Virtue Signaling

by Geoffrey Miller

  Originally published as:

  Miller, G. F. (2017). The Google memo: Four scientists respond. Quillette, Aug 7. https://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-respond/ .

  An anonymous male software engineer recently distributed a memo titled ‘Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber.’ Within hours, the memo unleashed a firestorm of negative commentary, most of which ignored the memo’s evidence-based arguments. Among commentators who claim the memo’s empirical facts are wrong, I haven’t read a single one who understand sexual selection theory, animal behavior, and sex differences research.

  When the memo went viral, thousands of journalists and bloggers transformed themselves overnight from not understanding evolutionary psychology at all to claiming enough expertise to criticize the whole scientific literature on biological sex differences. It was like watching Trinity downloading the pilot program for flying the B-212 helicopter in The Matrix. Such fast learners!

  (Even Google’s new ‘VP of Diversity,’ Danielle Brown, criticized the memo because it ‘advanced incorrect assumptions about gender;’ I was impressed to see that her Michigan State B.A. in Business and her University of Michigan M.B.A. qualified her to judge the scientific research.)

  For what it’s worth, I think that almost all of the Google memo’s empirical claims are scientifically accurate. Moreover, they are stated quite carefully and dispassionately. Its key claims about sex differences are especially well-supported by large volumes of research across species, cultures, and history.

  I know a little about sex differences research. On the topic of evolution and human sexuality, I’ve taught for 28 years, written 4 books and over 100 academic publications, given 190 talks, reviewed papers for over 50 journals, and mentored 11 Ph.D. students. Whoever the memo’s author is, he has obviously read a fair amount about these topics. Graded fairly, his memo would get at least an A- in any masters’ level psychology course. It is consistent with the scientific state of the art on sex differences. (Blank slate gender feminism is advocacy rather than science: no gender feminist I’ve met has ever been able to give a coherent answer to the question ‘What empirical findings would convince you that psychological sex differences evolved?’)

  Here, I just want to take a step back from the memo controversy, to highlight a paradox at the heart of the ‘equality and diversity’ dogma that dominates American corporate life. The memo didn’t address this paradox directly, but I think it’s implicit in the author’s critique of Google’s diversity programs. This dogma relies on two core assumptions:

  The human sexes and races have exactly the same minds, with precisely identical distributions of traits, aptitudes, interests, and motivations; therefore, any inequalities of outcome in hiring and promotion must be due to systemic sexism and racism;

  The human sexes and races have such radically different minds, backgrounds, perspectives, and insights, that companies must increase their demographic diversity in order to be competitive; any lack of demographic diversity must be due to short-sighted management that favors groupthink.

  The obvious problem is that these two core assumptions are diametrically opposed.

  Let me explain. If different groups have minds that are precisely equivalent in every respect, then those minds are functionally interchangeable, and diversity would be irrelevant to corporate competitiveness. For example, take sex differences. The usual rationale for gender diversity in corporate teams is that a balanced, 50/50 sex ratio will keep a team from being dominated by either masculine or feminine styles of thinking, feeling, and communicating. Each sex will counter-balance the other’s quirks. (That makes sense to me, by the way, and is one reason why evolutionary psychologists often value gender diversity in research teams.)

  But if there are no sex differences in these psychological quirks, counter-balancing would be irrelevant. A 100% female team would function exactly the same as a 50/50 team, which would function the same as a 100% male team.

  If men are no different from women, then the sex ratio in a team doesn’t matter at any rational business level, and there is no reason to promote gender diversity as a competitive advantage.

  Likewise, if the races are no different from each other, then the racial mix of a company can’t rationally matter to the company’s bottom line. The only reasons to value diversity would be at the levels of legal compliance with government regulations, public relations virtue signaling, and deontological morality – not practical effectiveness. Legal, PR, and moral reasons can be good reasons for companies to do things. But corporate diversity was never justified to shareholders as a way to avoid lawsuits, PR blowback, or moral shame; it was justified as a competitive business necessity.

  So, if the sexes and races don’t differ at all, and if psychological interchangeability is true, then there’s no practical business case for diversity.

  On the other hand, if demographic diversity gives a company any competitive advantages, it must be because there are important sex differences and race differences in how human minds work and interact. For example, psychological variety must promote better decision-making within teams, projects, and divisions. Yet if minds differ across sexes and races enough to justify diversity as an instrumental business goal, then they must differ enough in some specific skills, interests, and motivations that hiring and promotion will sometimes produce unequal outcomes in some company roles.

  In other words, if demographic diversity yields any competitive advantages due to psychological differences between groups, then demographic equality of outcome cannot be achieved in all jobs and all levels within a company. At least, not without discriminatory practices such as affirmative action or demographic quotas.

  So, psychological interchangeability makes diversity meaningless. But psychological differences make equal outcomes impossible. Equality or diversity. You can’t have both.

  Weirdly, the same people who advocate for equality of outcome in every aspect of corporate life, also tend to advocate for diversity in every aspect of corporate life. They don’t even see the fundamentally irreconcilable assumptions behind this ‘equality and diversity’ dogma.

  Why didn’t the thousands of people working to promote equality and diversity in corporate American acknowledge this paradox? Why did it take a male software engineer at Google who’s read a bunch of evolutionary psychology?

  I suspect that it’s a problem of that old tradeoff between empathizing and systematizing that I wrote about in another Quillette article on ‘The neurodiversity case for free speech.’ The high empathizers in HR and the diversity industry prioritize caring for women and minorities over developing internally coherent, evidence-based models of human nature and society. High systematizers, such as the Google memo’s author, prioritize the opposite. Indeed, he explicitly calls for ‘de-emphasizing empathy’ and ‘de-moralizing diversity,’ arguing that ‘being emotionally unengaged helps us better reason about the facts.’ He is right.

  His most important suggestion though is apparently the most contentious: ‘Be open about the science of human nature.’ He wrote ‘Once we acknowledge that not all differences are socially constructed or due to discrimination, we open our eyes to a more accurate view of the human condition which is necessary if we actually want to solve problems.’ This is also correct. If American businesses want to remain competitive in a global market, they must open their eyes to the research, and ground their policies in the known facts about the genetic evolution of sex differences, rather than blank slate delusions about the ‘social construction of gender.’

  American businesses also have to face the fact that the demographic differences that make diversity useful will not lead to equality of outcome in every hire or promotion. Equality or diversity: choose one.

  In my opinion, given that sex differences are so well-established, and the sexes have such intricately complementary quirks, it may often be sensible, in purely practical business terms, to aim for more equal sex ratios in many corporate teams, p
rojects, and divisions. The evolutionary psychology research on sex differences is one of the best reasons to promote sexual diversity in the workplace – and one of the best reasons to expect that there may still be some inequalities of outcome in particular jobs, companies, and industries.

  6. The Neurodiversity Case for Free Speech

  After the Google Memo thing, I thought a lot about nerds, geeks, and aspies (people with Aspergers syndrome). I thought about the unusual challenges they face in today’s ‘cancel culture’ of runaway political correctness, social justice, and wokeness.

  I’d always been a socially awkward, introverted nerd, more interested in things than people, and more interested in ideas than in gossip. I spent most of 2nd grade playing chess with my friend Ramesh, newly arrived from India. We didn’t talk much, but ‘pawn to king 4’ was our common language. I got obsessed with science fiction in 5th grade, and read a lot of it all the way through grad school. I spent most of my summers in junior high literally playing Dungeons and Dragons with my neighborhood friends. As soon as swim practice ended in the morning, I was bicycling home thinking about Basilisks and Beholders. Weeks at Camp Greenbriar in West Virginia were exciting because they allowed copious time to design submarines and spacecraft using my mechanical pencils and drafting equipment. I loved high school math team, because it was half girls, and the girls were smart. I hated making eye contact with anyone until college, when I had to train myself to develop basic nonverbal communication tactics. Whatever success I had in friendship and mating was despite my social skills, not because of them.

  In retrospect, I had (fairly) high-functioning Aspergers syndrome. I know that’s not considered a legit diagnosis by the latest edition of the DSM (psychiatry’s bible), which lumps Aspergers in with other ‘autism spectrum disorders.’ But I don’t care. Aspergers is a thing; it’s what almost all of my closest male friends have had, and it’s what almost all of my girlfriends have sought out and/or tolerated.

  Once I saw how Google treated James Damore, author of the Google Memo, and saw some TV interviews with him, I felt an immediate emotional connection. He reminded me of my closest friend from 5th through 12th grade. He reminded me of my best friend from grad school onwards. He reminded me of myself. I could easily imagine being a couple of decades younger, working at Google, and writing exactly what he wrote, with the same careful scientific style and moral earnestness, and with the same infamous result.

  I realized that, for all the lip service that the social justice warriors give to ‘diversity,’ they don’t actually care about one of the most fundamental forms of diversity – neurodiversity. And they don’t care how their ‘speech codes’ impose an impossible burden on people with Aspergers and other neurodivergent conditions. So, I thought I’d write something for Quillette about the topic.

  This is one of the most self-disclosive things I’ve ever written. Everyone who’s met me in person knows I’m introverted and socially awkward. But it’s different to ‘come out’ as aspie in a public forum. Nonetheless, I thought, we aspies have a moral duty to stand up for our rights against the censorious normies, and if that costs me a little embarrassment, so what? I’ve got tenure.

  Originally published as:

  Miller, G. F. (2017). The neurodiversity case for free speech. Quillette, July 18.

  http://quillette.com/2017/07/18/neurodiversity-case-free-speech/

  Imagine a young Isaac Newton time-travelling from 1670s England to teach Harvard undergrads in 2017. After the time-jump, Newton still has an obsessive, paranoid personality, with Asperger’s syndrome, a bad stutter, unstable moods, and episodes of psychotic mania and depression. But now he’s subject to Harvard’s speech codes that prohibit any “disrespect for the dignity of others”; any violations will get him in trouble with Harvard’s Inquisition (the ‘Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion’).

  Newton also wants to publish Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica , to explain the laws of motion governing the universe. But his literary agent explains that he can’t get a decent book deal until Newton builds his ‘author platform’ to include at least 20k Twitter followers – without provoking any backlash for airing his eccentric views on ancient Greek alchemy, Biblical cryptography, fiat currency, Jewish mysticism, or how to predict the exact date of the Apocalypse.

  Newton wouldn’t last long as a ‘public intellectual’ in modern American culture. Sooner or later, he would say ‘offensive’ things that get reported to Harvard and that get picked up by mainstream media as moral-outrage clickbait. His eccentric, ornery awkwardness would lead to swift expulsion from academia, social media, and publishing. Result? On the upside, he’d drive some traffic through Huffpost, Buzzfeed, and Jezebel, and people would have a fresh controversy to virtue signal about on Facebook. On the downside, we wouldn’t have Newton’s Laws of Motion.

  Let’s take a step back from this alt-history nightmare and consider the general problem of ‘neurodiversity’ and free speech. In this article, I’ll explore the science of neurodiversity, and how campus speech codes and restrictive speech norms impose impossible expectations on the social sensitivity, cultural awareness, verbal precision, and self-control of many neurodivergent people.

  I’ll focus on how campus speech codes impose discriminatory chilling effects on academic neurodiversity, partly because I’m a nerdy academic who loathes speech codes. But it’s not just personal. Ever since the Middle Ages, universities have nurtured people with unusual brains and minds. Historically, academia was a haven for neurodiversity of all sorts. Eccentrics have been hanging out in Cambridge since 1209 and in Harvard since 1636. For centuries, these eccentricity-havens have been our time-traveling bridges from the ancient history of Western civilization to the far future of science, technology, and moral progress. Now thousands of our havens are under threat, and that’s sad and wrong, and we need to fix it.

  This article is a bit long, because the argument is new (as far as I know), and it requires a bit of background. But I hope you’ll stick with me, because I think the issue is neglected and important. (A note on terminology: universities are commonly assumed to be ‘neurohomogenous,’ where everyone is ‘neurotypical,’ but in fact they are ‘neurodiverse’ and include many ‘neurodivergent’ people, who cluster into ‘neurominorities’ sharing certain conditions, and who may become ‘Neurodiversity Movement’ activists to advocate for their rights. People with Asperger’s syndrome sometimes call themselves ‘aspies.’ The ‘neurodiversity’ term came originally from the Autism Rights Movement, but now includes many variations in brain function apart from the autism spectrum).

  From Eccentricity to Neurodiversity

  Censorship kills creativity, truth, and progress in obvious ways. Without the free exchange of ideas, people can’t share risky new ideas (creativity), test them against other people’s logic and facts (truth), or compile them into civilizational advances (progress).

  But censorship also kills rational culture in a less obvious way: it silences the eccentric. It discriminates against neurominorities. It imposes a chilling effect on unusual brains that house unusual minds. It marginalizes people who may have great ideas, but who also happen to have mental disorders, personality quirks, eccentric beliefs, or unusual communication styles that make it hard for them to understand and follow the current speech norms that govern what is ‘acceptable.’ Harvard’s speech codes and Twitter’s trolls may not prohibit anything in the Principia itself, but they drive away the kinds of eccentric people who write such books because of all the other ‘offensive’ things they sometimes do and say.

  Eccentricity is a precious resource, easily wasted. In his book On Liberty (1859): John Stuart Mill warned that ‘the tyranny of the majority’ tends to marginalize the insights of the eccentric:

  ‘The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the
time.’ (Chapter 3, paragraph 13).

  Nowadays, the tyranny of the neurotypical oppressing the neurodivergent may be the chief danger of our time.

  The Neurotypicality Assumption Behind Speech Codes

  Campus speech codes may have been well-intentioned at first. They tried to make universities more welcoming to racial and sexual minorities by forcing everyone to speak as inoffensively as possible. But a side-effect of trying to increase demographic diversity was to reduce neurodiversity, by stigmatizing anyone whose brain can’t color inside the lines of ‘appropriate speech.’ The more ‘respectful’ campuses became to the neurotypical, the more alienating they became to the neurodivergent.

  Here’s the problem. America’s informal ‘speech norms,’ which govern what we’re allowed to say and what we’re not, were created and imposed by ‘normal’ brains, for ‘normal’ brains to obey and enforce. Formal speech codes at American universities were also written by and for the ‘neurotypical.’ They assume that everyone on campus is equally capable, 100% of the time, of:

  Using their verbal intelligence and cultural background to understand speech codes that are intentionally vague, over-broad, and euphemistic, to discern who’s actually allowed to say what, in which contexts, using which words;

  Understand what’s inside the current Overton window of ‘acceptable ideas,’ including the current social norms about what is ‘respectful’ versus what is ‘offensive,’ ‘inappropriate,’ ‘sexist,’ ‘racist,’ ‘Islamophobic,’ or ‘transphobic;’

  Use ‘Theory of Mind’ to predict with 100% accuracy which speech acts might be offensive to someone of a different sex, age, race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, religion, or political outlook;