Few of you can have failed to hear the controversy generated by James Damore's memo at Google which has gone viral. It can be found here.

Now among the storm of reaction that this innocuous memo has generated, there is an article which claims to give a point by point refutation of the memo. It can be found here. In fact, what this article does is bring the machinations of the female mind into clear perspective.

Even the most casual reading of the two documents shows that the "refutation" does not address any of the points of the Damore's memo. What it does do is list a number of statements not made by Damore and which appear to have been back generated from the writer's feelings about what he actually did say. These new points are described, by the author herself, as "unstated assumptions." She is therefore evidently well aware that they do not appear in the memo she claims to refute, point by point.

But her feelings - her antagonism towards Damore's point of view - over-rule the facts. She persists in attacking points he did not make, and which she herself describes as "unstated", under the heading of a point by point refutation.

The cognitive dissonance is obvious, but the mechanism for generating her refutation bears a little more thinking about. What she does is react emotionally to the memo, generate other ideas that would also have caused a similar emotional reaction, attack these ideas and publish the outcome as a work of analysis.

This pythonesque attempt at reasoning (it’s effectively the same as Monty Python’s witch scene from the Holy Grail) is the political counterpart of a social phenomenon often encountered in this subreddit. E.g. it is the basis of a recent thread along the lines of “She doesn’t desire you, she desires the image you project.

Worryingly, I suspect that many historical sex accusations are simply re-generations of exactly this nature: I feel bad about it, therefore I must have felt bad about it then, it must have been coercion, I was raped. The entire story can be then re-written, without regard to the objective facts, on the basis of how she feels about it. It’s certainly difficult to explain why some rape accusations are made that are obviously and demonstrably untrue, unless you assume this sort of back generation of ideas is in play.