A short story about dr. William shockley from the mid 1980s in downtown palo alto.

In 1984 or 1985 Dr. William Shockley, an inventor, and Nobel recipient in physics, used to come into the software store that I worked at in Palo Alto. He must have been 74 or 75 at the time,

but was still very lively. He passed away in 1989. He wouldn’t frequent the store as often as Steve Jobs or Larry Ellison, but came in regularly to check out and buy software available for

his ATT PC 6300 (early IBM PC compatible). Sometimes after he would leave, we would talk about his work and opinions on races that is still controversial. I never discussed that with him,

even when hired to help him with some software issues (APL interpreter installation), at his house about 2 miles away on the Stanford campus. We talked about a lot of things, and he and his

wife were very friendly. I recall that his wife served me Japanese tea at their house. I had to explain to them that I was a 3rd generation Japanese American. My co-worker Nazir, a Stanford

student at the time, did get into it at least once with Dr. Shockley, and questioned him about why he felt the way he did about certain races and intelligence. Dr. Shockley did not shy away

from it at all, but explained his data and reasons to Nazir. None of us were convinced, but we respected him, that he did some research to show for his controversial and, wrong to us,

opinions. Probably some of his controversial research has helped us. We now know that upbringing and context influence IQ scores, and no one I consider intelligent now puts any weight into

an IQ score. The guy who wrote the controversial memo at Google needs to show his data, and probably used an unfortunate choice for his delivery of his opinion. We now know that women can be

Navy Seals, and can work in virtually any field that men can, and we know that they are intellectually equal, and have had successes in math and science for a long time. They should have

always been paid equally, and shame on Google and other silicon valley companies for not paying equal wages to all women employees.