as well. And what are you going to do? You're going to chase the nurses out of the women out of nursing and medicine and psychology and social work and university undergraduate programs where they're radically overrepresented.

So what about Jews? You're going to get rid of them too because they're overrepresented in most complex occupations? And Asians as well? Are you only going to do this in very limited circumstances? You're going to figure out some way to put a limit on that, are you? Seems very unlikely!

I almost wonder what the ADL is going to be thinking six months from now or 12 months from now given the high number of you know at least in the United States Ashkenazi Jews in leadership positions at companies that are advocating for less of themselves or less people who are in the bucket that they're in.

Yeah, well, as long as the discussion centers on the overrepresentation of white men, people seem to have no problem. But you start to break that down a little bit, and because Jewish white men are particularly overrepresented, is why they’re going to make an issue out of that, really? We’re going to do that?

So, and Asians are already having a harder time getting into universities, so that's well documented. And that's a terrible thing, partly because of the cost to the individuals involved, but also the cost to society because it means that we're not taking the people who are most competent and allowing them to expand their education to the greatest degree possible.

And because there aren’t that many smart competent people; they're actually rather rare, and it's to society's advantage to exploit the hell out of them and, you know, pay them well for that. But it's not like they're of no benefit, and everyone knows that when they try to hire someone competent.

De-emphasize empathy.

Yes, empathy is a good ethic for small family units and a terrible ethic to run a company by.

It looks like conscientiousness is the right ethic to run a company by, and I think conscientiousness—we don't have good animal models for conscientiousness.

Hey, but I think conscientiousness probably evolved so that human beings could operate in groups that were larger than just kin-sized, you know, because equity makes sense at a kin level. Every mother wants her children to have a good outcome in life and wants resources distributed equally between them, so it's not like it's something that doesn't have a niche.

Micro-prioritize attention; our focus on microaggressions, etc., and other unintentional transgressions increases our sensitivity. You do a nice job of criticizing that. I read Darl Wing Sue's book on microaggression—it's an appalling load of tripe, really. And I believe Scott Lilienfeld, who's a very good psychologist, has recently published a paper shredding the construct validity of the concept of microaggression.

So it's a non-valid construct right from the bottom up; it's purely ideological in nature, and it's also one of those constructs that allows anyone who's offended to weaponize their discourse around it, so yeah.

Reconsider making unconscious bias training mandatory for promotion committees.

Yeah, that should be reconsidered. It should be stopped. There's no scientific basis whatsoever for proceeding with that operation.

So great! Well, you know, it's a pretty straightforward document, as far as I'm concerned, and I've gone through it with a fairly fine-tooth comb as a behavioral scientist, and I would like to state for the record that I believe that what you said in there, if not accurate, was at least representative of the current state of art among well-trained, psychometrically informed psychologists who are experts in the field of individual difference.

So congratulations! Too bad you have to pay such a price for it.

All right, well, thank you very much for the conversation!

Ah, one other question. Why did you agree to talk to me?

I’m a huge fan!

So, and I know that you went through similar influence on this. I mean, you're going to pay a—actually, I'm not sorry; I’d like to say I was sorry, but I'm not. I'm actually really pleased!

I do think that you’re going to pay a big price for this but that the net consequence will be very positive, and I think you did an excellent job on this document. I think you were very careful. I think the fact that you're being labeled with epithets and that you were fired is absolutely reprehensible.

You know, it's clear to me that you're just trying to figure out what the hell's going on and that, you know, you’re not any of the things that people would like to think you are so that they don't have to bloody well think about what it is that you said and did.

So like, congratulations to you, man! Courageous people are rare, and you put yourself on the line, and I've really learned that in the last year. So I would say, keep your head up, assume that this is going to work out. I wouldn't hide from the press because I think the press is actually —you're the right kind of person for the press to be a—something for you to use. You know, you're well-spoken, you're quiet, you're convincing, you're rational.

You're obviously, at least you come across as a decent guy. Very, very rapidly. There’s no reason—I would say there’s no reason not to let people see who you are because I think that would improve your credibility and make your message even more powerful.

So you think about that. I mean, you have every right to defend your privacy, you know, but—and that's fine—but I don't think that you have any reason to be afraid of the press.

I would say a couple of things: when you're talking to the press, don't apologize. Don't tell people what you're not. Don't tell them that you're not a bigot and that you're not a misogynist. That's a technical error.

Um, and stick to your damn guns, you know, as quietly and forthrightly as you can. And man, you're going to come out on top of this because you're on the side of the right as far as I'm concerned.