Item — HN Reader

Fair question. Perhaps they could just tell the truth a la

"We live in contentious times, we've surveyed our employees and thought about it ourselves, and decided that no matter what we say we can't win. There is a divide in our culture and we don't have 'THE ANSWER (TM).' Only time will tell what balance we as a culture will come to in weighing out the merits of hushing stereotypes versus questioning everything.

So to avoid hasty decisions we'll bow out, and return the Dalmore 6 months from now.

We're honored this great cultural debate could be started at our workplace, but it is not our intent to make this discussion about us. We are about search, email, etc."

2 comments

Frankly, a huge number of people would be utterly outraged by that. For many putting in doubt certain commonly held values and saying "we don't know if it's true" is like a slap in the face. At least the media in general are Left-leaning, so it's much safer for Google to pay Damore a limited sum rather than open to another wave of accusations, no matter how grounded they might be.

I'm pretty sure that if they would say something like this they would lose the lawsuit pretty quickly. Then they'd had to pay the guy a lot of money.

I still think they are probably going to do so, but not as much?

Well I was thinking they'd best have done this before firing him, instead of firing him. And after 6 months if everybody, after cooling down, still thought what he did was fundamentally inappropriate THEN they'd fire him.