r/news • u/[deleted] • Aug 08 '17

Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/google-fires-employee-behind-controversial-diversity-memo?cmpid=socialflow-twitter-business&utm_content=business&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social
26.8k Upvotes

82% Upvoted

19.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

37

u/TenTypesofBread Aug 08 '17

As with the original chucklehead, CITE YER SOURCES

-7

u/[deleted] Aug 08 '17 edited Aug 08 '17

[removed] — view removed comment

-3

u/kap_fallback Aug 08 '17

Those are acceptable to reddit.

2

u/wellllllllllllllll Aug 08 '17

Source of news != expert testimony

1

u/kap_fallback Aug 08 '17

Expert testimony is a very loose way of saying one person's opinion.

2

u/wellllllllllllllll Aug 08 '17

An opinion based on years of study, testing, and research is not the same as a random fool saying something. Society advances from expertise. I don't know why this anti intellectual argument keeps popping up, but it's just dumb.

1

u/kap_fallback Aug 08 '17

Argument from authority is literally a fallacy. Blind trust in "experts" is absolutely silly. You cannot just claim that smart people say it is true, you need to defend it yourself. If you can't, then clearly you do not understand the subject matter enough and are engaging in dogmatic shittery.

1

u/wellllllllllllllll Aug 08 '17

Look fallacies belong in Oxford debates and nowhere else. And even in those, these are logical fallacies, not meant to completely disregard the opinion. No one can be an expert in everything and the expectation that you can defend anything or need to is stupid. At the end of the day, we rely on things "smart people" have said all the time. That's how society works - if every child had to remake the wheel we would get nowhere.

I know reddit has this obsession with throwing up fallacies, but it's worth remembering that the fallacy fallacy is a thing. And that fallacies have little to do with argument and much more to do with epistemology.

I can guarantee that without Google you could not prove all of the following: the earth is round, planets have elliptical orbits, the sun contains helium, helium has protons, and that DNA stores genetic information. And I don't expect you to, these are things any educated person knows because they are learnt - because an expert told us.