If you are an employee of a medium to big company, chances are that you will take part in various training courses. Not just technical ones which are directly related to your job description, but also behavioral training courses designed to get people to work together better. One of the frequent exercises in such courses is to first teach and then let people practice the difference between facts and judgments. For example an expression of a fact could be "the bottle of orange juice that I had put into the break room fridge is gone"; an expression of a judgment could be "somebody stole the bottle of orange juice that I had put into the break room fridge". The purpose of the training course is to get people to use more expressions of facts, and less judgments, because in the resolution of conflict the statement of fact is usually more helpful. The guy who accidentally and unintentionally dropped your bottle of orange juice in the break room fridge is more likely to come clean and apologize on hearing the fact statement than on hearing the (wrong) judgment statement.

Unfortunately very few people manage to express only facts. In a longer text they might have some facts in, but then put a judgment directly after that and by that link destroy the effectiveness of the fact. And if somebody complains about a longer text, it is easy to pick out just the wrong judgments as selective quotes and make the quote look far meaner than the whole text. The big story in the tech world this week is about the guy who wrote a 10-page memo on gender diversity at Google and got fired for it. The guy has a right-wing point of view, and the people who attacked him have a left-wing point of view. And because we have right-wing media and left-wing media, you get the story told in two very different ways, with very different quotes, depending on the bias of the news outlet. The left-wing media quote the worst expressions of judgment, many of which are obviously offensive. The right-wing media quote the expressions of fact, which can be shown to be true (especially due to the obvious irony of somebody getting fired for writing a memo in which he says that you can get fired for writing your opinion).

Personally I would say that Google was justified in firing the guy, because of the offensive judgments in his memo, e.g. saying that women make less good software engineers. However I do think that if he had edited out all the judgments from his text, there would have remained a memo full of facts that would well be worth discussing, e.g. the fact that the current set of gender policies at Google haven't worked in achieving better gender equality. And that gets us into an area which I consider far more dangerous: Culture wars in which attacking the opponent's judgments has become so commonplace, that attacking the opponent's facts is considered normal. Both sides do that: In other news the White House has received an official report that has the best scientific evidence on the contribution of mankind to global warming, and it is nearly certain that they will dismiss those facts because they don't fit with their ideology. On gender it is a fact that if you were to take an MRI image of the brain of a man and an MRI image of the brain of a woman, a neuroscientist will be able to tell the difference. It is a scientific fact that men and women are different, and think differently. Numerous studies have shown that *on average* certain skills and modes of behavior are more prevalent in one sex than in the other. And yes, even in a hypothetical world free of sexism and only based on merit and free choice, we wouldn't have a 50:50 distribution of genders in every profession. I believe however that in this hypothetical world's Google, men would likely be lowly paid code monkeys, while women would hold the majority of better paid management positions (that is a judgment on my side, not a fact, because hypothetical situations can never be facts). What we need to work on is to improve everybody's judgment of the relative value of different skills and modes of behavior. Trying to deny that differences exist just isn't very helpful. Just like trying to deny global warming isn't very helpful. Facts and science aren't subject to ideology and disputable in a culture war. If you treat even scientific facts as only opinions, you weaken the edifice of human knowledge on which civilization is built.