I worked at Google for quite a while, 2005-2013, and even then, the internal political discussion was pretty toxic, but a lot smaller in scope since there are far fewer people.
There were definitely groups meant for discussing politics, and loudmouths like me willingly participated in those - however, it was very uncivil. There was a majority view in the company, and if anyone didn't agree with the majority view, the majority engaged in heckling, ridicule, etc. It was already becoming an echo chamber, and as the majority grew, their tactics grew more petty and vicious. However, this was expected in the politics groups, and you knowingly entered that fray.
What seems to be happening a lot lately is that politics are spilling over into large, global mailing lists which target a whole geographic region, so many people get involved, and when a company has 200k employees and contractors, you will find some outliers in there who will pick nasty fights.
It only makes sense that they're cutting down on something that has turned toxic. It's a bit disappointing to hear, since I personally enjoyed the occasional, honest discussion with smart people of other viewpoints - these good discussions made the much larger number of ridiculous ones, bearable.
I worked there for a similar length of time, but more recent (2012 - early 2019). The internal political discourse over that time definitely mirrored the rest of the world: becoming increasingly heated and divisive during 2016 and largely escalating since.
On the whole, it felt like it pushed the company in a positive direction --- internal discussions mirroring #metoo led to more visibility of sexual harassment and accountability for leadership. The discourse around the James Damore memo, as divisive as it was, felt like it still led to a broader understanding of the negative perspectives women in tech had to deal with constantly.
Most importantly (IMO), Google's product choices and politics are not inseparable --- Google is far too large and influential to pretend otherwise, and discussing these topics acted as a watchdog of sorts. Internal discussions about a potential censored search engine product in China resulted in pressure on leadership to change course, and pressure on Cloud bidding on the JEDI contract led to Google withdrawing from that bid.
Shutting off that political discourse feels like it'd be a huge blow to "oversight" from concerned Googlers --- particularly the ones who felt it was worth staying and using their influence internally to push Google toward creating a more just world.
Disclaimer: my comment below is directed at the culture of Google, and following in the train of thought from your comment. It's not directed at your comment or you.
Reading this comment just makes me feel baffled. How much arrogance does it take for a bunch of Googlers to assume the belief that they know what is "just" for the rest of the world?
An organization(in this case, a for-profit company) created to deliver products and services to consumers and advertisers playing politics on the world stage is laughable at best, and downright irresponsible at worst. There's no framework established within the confines of a corporation to deal with any of these sorts of social problems, and it shouldn't.
Play the right part, do the right job, and let others with the right skills and tools do the same.
> An organization(in this case, a for-profit company) created to deliver products and services to consumers and advertisers playing politics on the world stage is laughable at best, and downright irresponsible at worst.
Google is one of the largest technology corporations in existence, controlling the flow of information for huge swaths of the world's population.
They have no choice but to "play politics" as many of the decisions they make can have tremendous impact on global policy and society.
> Play the right part, do the right job, and let others with the right skills and tools do the same.
No.
More and more, technology firms and the individuals within them are realizing their own responsibility to consider the ethical implications of the systems they are building.
Private corporations acting in quasi-government ways is risky at best and terrifying at worst. While some of the checks & balances in civil+legal society have been broken, many are still there and there are repercussions when they're broken.
A corporation doesn't have the same mechanisms - public rules (aka laws), processes, appeals, accountability, etc, etc - built in and there's limited recourse when their definition of "right" and others' conflicts.
Frankly, it's begging for regulation.. and that's not even considering the potential monopoly angle.
What do you mean by they have no choice? Societies have different views and values, and the most intransient of these tend to be reflected in their laws. Companies can offer their product while avoiding politics by simply obeying the laws of a nation. For instance online pornography is a political topic yet the answer is clearly determined by nations: very illegal in Saudi Arabia, kind of legal in the UK, completely legal in the US. Companies can respect cultural views and values by simply gearing their behavior to obey the laws of the nations in which they operate. Since some people would prefer to avoid seeing pornographic results regardless of laws companies can offer an option to remove such results - which is exactly what they do. Nice, simple, no involvement in politics except perhaps determining whether 'adult results' should be opt-in or opt-out.
The last 'people' you want involved in politics are mega-corporations because they are one of the few groups that actually have the power to manipulate elections, corrupt politicians, and generally break democracies. In my opinion it's likely that the world will gradually 'progress' towards worldwide overt corporatocracy, but there's no reason we should embrace this in any way shape or form on the way there. If nothing else your post is a strong argument for why companies such as Google should be broken down. But, getting back to the original point, I think it's possible if not likely that that's already impossible -- thanks to their involvement in politics and the influence it has undoubtedly gained them.
"No. More and more, technology firms and the individuals within them are realizing their own responsibility to consider the ethical implications of the systems they are building."
Should people act in ways that disagree with their sense of justice?
Should people be allowed to speak out against things that other people do, but that disagree with their sense of justice?
I don't see how you can call it "arrogant" for people to act in accordance with their moral and ethical standards. We don't have the power to force the world do line up with our personal sense of justice. But we do have the power to make our lives and the lives of those around us more just, according to our own personal interpretation of that concept. Do you really think that striving for justice isn't OK?
- A non-decision by Google management to not place limits on its internal culture is a decision in itself, and has consequences that we are currently experiencing.
- "Justice" is not something for a profit-seeking company to have influence or power over. This is my personal belief. I believe there are other channels that are better designed to address those issues.
- My belief on this subject is limited to the above.
If you take a look inside the United States for a moment, you’ll realize we actually have a fairly hard division between civil, criminal, and political disputes.
Civil justice concerns two private parties, typically adjudicated by a Judge and Jury when they cannot reach an agreement.
Criminal justice concerns the State, represented by the Attorney-General or someone who works for him, and someone found to be in criminal violation of the laws of the State. They murdered, raped and/or defrauded someone, or something like that. The State takes a special interest because they have a monopoly on violence to enforce, and no one wants people taking Justice into their own hands. It would violate the social contract.
Political justice is typically subjective, an example of political justice would be Congress impeaching and removing a President or other official from Office.
What form of Justice are corporations specifically found to have disproportionate influence over? Certainly they might influence some laws and regulations around the governing of their business practices, but not all laws are concerned with Justice.
Justice is the domain of legislatures, Attorneys-General, police officers, juries, lawyers, prosecutors, public defenders, and so on. Justice is the domain of people that have the power to detain, arrest, try, pass judgement, imprison and kill you.
You take it as a given that they have this power and influence, but let’s say they do. Why would we formalize that state of affairs implicitly or explicitly? Their job is to be profitable, it is not to act in any meaningful capacity on Justice.
I think the problem is that the US has developed for various reasons (including a lack of discussing politics) a series of echo chambers and people don't connect politically beyond their echo chambers. In urban California, among software developers, you are likely to have one or two political views represented at most, and these represent a small racial and class-based cross-section of urban California. The first of course is the Neoliberal views of the Rainbow Capitalism camp that brought us Hillary Clinton's candidacy. If there is a second view it is the Business Liberalism view of the elite GOP members such as the Koch brothers.
You aren't going to get the political concerns of rust-belt America, or the political concerns of black families down in Watts recognized, nor will you get the communitarianism of rural America in there either.
And so that sense of justice gets warped, even regarding national issues of the US today.
What happens when these things go world wide? Someone's sense of justice gets offended by economic orders where procreative/childrearing families hold businesses which are inherited and passed on to kids, and where there are solid gender roles associated (my kids' second culture for example)? I guess we better do what we can to make the world safe for American Capitalism to come in and liberate people from family expectations. But that means opening up such cultures to economic exploitation by foreign business and that harm is waved away as if it doesn't matter.
The arrogance does matter, because the arrogance can easily lead to outright economic colonialism ("for their own good" as much now as a century ago). The way to hold it in check is for other viewpoints to actually be entertained and discussed.
> In urban California, among software developers, you are likely to have one or two political views represented at most, and these represent a small racial and class-based cross-section of urban California.
I would argue that these are the only ones allowed.
I used to hang out in predominantly Californian tech circles, and the atmosphere there was... not at all respectful of places that aren't California.
It would have been a good career move for me to suck up to them. Some of them were serial founders who hired their friends, and others could've given useful referrals.
But that'd come at the cost of being constantly insulted, hearing my family constantly insulted, and so on, and not being able to say anything in defense. I'm not interested in being around people who think everyone who isn't exactly like them is subhuman - even if cutting contact with them is a bad career move.
When I was in the US I used to have a big client in LA. When I would visit I would hang out with various immigrants when not working. There was a lovely Iranian family that owned a restaurant in the area of my client's office and we became friends.
I developed a very strong appreciation for how stratified California social class was on issues like public transportation.
Come to think of it I have been wondering why Sweden can have a really nice public transit system covering the entire country and California with less land, more people, and more tax dollars cannot. I bet that stratification is the answer.
In the sense that if you are in public with "wrong" views, you'd be shunned socially and professionally, your peers would avoid you or shame you, you may be attacked (verbally and sometimes physically) by unhinged activists, your career development may stall, you may be excluded from professional conferences, groups and projects, your employment may be threatened and in general the overall costs of maintaining such an opinion would be much higher than the "correct" one that "everyone agrees".
I am not saying this is the situation everywhere. Not at all. But it is the situation in some places, and Google seems to be one of such places.
> In urban California, among software developers, you are likely to have one or two political views represented at most
Centrist neoliberals, progressives, libertarians, and “I need active government support because private parties are not actively supporting me” anti-SJW meninists, among other political cliques, all seem to be vocally present in significant numbers among urban California developers.
I'm not sure which “one or two” viewpoints you were referring to.
But is it fairer or less fair than the cross section of society represented by executives and board members who would be policy making if employees did nothing and just followed instructions?
That is a point. It would be better though is we recognized Google as something of a common carrier and insisted that they do not try to be the arbiter of what is true.
Libertarians are rare and far between (if you don't consider somebody who likes to smoke a joint and not be busted and hates paying taxes a "libertarian", but talk about serious libertarian views), the right is almost non-existent publicly. Of course you can split hairs and find different left viewpoints represented - after all, we have how many Democrat candidates now, twenty? More? They must have some viewpoint differences between them. These probably are represented in hitech too. But is you look for broader political diversity... not the right place to look, from my experience.
If we understand Liberalism to be a social philosophy tradition starting with Hobbes, being further developed in various forms through Locke, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, John Rawls, etc. and seeking the liberation of the individual from culture, community, and family then for various the social Liberalism of the democrats (which seeks particularly to liberate people sexually from community judgments and rules) is closely connected to the efforts by the GOP to do the same for people in the business area. They are based on a common view of what it means to be human, a particular view of what freedom is, and so forth.
These assumptions are not really so fundamentally shared outside North America. So in both Sweden and Denmark, society looks a lot more like it did structurally to Aristotle than to Hobbes -- strong family households joining together in local communities to address common issues. Those local communities joining together into larger and larger units to address common needs until you have the overall kingdom. These places are less individualist and more localist.
Growing up in small towns in the US, I can also tell you that this Business Liberalism is most heavily a force politically in the urban centers of the GOP. Rural politicians don't tend to push it in the same way.
1) I would not include Rousseau among the fathers, but among the enemies of Liberalism.
2) I think the discourse in the USA has been heavily tilted in favour of libertarianism (maybe what you call "Business Liberalism") by concerted subversive effort sponsored by Koch, Mercer, etc., as outlined eg in the book Dark Money by Jane Mayer.
Rousseau certainly had an interesting relationship to the rise of Liberalism. And I am often unsure of whether to count him among the developers or enemies of the movement. I can read him both ways.
Your second point is I think correct on part of the problem but I think there is a second deeper issue which goes beyond dark money per se and implicates everyone. That is the fact that family and community are support structures which each of us rely on during hard times. If you come from a wealthy family and you really screw up repeatedly you will still probably do better than if you come from a poor family and do everything perfectly. But the family support structures have been under constant and sustained attacks on a number of means on the idea that if we undermine the family we will, for example, liberate women from inequality (in truth, it only increases gender inequality because motherhood has heavier burdens as single motherhood). Undermining the family, however, creates larger markets for a lot of things. A larger number of smaller households consume more. So business steps in to fill the role, as does the state. Moreover if you liberate business from the state and from community, then the first thing it will attack is the family and the reproductive order because it isn't very efficient for employees to have and raise kids (better to import kids after they grow up).
So I actually see the sexual liberalism of the progressive left and the business liberalism of the Koch brothers as mutually reinforcing, as politically heretical as that might be in the context of US political discussions.
>> Do you really think that striving for justice isn't OK?
The problem is that one person's justice is another person's genocide. I'm exaggerating, but not by much.
Consider the typical political discussion around Israel and Palestine. Both sides feel they are on the verge of being wiped out, with or without merit. Both sides feel they can do anything and everything to avoid that presumed outcome.
"Striving for justice" means very different things to both sides. To a Palestinian mother who has seen, say, two toddlers shot to death, justice might mean killing the offender, a soldier. To an Israeli mother of the soldier, justice might mean killing the Palestinian mother before she kills the soldier (her son.)
Details will vary, but suffice it to say, no view of this is pretty.
You dont want to talk about that stuff in the office, because there is not going to be any just solution.
> You dont want to talk about that stuff in the office, because there is not going to be any just solution.
There are going to be asshats in the office that can't handle being wrong or the fact that not everyone is sharing their views. Political discussions aren't toxic - immature people who can't handle disagreement are.
It is not great that we are letting those people ruin the workplace for the rest of us. I'm pretty sure that's one of the main drivers behind the alt-right movement. People aren't discussing and sharing views because doing so is taboo and they risk losing their jobs. Instead, people just sit at home and read wildly spun news stories which they soak up because their critical thinking ability has been impaired due to lack of training.
Utter nonsense - the lack of politcal discourse at work does not result in worse politics generally.
Politics at work has long been a no no at most companies and there's no evidence to show this has caused the rise of any extremism.
Work is where you get your work done. There is no room for you opinions on Trump etc, whether positive or negative. Your political views can very easily marginalise others especially when you hold a majority view.
You're asking why people that can't handle politics at work are 'ruining it for the rest of us'. May I turn the question around and why people that want to discuss politics at work are ruining it for the rest of us that don't?
Lack of respectful political discourse in general results in worse politics.
It should be possible to talk (and disagree) about politics without it affecting work cooperation.
I'm not sure whether the fact that it's not, is a cause or a symptom of the current political climate.
No, I am not saying that. This is exactly what politcal people at work do - they are so high on their own opinions that they start to plant opinions in other peoples mouths if they don't agree with you, you just did that to me.
I very very rarely engage in any politics talk at work unless I'm totally cornered. I couldn't care less what you think about anything beyond the scope of our work. Chances are, your opinions are nauseating. I will be polite but I won't engage.
I rarely see any political type at work that doesn't somehow create drama. Your politics and your religion are of no interest to me. No I won't join your womens march, no I don't believe in equal pay (regardless of gender etc) and yes I'm a liberal / labour voter that favours unions. These are all distractions to what I am here to do though.
Maybe it's a cultural thing, me and my work friends never discussed politics, maybe that's just the apathy of my generation?
Don't know, don't care. Politics is not for work. It's divise and the people pushing their political opinions are usally toxic and they don't even know it.
Impaired critical thinking ability leads to shitty politics. Impaired critical thinking ability is caused by people's lack of experience which is caused by political arguments being seen as taboo. You become fat if you never exercise and you become dumb if you never think critically.
Work is where we spend a major part of our lives 8-9 hours per day five days per week. The idea that freedom of speech should be suspended for the duration is dumb. People aren't automatons and shouldn't be treated as such. It leads to the bizarre situation that you neither care for nor have anything in common with the people you spend the majority of your time with. The most interesting conversations you have is "I see it is raining outside." "Yes, it is raining." because people are so afraid of breaking the workplace decorum.
Being respectful of other people not being interested in your BS opinions is not stopping your freedom of speech. You're at work to get work done, not to espouse your opinions on the middle east.
Politics isn't the only way to keep your critical thining sharp. We're knowledge workers after all.
> How much arrogance does it take for a bunch of Googlers to assume the belief that they know what is "just" for the rest of the world?
That of a regular human being with rationalized opinions through the lens available to them? For some reason only because Google has a lot of power to control the dialogue you ask them to bury their head in the sand? Or are we going to pretend that there hasn't been an arms race of sorts to game search results across nearly every topic and as such one might consider removal of what one considers to either be harmful, false, or manipulative to be a part of doing the "right" job?
What's the quote again, " The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing " -- Edmund Burke
And as far as Google goes, I think it would be easy to rationalize that (if I was a Google member) I have access to better tools than most to make a decision (more information).
- A non-decision by Google management to not place limits on its internal culture is a decision in itself, and has consequences that we are currently experiencing.
- "Justice" is not something for a profit-seeking company to have influence or power over. This is my personal belief. I believe there are other channels that are better designed to address those issues.
- My belief on this subject is limited to the above.
Everybody thinks they have better tools than everybody else to know what's right and what's wrong. In most cases, they are mistaken. The cost of being mistaken for a company that has power to control significant amount of information available to humanity is enormous. That's why in the US there are direct prohibitions on government suppressing points of view. You could think - why should there be one? Of course, if the government would suppress normal people, like you and me, it would be bad. But why not bad people? Why don't we elect a very good government, an excellent one, with the best tools and information we have, and then let it do whatever it wants, no limits? Except we know it won't work. The power corrupts, and what we'd get would be the worst tyranny, regardless of how pure were the initial intentions. Why would we delude themselves into thinking if we call it "Google" and replace elections with technical interview it would go any better?
In the US, we have government to take these things on. We have rule of law. And rights. Both government and individuals are subject to these.
With Google, there is no rule of law or rights. Goggle does not have a constitution. If you have a problem with them, what can you do? Nothing.
There is no right to question your accuser. There is no right to protect agains unreasonable search/seizure. There is no right to free speech. No right to privacy. And so on. There is only what Google arbitrarily decides to do. And if you're not in the majority as Google defines it, then it just sucks to be you.
This is why unregulated monopolies are intolerable. The US is founded on the principle that powers are separated to keep any one entity from getting too much and being able to infringe on the rights of citizens.
Google is way over that line, with monopolies in many areas. Add the partisan activism, and this is a very toxic brew.
>How much arrogance does it take for a bunch of Googlers to assume the belief that they know what is "just" for the rest of the world?
I'm often stuck in the elevator with Googlers (our office is on the same floor as one of theirs). Some of the stuff that I end up overhearing is particularly jarring. It's not really the opinions but the self entitlement that makes me wish we had faster elevators.
I think the logic is backwards. In today's world government policy is the shadow of business interests, not representative government of the people like it is supposed to be. So I am glad for political discussions inside these large organizations, it seems like an escape valve for a broken system. The biggest problem with it is that it is not representative, as organizations are often unfairly hierarchical (and hence some people get an unfair amount of influence) and the workers in these organizations aren't often a representative cross section of society.
I think you raise a good point about the nature of a for profit organization and it’s design being optimized for a particular thing, which is very much not a thing meant to generate good answers to tricky political questions that impact a whole lot of people/things. In reality, it’s headquarters is in a politically radical place where conservative voices have a helluva hard time speaking up because they could face career backlash by dissenting with the overwhelming majority views in those rooms, which are not representative samples of America. Google decision makers are not designed to be accurate representatives of America’s constituents.
Ideals aside, I think there’s a clear business reality that the radical left employee base is giving google a lot of headaches. Many might argue this is for the better, but that’s mostly because they have similar political sentiments. It seems like woke culture has made google a very tense place and is gobbling them up.
Blaming radical “lefties” and exaggerating their negative influence is a favorite tactic used to demonize that part of society. This is analogous to the now discredited argument of leftist students silencing and tensing up college campuses in the US. And it is a similarly disingenuous argument.
These "arrogant" Googlers aren't changing the magnitude of Google's impact on people's lives. Google's impact will still be there if they go away. There is no option that makes it go away. The choice is between the company's workers trying their best to come up with a just way to pilot it, or Google's impact being directed entirely by its executives and profit motive.
They changed the impact of Google on my life. I completely excised Google from my life after a couple high-profile incidents at Google indicated they the company would use its power for political gain.
>An organization(in this case, a for-profit company) created to deliver products and services to consumers and advertisers playing politics on the world stage is laughable at best, and downright irresponsible at worst.
Most large companies have lobbyists. That's much more "playing politics" than simply deciding not to bid on a military contract.
People who look at someone else and think "you should just.." are normal. We all do that.
People who look at the world and say "everyone should just.." are the height of arrogance and epitomize the phrase "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."
Is Google saying "everyone should just.."? It sounds like
jgunsch's comment is about "what should we (Google) do?". That is, should Google bid on the JEDI military contract, should Google make a censored search product in China.
> Not very much? Doesn’t everybody think like this in one way or another?
Probably. But lots of people realize they've been wrong before, might be wrong on this occasion, and therefore don't just put their ideas over everybody else's. That's the non-arrogant way to handle that, I guess.
> The discourse around the James Damore memo, as divisive as it was, felt like it still led to a broader understanding of the negative perspectives women in tech had to deal with constantly.
Damore was fired for his contributions to this "conversation". Hardly just.
> particularly the ones who felt it was worth staying and using their influence internally to push Google toward creating a more just world.
How about just returning what I'm actually looking for when I search for something? Or not killing products off when they get traction? Google users don't care at all about the politics of Google employees, they just want the product to actually work which seems to be less important that ever internally at Google.
But I also care a lot about the politics of Google employees insofar as they exercise a tremendous amount of influence over both elections and people's ability to broadcast their messages to the world.
Since Googlers tend to veer decidedly towards one end of the political spectrum, I would like to see their ability to censor speech restricted as much as is technologically possible.
So you would agree that since search is entirely technical, then search results by definition cannot present political bias?
Personally I disagree with that claim, but if you feel that search is a wholly technical problem, I'd expect you to agree.
And that doesn't even deal with the obviously political: laws like the right to be forgotten, or other forms of censorship like removals of content due to copyright. How to engage with those is inherently political.
> As a user I want back the documents I’m looking for
Of course! But converting from a search query to an ordered list of documents requires choices about ranking and filtering to be made.
If I search for "irs" do you include spam phone numbers attempting to steal my identity? There's distinct value to not returning garbage results, but how you do that is going to be called political by some people. And choosing not to do anything is going to be called political by others. There is no non-political choice, despite what you keep implying. Like, given a search query, you can't tell me the objectively correct set of results to return. If you could, you'd be very, very, very rich.
In the absence of that objective, perfect, "true" result, any choice is political in some way or another. Pick an algorithm and I'll happily explain to you a failure mode that is "political".
Sadly, a lot of people genuinely believe that everything is political. I recently expressed hope for the "no politics" guideline of HN be more strictly enforced and was told that "not talking about politics is politics". Frustrating to deal with this mindset...
I'm certainly one of those people. What is the boundary between "politics" and "not politics?" Who gets to decide?
Your employer probably has more effect on your day to day life than your government does. Why would you be allowed to debate what the latter should do but not the former?
> I'm certainly one of those people. What is the boundary between "politics" and "not politics?" Who gets to decide?
It's common sense. Anything that revolves around government, elections, laws, etc.
> Your employer probably has more effect on your day to day life than your government does. Why would you be allowed to debate what the latter should do but not the former?
I meant the exact opposite (I forgot that politics could be taken to mean "office politics" or "company politics"). Getting involved in government politics or activism is your role as a private citizen, not as a company employee. Regarding "company politics" (work hours, office arrangement, project management methodology, managerial decisions, coffee machine model, etc.), I guess it's up to your employer to decide what is up for debate.
>>It's common sense. Anything that revolves around government, elections, laws, etc.
Go ahead and google 'Taiwan' and then 'Canada' or 'Japan'. Taiwan (in the right sidebar thing) is listed differently compared to the others. They're listed as "Country in $X" - Taiwan is not.
That's political. Or is it not? It's "just search", sort of.
I don't see where you're going with this. I never claimed that Google was not political (your example wasn't very convincing though, it simply reflects the fact that Taiwan isn't widely recognized as a country). Also, a more charitable interpretation of the comment you are referring to would be that "search doesn't have to be political".
Your initial comment was "Sadly, a lot of people genuinely believe that everything is political"
Taiwan being a country or not, and what shows up in a google search about it, isn't political for you, or for me, or for many people around the world. It may be very political for the people who live in Taiwan (or China).
Nearly everything is political to someone. So it's not very easy to draw a hard line between political or not. A "no politics" rule is very difficult to enforce in a meaningful way for that reason.
You came up with a super dubious example which doesn't help support your point. Plus if you could convince me that those Wikipedia populated information boxes were politically, I could simply argue that Google should stick to returning links in its search results.
> Nearly everything is political to someone.
Saying that something is political to only a few people is an oxymoron. For example, there are some people who do not recognize Donald Trump as the US president. Is it political to state that the US president is Donald Trump? Absolutely not.
HN is an example of a community where a large majority of the content is apolitical. Drawing the line is really not that hard.
That could be the case if the distribution of views were evenly stratified, but they are not. Even the application of very simple mechanics can subtly amplify the views of the majority.
I specifically do not want results manipulated to be more politically correct. It makes sense that the most popular results would be first. I want that.
It's very possible that they are not being manipulated, simply that most people who use the internet are more left/right wing. That's the amplification of the majority.
Damore was fired for his contributions to this conversation". Hardly just.*
According to what you said in this post, It was completely just as Damore basically wrote a dissertation about things that were completely unrelated to any work done for any Google product. All that work would've been tantamount to a complete waste of company time and could be grounds for a firing.
Google users don't care at all about the politics of Google employees
I care a great deal about how Google employees or any employee at any company are treated. You should too since most people spend their lives at companies and policies and laws surrounding them impact people directly.
> It was completely just as Damore basically wrote a dissertation about things that were completely unrelated
It was a completely inconsistent.
Damore was not fired for debating politically-sensitive HR proposals. Many people were involved in the same conversation, with the same degree of relevance to Google's products.
Damore was fired because his proposal was contrary to the majority.
---
It's possible to maintain both that widespread workplace political discussion is a poor idea, and that Damore was unfairly treated relative to his peers.
Do you really think that there are no liberal opinions that are fireable? Like if I said all men are rapists, you think that’s a safe thing to say at work?
I think people took notice that saying “women earn less money because their genes make them less good at stuff” is a fireable offense. I actually don’t believe conservatism has anything to do with it.
Damore didn't say that, but that didn't stop lots of people lying about what he wrote.
I guess those few of us who actually read his memo will have to keep repeating this over and over against the wall of lying about it, but one more time - Damore argued women were less interested in computing, and that's why they are "underrepresented". He explained why they might be less interested and showed that this isn't controversial at all, neither with scientists nor anyone who ever tried to interest a pretty girl in the merits of AVX512.
He explicitly didn't argue women were worse at computing though. He said that very clearly.
You ask what liberal opinions get you fired at Google. I'd also like to know that. Here is a petition by nearly 1500 of them which claims border control is comparable to the Holocaust. That's unbelievably extreme, but apparently nobody was fired for it.
For someone who claims to be trying to tackle the misinterpretation of Damore, no where in the medium post you linked does it say what you claim it says. It doesn't compare CBP to the Holocaust. It sites the human rights abuses that it is enabling that has lead to the death of 7 people by forcing these people into indefinite detention for what could be, at worst argued, a misdemeanor. They're held enmasse in cages in warehouses which fits the textbook definition of a concentration camp.
It's surely not as bad as the Holocaust (which this petition doesn't claim what you claim it does), but it's not any better.
In working with CBP, ICE, or ORR, Google would be trading its integrity for a bit of profit, and joining a shameful lineage. We have only to look to IBM’s role working with the Nazis during the Holocaust to understand the role that technology can play in automating mass atrocity.
That's pretty direct. Working with ICE would be a "mass atrocity" and "we have only to look at IBM's role working with the Nazis during the Holocaust to understand".
You say, "It doesn't compare CBP to the Holocaust" but I'm going to have to disagree. Why bring up the Nazis at all if they aren't making that comparison, which a plain reading of their words absolutely seems to do?
They're held enmasse in cages in warehouses which fits the textbook definition of a concentration camp
Huh, and now you seem to be doing it too.
No, it fits the definition of a prison, which is where you'd expect them to be given that they're breaking the law. Are all prisons concentration camps now? No, concentration camps are defined by the fact that they imprison identity-based groups of people who haven't committed any normal crime - e.g. political prisoners, disfavoured ethnic groups and so on.
It's surely not as bad as the Holocaust (which this petition doesn't claim what you claim it does), but it's not any better.
This last part is a puzzle to figure out. It's not as bad, but also not better - those two things are in contradiction.
I don't think comparing immigration laws of any country to the Holocaust is helpful at all, as that would make literally every country basically the same as the Third Reich, which they clearly are not. And not only those Googlers are doing it but now you are too!
It's not direct. IBM was just an example to illustrate the point of what CBP is doing in terms of following a lineage of supporting mass atrocity, of which indefinitely detaining people in an inadequate facility is a mass atrocity. They aren't making an equivalence like you claimed. They could've used Japanese internment camps. However, people know what the Holocaust is a lot more.
A prison is when you're incarcerated in your own cell and not a crowded cell. A prison provides adequate comfort that meets a minimum standard of care for inmates. A prison is not putting 30 people in one room, putting 30 people in a fenced in cage, providing lack of hygiene products and having 30 people to a single toilet. They're not provided space blankets and given no bed.
A concentration camp, by definition is deliberate incarceration of a minority group in inadequate facilities to sometimes perform labor or be exterminated. Going through this one by one:
1) They're being incarcerated even for claiming asylum (which is legal in the US) and crossing a port of entry is not illegal.
2) They're being incarcerated indefinitely which is also illegal.
3) They're an identity group (ie. of latin heritage). There are no detention centers for Canadian immigrants.
4) They're placed in warehouses in cages with little access to hygienic facilities. They're placed in mass groups with no beds or individual cells. This fits the inadequate facilities criteria.
So yes, that fits the definition of a concentration camp pretty clearly.
> women earn less money because their genes make them less good at stuff
That's a poor paraphrase.
A more accurate one would be "Women earn less money on average because on average they are less interested in earning due to long-standing innate differences."
But that isn't one off Google's workplace rules, and evaluation of whether or not someone is being "just" should be partially based on how well they apply their own rules.
If I say "this thing is permitted" and then punish someone for doing that thing, it should be unjust in your eyes whether or not you would have said "this thing is permitted."
No. Why do you presume they don't apply their rules correctly? And what makes you think this isn't one of Google's rules? A diversity class usually means diversity in the sense of protected classes, not political opinions.
"According to what you said in this post, It was completely just as Damore basically wrote a dissertation about things that were completely unrelated to any work done for any Google product."
My comment was explaining why i disagree with the above. It has nothing to do with whether I agree or disagree with Google's policies, past or present.
My understanding is that Damore was asked for his response to a training class he had taken. That would make the dissertation, as you call it, a work assignment. Is that understanding incorrect?
That doesn't address either of the things I said, so I'll restate them:
1. Anything he did was optional, it was therefore not a work assignment.
2. If such a report was solicited (which I don't actually agree with in the way you're implying), the way to provide it wasn't to post it on public company mailing lists, but to give the report to the people in charge of the class.
Do you disagree with either of those claims?
I'll now add a third one:
3. A "report" of the form he provided wasn't solicited by Google. They solicited feedback on the class. Your claiming this wasn't feedback on the class. Therefore it wasn't solicited.
The second one is completely wrong, and I think the first is though I'm not certain.
* No one was looking for feedback on the class as far as I remember.
* He went to an external session to learn how to improve their own processes, which is the report he wrote. I believe in one interview he said his did do it at some manager's suggestion, and so did use work time for the trip with their (figurative) blessing.
* He sent his report only to one or two internal groups, never a public internal mailing list (one was meant to privately poke holes so submitters could improve their arguments before submitting it to HR or whoever. I've heard conflicting stuff on the order of events, so he may or may not have sent it to HR).
* It was the internal quality group that leaked it to a public internal mailing list instead of maintaining privacy.
This is the problem with these things. Literally every claim you've made is wrong. I don't know where you got it, but if you aren't a google employee, I can promise I'm more reliable than whatever you got it from. But nothing I can say is verifiable, except through oft-contradictory leaks. It's infuriating and unproductive, so I'll stop.
That's what he claims it was. He also posted it on an internally accessible mail list within the company. That's a very odd way to give feedback about a course. Usually you provide feedback directly to whoever is in charge of the course and not let the entirety of the company view it.
I felt the Damore affair exposed a perverse situation. Essentially anybody denying that there were an equal number of women equally inclined towards and capable of performing in a certain industry is used as proof of systemic discrimination. Leaving that uncontested also proves systemic discrimination since there are less women in the field proving the sexism. Then when people get upset that they're being discriminated against and lash out that also proves the sexism. Yet when I talk to just about every ordinary person on the street there is just about nobody who believes women and men have a 50:50 inclination towards all types of work besides fringe egalitarians.
If an honest discussion cannot take place that yes women are discriminated against, but that yes men and women DO in fact differ, then affirmative action will inevitably stop being about stopping sexism and start being about forcing equity as time goes on. You would have to apply a LOT of oppressive systemic sexism and force a whole lot of people male and female into jobs they're bad at and unhappy with to fix inequity in tech. Currently the reaction to people pointing out the looming problem is to fire that autistic employee for sexism and for the CEO to make a public apology.
Damore was just ahead of his time. Affirmative action hasn't distorted tech enough to destroy itself yet.
History is full of nasty stories of groups of people pushing towards creating a 'just' world.
Absolute conviction of righteousness leads to polarazation leads to extremism as nuanced opinions are projected onto the anti-pole. 'You are either with us or against us', 'You are part of the (our) solution or part of the problem', 'the end justifies the means', 'you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs' ...
The art of moderation seems completely lost as people are swept up in a never ending exaggerated and overexposed arena that requires pledges of allegiance and virtue signalling, demonization and sacrificing above and beyond all reason.
I'm not advocating everyone just shut the hell up, but the moment you when asked would not be able to switch sides in a debate and plead the opposite's case because you are so far down the path that you can not imagine anything but 'pure evil' as the motivations behind your opponent, you are no longer a valid contributor to the conversation, you are just part of a lynch mob out for blood.
Where in your comment do you show any indication you understand your views are very much both subjective and opinion and based on your necessarily limited lived experience?
In the few concrete examples you have, your wording implies a one sided take on various controversial topics.
People who think like that aren’t creating a “just world” by any definition I agree with. It’s more an example of the truism that the most dangerous people are the ones who are convinced they are acting from a place of moral correctness.
These people aren’t the solution, they are the problem.
And they can’t be reasoned with because they can’t see that, which is why they can’t stamp the problem out.
I worked at Google for quite a while, 2005-2013, and even then, the internal political discussion was pretty toxic, but a lot smaller in scope since there are far fewer people.
It sounds like the work culture at Google has rediscovered the emergent factors which gave rise to the traditional cultural strictures against talking about money, politics, and religion.
Good science is repeatable. Given that Google is arguably an intellectually friendly environment, where more people than average understand how to talk in ways that get closer to truth, the inadvertent experiment conducted by Google over the past 15 years or so should hold a lot of weight.
It only makes sense that they're cutting down on something that has turned toxic. It's a bit disappointing to hear, since I personally enjoyed the occasional, honest discussion with smart people of other viewpoints - these good discussions made the much larger number of ridiculous ones, bearable.
It sounds like the overall cost-benefit tradeoff supports Google corporate's decision. (There were externalities beyond the discussions themselves.)
I remember the Founder's Letter included with Google's IPO in 2004 - "Google is not a traditional company. We do not intend to become one." It looks like they became one.
The other interesting takeaway for me is how long-term equilibria can leave holes that may be exploited by short-term-focused actors. When Google was young, it's say-anything culture was a big competitive advantage: it let them hire people who were nearly unhireable elsewhere because they were too free with their opinions or too difficult to work with, and it let people be more open about their emotions, which is a prerequisite for creativity. Many of these people were immensely productive, building key systems. But as Google grew, this same culture would've led to the destruction of the company, so eventually management is forced to clamp down on it. Not before making the founders and many employees fabulously wealthy and reshaping the industry, though.
Every company becomes a "traditional" company because only traditional companies have survived. If alternative structures worked well then we would've seen them by now.
Also I'm willing to be that a startup's lack of bureaucracy and momentum lets it experiment and move faster rather than just a carefree internal attitude. I've been in midsize companies on both sides of the free-culture spectrum and have never noticed any major difference in talent or capabilities.
> If alternative structures worked well then we would've seen them by now
Well let’s not go this far. Human civilization has existed for a tiny portion of time, modern civilization even less so. There’s PLENTY of time for better structures to be discovered.
Within current historical and cultural context, legal and technology frameworks etc the dataset is big enough to give some confidence that better structures won’t be found tomorrow or in the next 5 years.
It's not a pissing contest; it's a misunderstanding of giving equal weight to two incredibly different probabilities. When Fox News says it's important to have a discussion about climate change and give 50% time to those for and against it, they are conveniently ignoring that 98% of scientists believe in climate change and 2% don't. But they are essentially saying both viewpoints are equally important, even though one is widely accepted to be true by the scientific community.
Yes, it's certainly possible that thinking different (or being contrarian, or stubborn, or creative, or whatever you want to call it) will lead to something great! It is also extremely unlikely unless you are in a brand new field such as quantum physics 100 years ago that whatever idea you had has already been considered by countless people before you and you are not special.
The reason most startups fail is more than just bad execution. It's because most startups weren't meant to exist because they just don't solve a problem people are willing to pay enough to make the company a profit. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try it if you really think you're onto something - but you should be aware the odds are wildly against you.
this site suddenly becomes conservative and doesn't even think progress is possible
Progress is possible. The thing is, that progress doesn't necessarily take the form that people wish it would take in their utopian fantasies. If we use history as a guide, we find that progress almost always takes a form with would have been unimaginable to past generations, if not at times even a little shocking to them. For example: The progress of agricultural technology, and its ability to feed people with unprecedented efficiency would have been considered wonderful and utopian by our forebears, until they started looking into some of the disturbing details.
A realistic, nuanced view of issues involving human factors and group psychology often incorporates elements of both the progressive and conservative mindsets. Both viewpoints are needed for effective, balanced government.
This is an absurd statement and demonstrably false on several fronts.
1) large corporations that do exist are quite different,for example there are cooperative member-run organisations like John Lewis that have been very successful. Additionally, different countries, say compare Germany, US and Italy will have different corporate structure and culture.
2) There is a massive body of academically reviewed research that demonstrates that managers and executives are affected by fads that measurably reduce productivity (such as open plan offices) and often unwilling to change even when more efficient methods are presented
3) In corporate governance there is large mount of conflict of interest. Take Skyrocketing executive pay in the past 30 years, frequent bubles, tax evasion, large amount of fraud in financial sector. etc. Does that look like an optimal, balanced system?
Actually, there's a TED talk where the implementers of remote, self-contained ATMs in India had to modify their procedures and deliberately rough up and age their paper money. Otherwise, people didn't believe that the crisp, perfect paper money that came out of those remote ATMs was real money.
If it was really ₹2000, someone would already have roughed it up already.
Look up WL Gore and Associates. They have thrived on a very different company power structure. Or maybe their founder was right and the power structure wasn't different (he thought official power structures were not where the power was held, and therefore dispensed with them in order for unofficial power structures to more easily come to the fore).
The problem is that you have to have some forms of effort in coordination and there aren't a while lot of models for that in actual practice. There are a few different topologies.
Where I work is becoming more of a traditional company in many ways. But I still look to Gore's insight that the real decisions are made around the water cooler and in the carpool van, and that is helpful.
>But I still look to Gore's insight that the real decisions are made around the water cooler and in the carpool van, and that is helpful.
So it assumes a very in-person culture for one thing.
Which is fine. But it basically excludes models based on people communicating in a more distributed way. And that probably strictly limits size and geographic diversity.
Nothing wrong with that. I can say I'm building a company in X location. I want everyone to come into the office and we're not looking to get big. That's fine. Among other things, you've described every local manufacturing, wtc. business.
I am not sure that's the assumption behind it, but I do agree these things are products of assumptions.
I have ideas for how I would organize a company if I had a blank slate. However, usually if you start getting investment, the discussions get more restricted.
I kinda of see what you are pointing at, but by definition every alternative structures we’ve seen survive long enough is now part of our tradition, so “traditional”.
I don’t see this as just a play on word, there is a wide variety of existing models that worked, and I’d also totally see a new model emerge and become “traditonal” when adopted widely enough. The world changes, companies should to.
Google was also smaller, which both makes political discussions feel more personal and allows maintaining a political bias in recruiting/hiring because you don't need to fill headcount as urgently. I would absolutely believe that a company of 100 SJWs bringing their whole self to work contracting with a company of 100 MAGA hat wearers bringing their whole self to work would be more productive than putting all 200 of them in a single company and imposing the traditional politeness restrictions of a corporate job.
So the question in my mind is, why did Google need to grow?
>100 SJWs [...] contracting with a company of 100 MAGA [...] would be more productive than putting all 200 of them in a single company and imposing the traditional politeness restrictions of a corporate job.
So the question in my mind is, why did Google need to grow?
I had trouble parsing what you wrote but I think the question you're asking (growth with employees vs growth by contractors?) is answered by Coase's "The Nature of the Firm": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm
EDIT to reply: I don't think it's about "diversity". OP specifically asked ", why did Google need to grow?"
Presumably, the question could be expanded as "why did Google need to grow to 100,000 _employees_?" instead of
"only have ~1000 core employees on Google payroll and augment with 99,000 _contractors_". (The reason given by Coase is that activities mediated by too many unnecessary external vendors with contracts is less efficient than hiring people into the firm.)
I left it open for OP to clarify what he was asking but I don't think it's about diversity.
I'm specifically saying that political diversity (sometimes inaccurately called "diversity of thought") is disruptive. If one side thinks the other side doesn't believe they should exist as people—and even more so if they correctly believe so—how do you get the psychological safety to tell each other hard truths about their work?
(As for demographic diversity, the SJW population and to a lesser the MAGA population have that, empirically it doesn't inherently cause strife.)
If one side thinks the other side doesn't believe they should exist as people—and even more so if they correctly believe so
As someone who had grown up in a part of the country, where my parents had to drive almost 50 miles to hang out with people vaguely of the same ethic group, let me posit that the real problem is:
People who don't think certain other people should get to simply exist.
On the other hand, a company full of people who genuinely believe in fundamental human rights, self determination, live and let live, and the equality of people (even of people they don't like or agree with) does just fine. My former company did just fine with that. Democrats interacted with republicans, with people of faith, with atheists, with people of all backgrounds and skin colors.
The problem is with people who go around "seeking" people with the wrong opinion. Frankly, this reminds me of the same kind of "seeking" that some people who turned out to be racist enacted with me as a young adult, questioning me to find out how "American" I was to justify mistreating me. (Even some of them know better than to attribute to genetics what should be attributed to culture.) The similarity with which some people (who claim to be about "love" and "justice") enact the same "seek, then persecute" pattern is eerie to me.
I'd rather have someone who would use a racial slur on me, then accord me some meritocratic respect later, than someone who assumes I should think, vote, and affiliate a certain way based on my skin color, then gets outraged if my compliance to their expectations isn't 100%. True liberals are live and let live. It's false to be "liberal" and then demand ideological compliance -- or else. Doubly so if that reaction is based on identity.
The issue isn’t that contractors are less productive, nor are they less capital efficient. The issue is they are less easily controlled. You can’t just issue a directive via email and expect them to obey it because that will put their legal status as contractors in jeopardy. You can’t just demand they use your equipment or follow corporate policy.
If you are happy just having the job done, and don’t need the ability to control details of execution then contractors are often more efficient. (Depends on the task and the market)
The danger is, you may find your contractors start selling to your competitors. Then you need to compete on your core product.
Most corporate strategies don’t boil down to “have a competitive core product” they boil down to “control as many aspects of your market as you can so the cost of entry is too high for others to follow”.
The larger issue is that if we accept a correct scope of work to be including someone's sense of social justice, then what happens when you now have a lot of people from very different cultures perhaps with very different views of cultural topics such as gender.
If we accept that culture influences politics, then cultural diversity means necessarily political diversity does it not?
It's the same way in every endeavor. People get used to doing things a certain way, and forget the reason why. Try a different way, and relearn the reason why :-)
It's a reason why hiring some older people is worthwhile. They can tell you why things are done in way X, so you can avoid costly mistakes.
This. Worked at HP for years. It was a pretty great company for the most part.
Until Carly Fiorina joined. Amazing how one person can so transform a company - in a bad way. It started almost immediately. But buying Compaq really accelerated it. Companies like Compaq that have been in a slow death spiral throw off good employees.
That leaves low performing politically focused who protect their own. When they get purchased and “integrated” and they start filtering throughout the parent - like an infection, spreading their poison and killing it from the inside out.
HP was on a downward trajectory before that. Which is why Fiorina ended up on board. As a colleague of mine notes at the time "Bring back Lew Platt" was not really a strategy either. I do think the big computer companies of the era reached a certain ceiling beyond which it was challenging to grow.
Haha this prompted a flashback to an all-hands we had when purchased by Lucent, led by Fiorina and her minion Lance Boxer (you might think that's from a comic book, but literally that was his name... for when the pugilistic becomes pornographic). She talked about how we were all in for the long haul together, and was gone to HP within months...
Certainly a 100,000 person company is going to have characteristics that someone who generally prefers a 1,000 or 100 person company may not much like. But not all large companies become "terrible" companies--whatever that means exactly.
As the peer comment notes, there are also companies that remain private and mostly small and march to their own drummer. Of course, those can easily end up in family control spats and the like.
Nothing's perfect but I'm not sure the lesson is everything sucks or dies in the end.
My tenure overlapped ('06 - '10) and the discussions were lively. There were (and probably still are) interesting meta-terms like 'centathread' which was a topic that had received >= 100 replies (the gmail threading limit at the time).
That said, the change in policy (what is cited at least) reads a bit like "Let's create air cover for management actions to separate trouble makers from the company." Where trouble makers has enough vagueness in it to cover a wide swath of things. That allows for 'for cause' termination which is more financially advantageous to the company than simply laying someone off.
So to the extent that Google didn't want to be a 'traditional' company with all its rules and opaque policies and structures, it clearly is learning through experience the motivations that companies have for establishing those sorts of rules.
What I find disappointing is that after reproducing the experiment and getting the same results, they aren't able to come up with any other solution than the centuries old authoritarian one. I feel like they missed an opportunity here.
There’s a decent chance this centuries old authoritarian method, which is more like millennia old, is actually the best way of dealing with it.
Humans are more or less the same as a few millennia ago. Our technology is more advanced, we’ve more or less covered every corner of the planet, we have birthed billions of humans and built millions of organizations of every stripe, and dealt with as many management issues as there were and are people.
We haven’t significantly advanced in our cognitive capabilities, we’ve just learned how to outsource more to experts and computers. If there’s one difference between us and us a few millennia ago, it would be that there are so many more humans on the planet that we probably don’t have a role in society for everyone. Under, e.g. a feudal System, every person had a functional role, and those that didn’t could at least point a spear in more or less the correct orientation. Vagrants of course were prosecuted and often pressed into service doing something somewhere for somebody.
In 2018, Google had ~99K full time employees. That’s larger than most cities, and historically, most countries. At that scale, you eventually need to tell most of them sit down, shut up and fall in line. Check their problems at the door, and if they really really need to fight about something, do it off premises on their off time without company resources, just to keep the peace.
I don't disagree, but I will contrast that with my later experience at IBM (when they bought Blekko).
IBM had at the time 400,000+ employees, so more than four times the employee base of Google. IBM is over a hundred years old at this point so have been doing this about five times longer than Google has.
In IBM's case they came at it from the opposite direction. Fifty years ago there was practically zero horizontal communication in the ranks and they were interested in increasing that to get better dispersal of thoughts and ideas throughout the company. As a result they were deploying and encouraging a sort of internal social network to improve cross flow and get more things out.
You raise an excellent point, and going over-totalitarian is just as likely to crush innovation as anything else.
However, I think taking an authoritarian stance on politics, religion and so on in the workplace, so long as it is done in a respectful manner and puts everyone on the same level, is completely appropriate.
When you are a group of ten, and that’s your entire company, you can get away with a lot. Everyone is going to know each other, maybe a little more intimately than some of them would prefer. Your CEO might also be your drinking buddy and a good wingman. That’s the nature of a small organization.
At 2K, things don’t have to be quite so intimate, you don’t have to know everyone by face and name, just get along with them well enough to do your jobs.
I’m not going to try and guess where the tipping point is, but at 99K or 400K, there isn’t a lot of difference between the organization ability you need. Everyone has their own ideas about Life, the Universe and Everything, some teams might get along better than others, but politics and religion and the like have led to actual wars between smaller masses of people. If you have 99K on your payroll, not all of them are going to like and respect each other. Not every team is going to have perfect cohesion with every other team.
You still want civility. Every one of those 99K or 400K people has their own ambitions and dreams and reasons for getting out of bed at whatever time of day they crawl out of bed. But there is a time and a place for it, a whole wide world and life outside that of your employer’s little world, where not everyone is necessarily on the same payroll.
Absolutely if you can build an internal social network for your workers, that’s great! If they want to debate politics outside of work, that’s great too! It is still entirely appropriate to moderate that network, and draw a few hard lines where you think it is appropriate.
Typically, bureaucracy and internal policies are what kills innovation in large established companies, not lack of political debate. It takes so much energy and internal politics to make the smallest changes that an organisation constituted of otherwise smart knowledgeable people will only produce mediocrity.
But what is the alternative? The problem is diametric opinions end with two people (no company involved). What is the company to do to get people with opposing views to “get along”?
Let’s put up Tibet. Some people will have strong opinions on one side and another set will have strong opinions on the other side. (Most people will be indifferent).
How can the company manage that tension among people who work for them when those people believe the company has given them the freedom to pick a side and express that side and perhaps vocalize and ultimately mobilize?
I don’t see an obvious solution to this beside the traditional course. The present alternatives are even more “authoritarian” (i.e. firing the adherents of the wrong opinion, etc.)
The 'hard' solution is to teach people to communicate about topics on which they disagree. An easier solution would be to have employee moderators. A combination of providing communication classes and moderators with a dose of involuntary enrollment might be a middle ground.
For a long time Google generated hundreds of thousands of dollars per employee in revenue which they have been banking for the most part, and occasionally spending on acquisitions. An alternative would be an employee communications support network that promoted good communication skills and facilitated improvements in employee discourse on all topics. Google could have funded an entire research institute and a few thousand employee 'coaches' without meaningfully digging into their cash pile. That would have been "non-traditional."
I love that suggestion and I've borderline fantasized about initiatives like that. I always wonder why debate-focused activities aren't more popular. A few obstacles usually come to mind:
1) Top-down, it's hard to convince people of the value of this who don't already see the value. It's hard to attach a KPI to it, hard to attribute changes. Or at least, from some POVs.
2) It's hard to be sure there will be participation. It's easy to pop off via text when you're procrastinating or got (self-)baited into a conversation. Scheduling discussion time / debate club or whatever feels like a chore.
3) It takes work. Like, to actually have a good debate about something takes time to think, engage, research, reflect and iterate the conversation. Not to mention the willingness. As above, it's easier to engage in junk food discourse than it is to challenge yourself, patiently tune your message over time or advance a dialectic.
But that said, those all feel like workable problems. I'm not sure if I'm missing something or if this is one of those cases where nobody has mustered enough will and attention to give it a real shot.
Mediation and coaching are certainly great ideas for non-traditional approaches, although I feel that’s beyond the scope of a company given how resource intensive this is.
Beside, you won’t get the Dalai Lama with all the tools at his avail to accept the mainstream Chinese point of view.
That said I wouldn’t mind if a company tried this approach out of curiosity to see how it works out.
> although I feel that’s beyond the scope of a company given how resource intensive this is.
That's the thing, Google banks multiple BILLION dollars in free cash every quarter. Lets say you build a 'company within the company' and give it a budget of $100M a YEAR. That is a pretty sizable enterprise for what is funded out of about 1% of the cash that would otherwise just sit around in 'cash and cash equivalents'.
One might think that an executive management team might say, "Hmm, if we spend 1% of our free cash flow on improving the communications of all of our employees, what effect will that have on their productivity?" Will they be "more productive" or "less productive" ? They already have the null hypothesis results to compare to.
To make a comparison, a more "traditional" company might consider starting up a private bus service to move their employees from their homes to work and back again was too resource intensive. And yet that is exactly what Google did.
> The 'hard' solution is to teach people to communicate about topics on which they disagree. An easier solution would be to have employee moderators. A combination of providing communication classes and moderators with a dose of involuntary enrollment might be a middle ground.
The easy solution is to just do what has always been common sense: don’t talk politics at work. Because even the if there is healthy debate, at the end of the day people are petty about people on “the other team.” For example, I’ve gotta imagine being outed as a Trump voter at Google has to put a huge target on your back.
Problem solved: There should be no "opinion" at the workplace outside professional topics. Unless you're the person in charge of the Tibet strategy, your opinion should stay at home.
I agree but what if the employer takes a position on Tibet? Or more likely on any hot potato topic (gender equality, Trump, pushing the political debate either side if the company has the ability to do so, etc).
Great points. There are plenty of areas to discuss politics, and at work doesn't have to be one of them.
I've studiously avoided talking to anybody at work about politics, as it usually only serves to anger people if you don't agree. I've had a successful career of doing that.
I enjoy discussing politics, at work too, however, you have to do it in a respectful way. Politics is like religion, you will never directly convince anyone of anything, but if you can expose them to new ideas, and watch them either incorporate or challenge these ideas, it's a really rewarding discussion. You also have to limit these discussions to willing participants.
In my time at Google, there were tons of people who felt they had the right answer, and had to convince everyone else who was wrong to come around to their views.
>you will never directly convince anyone of anything
Policy is the surface level of a deep tree of rational beliefs. No one will ever be convinced of policy because each sees their favored policy as rational due to the underpinning structure of beliefs.
Discussions that don't begin with the core beliefs are bound to lead nowhere, you're right.
You're right in that a lot of policy debate these days is folks talking past each other, ignoring their irreconcilable fundamental assumptions. But a discussion artifically limited to discussing those in the abstract will go nowhere. Most people best converse productively at the level of a series of examples.
I agree. A big reason for not achieving something in an activity (whether a discussion, a software project or something else) is not being clear what you want to achieve in the first place.
That sounds like a fine approach, but unfortunately politics creeps into more and more aspects of life, hardly any topic remains apolitical.
Like that quote "you may not be interested in war, but ..."
That sounds like a fine approach, but unfortunately politics creeps into more and more aspects of life.
Do a historical survey of people who tried to suffuse politics completely through the lives of their followers. For completeness, look also at the actions of religions in the same way.
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Politics, movements of any kind which demand the entirety of the lives of their followers are often perpetrators of the worst things.
As a counterpoint, look to times and places where people are free to be open, to be themselves, and to choose how they live. There is also a power in the dispersal of power. Many call this freedom.
Like that quote "you may not be interested in war, but ..."
The way Robert Heinlein put it was something like this: "The end product of politics is like the result of peristalsis. It's not very pleasant, but it's no less vital to your health and well being." I think this is a good analogy. Imagine having a cocktail party conversation with someone singularly obsessed with their digestive tract.
I'm trying to say this as politely as possible, but... are you serious?
If you seriously cannot have conversations at this level without them turning into political discussions, you really need to reflect on your conversational habits. It is absolutely not normal or healthy if you can't talk about drinking water without it turning political.
My SO is a vegetarian. It comes up a lot, both with my friends (who are all meat eaters) and newly met people alike, but I seriously cannot think of one single time it has turned into a political issue.
If these topics are frequently turning political for you, it's on you.
In places where there's more political diversity, people aren't so uptight. They know there are others who aren't like them, that's OK, and we all sort of get on with our lives. I grew up in Illinois and it feels this way.
Whereas in northern California, the "muscle" of respectful tolerance doesn't get as much exercise. People are a lot more alike and if you stand out, it seems weird. Which is kind of ironic for a place that's supposedly bought into "diversity" or "tolerance".
Yes. I am truly trying my best to understand your viewpoint here, but I honestly don't understand why you imply that those questions, or even any questions similar to them, would be necessary parts of a conversation about vegetarianism. In all of the various discussions we've had with each other and with other people, even very in-depth ones about her reasoning for being a vegetarian and how other people are not vegetarian, not once has any three of those questions come up.
The original point was in-depth discussion of things like dietary restrictions necessarily come to political questions. The counter-argument seems to be "don't discuss anything in depth."
That is not at all the counter argument. It is very possible (easy, even, at least for me and my work/social circle) to have very in depth conversations about vegetarianism without bringing up any of the questions you posed. As I said in my previous comment, my SO and I have in-depth conversations all the time with people regarding vegetarianism and not once has any of those questions surfaced.
I showed my SO this thread and she laughed at the notion that she apparently can't discuss her lifestyle (she takes a car to work and drinks tap water, too) without it being political.
I suspect, as another commenter said, that this is apparently a cultural aspect where I and those around me have always grown up talking to people about such topics without any of them becoming political, while apparently others have not had such 'training'.
There is a confusion here. These are certainly ethical issues, that may be discussed at the level of the particular personal ethics practiced by particular people. Immediately jumping to the political is a particular (and particularly unpleasant) way of answering these questions, but not the only way. I would never eat chimpanzee, but I would consider eating horse. My friend would never eat horse, but would consider eating veal. We can discuss this from an ethical perspective. We don't have to lower the discussion to politics.
It's a good question; I may not have a satisfactory answer. There is something uncontrollable about the political. It always stands in relation to the rest of humanity, and we can't control or necessarily even predict what they will decide. Whereas, even if I take inspiration from other humans whom I treat as ethical exemplars, my sense of ethics comes ultimately from myself.
Whether one sees a distinction between these two concepts may align with one's position on the spectrum between individualist and authoritarian. Or maybe not, I really don't know...
> Whether one sees a distinction between these two concepts may align with one's position on the spectrum between individualist and authoritarian. Or maybe not, I really don't know...
If so, then we would assume that people who see a distinction there would also see nothing wrong with different countries having different political orders, for example stronger gender roles, procreation being tied to marriage, and marriage being tied to household business? We might assume that authoritarians would want to stamp out such variations and individualists would assume that different cultures can organize things like marriage and business differently?
But that doesn't match our observations I think, so it has to be something different. Either that or everyone is secretly an authoritarian when it comes to disagreements regarding social order and ethics of relationships or when we decide to be because it is "really important."
I don't feel that assumption is warranted, but I'm not surprised that someone else does. For myself, I definitely prefer some political orders to others.
Even so, I recognize that some authoritarian polities produce better lives for many of their subjects than some less authoritarian polities do. There's always room for improvement. A situation in which husbands don't beat wives because the people are educated in humane fashion is strictly superior, in my estimation, to one in which husbands don't beat wives because that would invite devastating punishment from the state. Even that latter situation is strictly superior to one in which husbands do beat wives and the state reserves its devastating punishments for other purposes.
However, that is not to say that the society blessed by humane education should make war on either of the other two, or on some society like our own in USA that is in some sense an average of all three. Humane culture is best spread by example, not by the sword.
By the way I agree that we should lead by example but I don't know how you can get beyond the fact that different evils are so different they cannot be directly weighed off each other.
For example how do you weigh the draining of capital by foreign companies agains the purported benefits of liberating people from family and family business expectations (which my wife by the way definitely does not want to be liberated from)?
It is possible to simply not seek authority. We can opine without seeking to enforce our opinions on others. I was no fan of TPP, but I never took any action that was motivated by that opinion.
It's usually the vegetarian (vegan) that starts it, so if it doesn't turn into an issue, your SO has the non-escalation skills, not all of your meat-eating normies.
I'm curious if you live in San Francisco, Seattle, New York City, Portland or any "woke" city. The point you're replying to is palpable as someone that has lived in two of these places, but I agree that it would sound absurd based on my experience living in places that aren't highly woke.
That said, my SO and I travel frequently (and due to the nature of our work, our friend group is very varied in terms of where they come from, with several of them being ex-SFers/ex-NYCers, etc). I honestly can't think of any increased politicization when talking with non-Texan friends versus Texan friends.
These are all very easy to discuss at work without politics. You ask, "Do you have any dietary restrictions? If so you should make sure to read the menu closely, it'll tell you what the dish contains."
There, now I know as much as I need to about my coworker's diet. We're here to work and if you're going to be a member of a _diverse_ community with a shared goal you're going to need to accept that other people live their lives differently than yours and that's ok. I don't need to know the reason my coworker is a vegetarian I just need to let them know if my cookies that I brought to work contain animal products.
If you refuse to get along the result will be internal strife and the shared goal, a successful company, a working community, etc. will fail.
Sure you can. You can have an attitude of tolerance, of acceptance, and embrace different opinions/stances. Judge a little less, worry a little less about what others do.
Our culture has become a toxic stew caused by everyone forgetting to mind their own business; partially because people think that because politics does have a part of everything people do (hence the etymology of the term), that it gives them the right to control others. Fascism is the end result.
>Sure you can. You can have an attitude of tolerance, of acceptance, and embrace different opinions/stances. Judge a little less, worry a little less about what others do.
Completely agreed on that point. In fact that's how politics should be discussed.
But if we consider politics to be "what should we do as a society?" then you can't avoid political discussions in those topics still, right? You can only seek to discuss such topics tolerantly and maturely, I think.
I will admit to having avoided arguing with one of my colleagues about whether it is irresponsible to have more than one child in the current state of the world (he thinks it is, and I have three kids).
I would generally find all of the above somewhat too pedestrian as topics, if they come up too often. Also, I've discussed all of the above at work with coworkers recently, and when things do veer into the political, they don't go too deep (though at my current job, we're free to be quite acerbic) and the conversation veers away to something else.
I guess we treat the avoiding taboo topics more like not driving on the lines, and less like driving over a minefield. We generally avoid for safety's sake, and don't expect things to blow up immediately if there is a bit of driving over the line.
I don't think this is true anymore. Even war doesn't impact my life. We've been at war almost 20 years now and the only difference it's made in my life is airport trips are more annoying. And even if war did impact my life more directly, I don't see how discussing it at work would be helpful in any way.
Living in Europe and being a bit closer to the war zones, I can tell you it has affected my life in a large number of ways. It is a big reason why a lot of my voting in the US is for whoever seems more anti-war (within reason).
I also vote anti-war. Would you mind sharing some tangible examples of how it's affected your life? I'm not looking for a debate, I'm genuinely curious.
1. I was commuting between Sweden and Denmark when the refugee crisis (people fleeing our efforts at proxy civil war in Syria, and our efforts at direct war in Iraq and Afghanistan) caused the Swedes to have to close their borders. This was not controversial. Migrationverket could not house the number of refugees who showed up and so refugees were sleeping on the street in Sweden in November. This lead to hours of lost time every day and eventually the loss of a contract that lead to the commute, and eventually after that, to a stagnation in my work (I left Sweden for Germany in part for that reason). You would see whole families with nothing trying to get somewhere they would have some sort of chance.
2. My kids have been subject to some harassment due to the fact that they are mixed SE Asian/White, and therefore could probably pass for Afghan. This was true in both Sweden and Germany.
3. Now the lines to get things like work permits or blue cards renewed are getting longer and longer (because of capacity shortage in civil servants) which means that when I go to get this renewed, I need to plan six months to a year in advance. A large problem here is the fact that the refugees are impacting the immigration service departments. Its to the point I am considering giving up US citizenship for German citizenship just to get around that problem.
There are of course more. Not getting into the amusing problem Sweden has with hand grenades and plastic explosives (organized crime gangs scaring each other late at night by setting off bombs and grenades, though I suppose that's better than drive-by shootings).
I'm sorry that your kids have been harassed. It's very hard to watch it happen to them. My son is 6 years old, non-verbal, and diagnosed with autism. In my son's case, how do I explain bigotry (and he clearly feels it)? In your kids' case, they may understand the explanation, but still struggle to reconcile the feeling.
Yeah. In one of the worse incidents in Germany, to the credit of Germans, the majority of adults in the around came to my kids' defense. I tell them to try to be thankful for the culture of being helpful, but it was a hard thing for them.
For a long time my oldest hated Germany after that. I actually feel bad because both of being part of the Berlin tech boom that is causing rents to rise really fast (and price many Germans out of the city) and also for the fact that refugees are being used to undercut wages (I know of too many cases of refugees being paid under minimum wage to ignore that dynamic).
But that doesn't excuse ranting at my kids as they are walking down the street.
That's not how war affected your life, that's how immigration policy affected your life, nobody forced Sweden to accept those people. The UK has the same problems and most of the immigrants there are not from those wars. Hungary doesn't have those problems because they don't let in immigrants. You just want to be anti mass immigration but too afraid to admit it so you say you are anti war.
Yes, nowadays attempting to “stay out of” politics simply leads to people accusing you of actively supporting the status quo. You can’t win, once a political culture has taken root around you.
I think you can accept or be neutral on the assertion that "the personal is political", without it entailing that you actually live in a state of political engagement. After all, the professional ought not be personal.
And the other thing is that the company may itself be actively involved in politics that some of its employees may object to. Google actively tries to control the political debate through youtube. Its positive discrimination policies may be considered by some of its employees as objectably discriminatory.
I can understand that the company will not tolerate anyone publicly disagreeing with its political stance but it is a natural thing for their employees to discuss the politics of their employer between them.
Though given the little tolerance of large companies for disagreeing their politics (not just in the Silicon Valley), the said employees would be well advised to not do so in writing.
> Good science is repeatable. Given that Google is arguably an intellectually friendly environment, where more people than average understand how to talk in ways that get closer to truth, the inadvertent experiment conducted by Google over the past 15 years or so should hold a lot of weight.
But what conclusion should be drawn from this experiment?
During those years, Google grew into a large and profitable company, with enormous impact on the world and technical community. One could argue that the lack of a traditional corporate culture was important for attracting the employees who made this possible.
Perhaps Google eventually grew to the point where this was no longer a positive factor -- but even knowing that, should they have done things differently in the early days?
You could look at message boards in the public space, Yammer, etc and draw the same conclusions. Online communities always have a critical mass where increasingly strong moderation is required.
Organizational structure is a massive influence on any organization's outputs, and seems over and over to be substantially more important than the personal attributes or credentials of the pool of employees. This is discussed by Clay Christensen in the context of disruption tech theory, it's enshrined in hacker lore as Conway's Law, and I'm sure is well known across many other domains.
One could interpret the overall trajectory of Google here as reaching the limits of disruption-capable organizational design. It's likely they hit that limit some years back, and have just reached the point where they've internalized it enough to drop the pretense.
It's not all bad -- there are many things at which large corporate structures excel. They're just not typically the ones that are sought in Silicon Valley.
I am not sure if google could have done that but there is always the realization to be made that small is beautiful. At some point growth turns into taking on more useless people and then you need more money to fund all of them and then you need to turn to unethical practices. Perhaps the google founders could at some point have decided to buy back as much of their stock as possible and after that they no longer would have needed to make as much money as possible and could have just kept having the greatest search engine with a little advertising on the side.
Yep, feels like there's a bias in here. The "big experiment" that is on our radar (which is supposedly proving that free culture is a liability after all) is only big and on our radar to discuss because it reached such success compared to other companies (and it grew under those same conditions we're maybe implying are being proved wrongheaded?)
> traditional cultural strictures against talking about money, politics, and religion
That is not a particularly widespread tradition globally or historically. And I personally think everyone should be incredibly skeptical of it.
I've never met anyone with power who followed this tradition, and plenty who are kept powerless by the always-one-sided application of these traditions.
These subjects are difficult to discuss because they are important, I find it far easier to believe that this toxicity comes from default of not talking to your family/friends/community about some of most important aspects of your life.
Another view might be that it's impolite or rude to bring it up.
Consider that other people might not want to talk about these things, and by bringing them up yourself, you're prompting others to share their own opinions, which they may not (for whatever reason) feel comfortable sharing.
There's also the reality that many of these conversations just aren't productive. Best-case scenario, one person talks, the other talks, maybe they learn a little about each other, or their mutual empathy is enhanced. But a lot of times, it seems like two otherwise civil people find out things about each other that actually degrades their relationship. "Too much information" is real and at 34, I've learned there are some questions that just aren't going to lead to a productive conversation, on balance.
The unproductive version is a big problem, precisely because people don't have the social skills to navigate it because it is so often taboo. So the options are to make it taboo or to adapt.
"don't speak about these important things, we don't have the EQ to handle this conversation" is a strong pro-status quo political stance to take and couching it in apolitical terms is dishonest.
I agree, rules that govern large organizations didn't grow out of "mean bosses doing mean stupid things" but out of need for such a large organization to work well together. But, while that is true, it doesn't necessarily mean people will like the new Google, everyone's got their own personal taste in how the work culture should be and regardless of having very rational reasons why the culture is changing in some way, people that enjoyed the previous culture are likely to not enjoy as much the new one, resulting in increased difficulties hiring and keeping them.
Similarly, as the size and footprint of a company grows, the parameters controlling/sustaining the growth/maintenance of said company also change as well, thus changing the required talent profile accordingly.
EDIT: for the sake of the completion of thought, I want to add that the opposite is also true: a young company in a fast growing innovative industry can afford to hire a different kind of talent without harming its growth, and as the industry matures, they simply can't afford to keep doing that.
This! All categories break down but many arise out of some reasonable necessity. The categories of "work life" and "personal life" are useful categories. I see no reason why I should discuss politics with someone I work with. It seems like a recipe for disaster.
I've almost always found it completely beneficial when workplaces discourage talking about politics or religion. Everyone just gets along better, and that's a good thing for a work environment
This. I've been saying for a long time now that 2010-era Google will be in business school textbooks for generations as an example of why we have a taboo against contentious issues in the workplace.
It's like the old demotivational poster said: "it might be the case that your purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others".
Do you mean "internal political" as "Oh man Jimmy is in charge of gmail now!" (just a made up example of internal politics there) or "Can you belive what the POTUS did!?!?!"?
If the latter, I'm a bit surprised ... I can't imagine having that kind of conversation at work. That is absolutely a NO GO zone for me at work.
And this was common workplace discussion!? This seems like a disaster waiting to happen. I don’t know why you’d want to introduce the divisiveness of politics to your workplace.
It must be US culture there: everywhere I've worked (in France) arguing about politics was always ok. Even fun when you get people of differing views who can explain how they came to those so you can debate. Things must be boring when you have to limit yourself to safe subjects.
That's only a US thing. In the rest of the world (well, I can only speak for a few european countries) discussing politics is normal office chat. Why wouldn't you want to discuss current and thought-provoking issues with your peers?
I get the feeling people are much closer politically in other countries than they are here, which makes the debate a bit more polite. Remember, to half the US population if you voted for Trump you’re a Nazi. Not a lot of room for people to debate you in a serious manner or even think of you as a human being when those are the stakes involved.
Generally not out in the open, but on internal groups (message boards) or email chains. Keep in mind the vast majority of people working at Google don't care - the people looking to engage politically are a minority group and found each other on the intranet.
Many moons ago I worked for a company that did some outsource work for another company who asked for responses to an anonymous survey.
So I responded.
1. I shouldn't have gotten the survey as I didn't work for the company who sent it, but nobody at either company was very smart or careful because it went to everyone.
2. I misread the email and didn't notice it wasn't my company asking for responses it was the company we did outsource work for.
I made some pretty tepid constructive criticism. So did a couple other people.
The next day we were in a conference room with people we never met before angry that we responded to the survey. They hadn't realized we were actually sent the email just like everyone at the company (like I said these were not smart people) ...
It also raised the question about how anonymous this survey was. Of course it wasn't, you could see in the URL when responding your name, email address, etc ;)
I try to keep the latter out of work-related mail, slack, etc, but I've had plenty of political discussions over coffee and lunch, and nobody ever seemed any the worse off for it.
I suspect an important factor is that these happen in smaller groups that know each other better, beyond individual views.
I was appalled that one of my foreign born, non-Christian, non-Caucasian co-workers voted for Bush 43 and listened to Rush Limbaugh, but having known him for years, I did not reduce him to that single aspect of his life.
Your observation that small groups that are already friends having differing points of view does not make them "the other" in your mind, may well be the opposite of (Political) Twitter, which may well be why that ends up being such a dumpster fire.
Q: You mention that you were 'appalled'. Did either of you take the time to explore your presumptions behind your reasons for coming to differing conclusions (while realizing the humans are 'rationalizing creatures', not 'rational creatures')?
Good question. We discussed this a bit, and my impression was that he (a) had somewhat negative opinions of muslims in general (although he got along fine with muslim co-workers — again, the phenomenon of knowing somebody protecting against "othering" them) (b) did not hold his political views very strongly, but partially saw politics as entertainment (he also listened to Michael Savage) (c) somewhat felt that when Limbaugh and Savage trashed foreigners, they could not possibly mean him.
I apologize upfront for not knowing who Mike Savage is, but it is my understanding that Limbaugh (who I don't listen to, so I could be wrong) is a guy that rudely declares that we should enforce border policies as written into regulations written by Congress?
That may not be true, but if it is, is that wrong-headed?
Edit: I have many loving/giving Muslim friends, and without their help I would not be alive today, but I am somewhat afraid of their "extremists" when I travel to Pakistan, or Qatar. I don't think I'm a hater, but maybe I am?
> it is my understanding that Limbaugh is a guy that rudely declares that we should enforce border policies as written into regulations written by Congress?
I'm somewhat conflicted in my thinking on border enforcement, and I do think it should, in general, exist, but that's far from the core and the tone of his argument, I think. He also declares that Mexicans in general are lazy (regardless of the legality of their status): https://www.huffpost.com/entry/rush-limbaugh-attacks-mexican...
> I am somewhat afraid of [Muslim] "extremists" when I travel to Pakistan, or Qatar.
My colleague did in fact come from a country where Muslim extremism was a thing. For your travels, I would certainly share your concern in Pakistan, but I don't really think there is an objective basis for it in the case of Qatar:
Anyone that thinks Mexicans are lazy have never worked beside them.
But, one size does not fit all. My anecdotes to that effect are surely not data.
But my friends of Mexican descent (Americans) don't like uncontrolled migration because of the (perceived?) downward pressure on wages for unskilled labor.
EDIT: That last point was also anecdotal. My gut feel (intuition) is largely driven by my experience. I do not claim that this experience is global or globally correct.
It is the second kind, and in addition to the multitude of dedicated political discussion boards it is also very popular at the social forums like memegen and google plus. I was a bit shocked by this when I started but I got used to it, now I just filter it out.
I understand your perspective but I'm honestly very surprised given your example. I'm in Canada and the things Trump does and says are still present in conversations nearly every day.
>I'm in Canada and the things Trump does and says are still present in conversations nearly every day.
I'm not sure what you mean but generally in my life... I actually don't have a lot of "political" conversations every day. More often than not, none at all.
As in simply something like going to the dentist or getting a haircut, politics comes up because at least in my lifetime and most peoples there's never been a President (and certainly not Prime Minister in Canada) doing the things that Trump is doing. Peoples lives, families and affairs have been affected for many who travel to the United States as an example and the discussions of what he's saying and doing permeate work and non-work environments.
Some people can handle civil discussion with people of differing values, and some people can't.
I wonder what the difference is, I mean beyond just painting someone who can't as a jerk.
I think it has to do with learned skills of emotional self-regulation... someone with those skills is better able to hold their perspective while allowing that of another. But how does one learn that?
It might have to do with safety. I suspect that the people that are better able to have those kind of civil discussions have had good behavior modeled to them in the past, that has increased their own sense of safety, like from someone else in a position of power that has demonstrably respected their opinion even when they held different values.
Could that be the krux of it, that most "uncivil behavior" in this realm is from people that are reacting from a sense of danger, like that if they meet a person with differing values they automatically believe they are being threatened? (Recognizing that sometimes that belief is correct.)
I also wonder if there's a universal central reason behind why it is important to understand someone else's argument if their conclusion differs than yours.
There are deeply important and therefore difficult to talk about.
I totally agree that what it requires are those types of emotional skills, and getting them takes practice.
This tradition of avoiding ever getting practice seems absurd to me, and it also very much benefits those already in power (and they are not unaware of this fact).
> I also wonder if there's a universal central reason behind why it is important to understand someone else's argument if their conclusion differs than yours.
In fact, if you can't argue for their side as well as they can, you haven't really understood it, so you shouldn't argue.
I'd agree with the first two parts, but one can argue a fully reasoned argument without understanding all possible conflicting arguments. At least in the terms of normative arguments, where values (premises) can differ from person to person.
While I absolutely agree that there are people of all political beliefs who have major problems with remaining civil, I think we sometimes have an unfair standard. If someone is dealing with people who just want to spread hate and have no interest in having an open-minded discussion or ever changing their views, and that person then betrays even a hint of frustration, they are often immediately slammed for becoming impolite and uncivil. (Note: I'm not saying there's no line here, just that I believe the line is sometimes drawn in the wrong place).
However, the person being toxic is often not criticized at all because they were spreading their hateful views "politely," if such a thing is possible. So while I believe there is nothing to be gained from getting angry in a political discussion, I do think we should give people a bit of a break if they understandably become frustrated when dealing with actual white nationalists/neo-Nazis/incels saying rape should be legal/etc.
Yes, I do think it's far easier for someone to phrase toxic and hateful views in a civil manner, than it is for someone to hear it and respond in a civil manner.
I wonder though if there's a conflation here between dealing with the argument itself, and dealing with all the social realities of being subjected to the person making it - how threatening they appear, how connected their beliefs are to impending action, how confrontative the exchange is, etc. Like, it's totally fair to believe that the person making the argument is dangerous, and respond emotionally from that. It doesn't mean that it's the argument itself that is being responded to - the argument might instead be evidence of impending dangerous behavior, which is different. It also doesn't mean that the argument itself is dangerous - the danger might entirely come from the circumstances, like if the argument is being used as a physical threat.
Like, I don't know, imagine it's Joyce Brothers making the hateful argument, from her hospital bed with a cocktail in her hand. It might be easier to engage with the argument in that case - to determine if it's based off of incorrect facts, bad reasoning, or just hateful premises that can't be challenged.
It boils down to whether they believe that all ideas are worth having, discussing about and of equal value to a "free" society and should therefore be openly discussed or whether only their specific subset of ideas are allowed and everything else thought-crime.
Hell, believe it or not, I've heard people say that it should be illegal to be fascist for example. Of course these people should be ridiculed.
Discussing politics at work is a huge liability. With the recent surge of outrage culture I’m not willing to put my job on the line to prove a point. I engage in discussion, but only online and anonymously.
Similar argument to people that think they should be allowed to smoke anywhere. I can't stand people that talk about politics. It's worse noise pollution than that scene from Dumb and Dumber (hey Lloyd, want to hear the most annoying sound in the world?)
I'm sorry, but I don't think having to listen to co-workers ram their ill-thought-out opinion down my throat is "freedom."
What has your experience been in places outside of Google? I've worked in a couple of non-FAANG companies over the years and politics never enters into the conversation. People just agree not to discuss controversial political stuff except may out over a beer or something.
That seems largely fair enough. I’ve pushed back before on conversations that make an assumption about the audience, suggesting to redirect them to the place where people have explicitly opted into that kind of stuff.
In that sense it’s not really about the politics, it’s just seeing the world outside of your own.
In almost every other case we’re okay with this. In a lot of contexts irrelevant discussion is called ‘taking it offline’.
> What seems to be happening a lot lately is that politics are spilling over into large, global mailing lists which target a whole geographic region, so many people get involved, and when a company has 200k employees and contractors, you will find some outliers in there who will pick nasty fights.
Really good point here. One could argue the same for society as a whole - not just companies with global mailing lists.
I'd say the same would happen in pretty much every other company. Political discussions are very hard to have outside work and it is 10 times worse at it. Most of the time it's either echo chamber or free ride for all without any considerations.
No they're agreeing with early 20th century communist theorists like Marx. The left has always biased toward the idea that social interaction is politics. And "politics" is just the micro social politics playing out on a grander scale. It's just easier to ignore those things when you're in (relative) power, since, as a straight person, you aren't directly affected by the ability of gay people to marry, or whatever.
Limbaugh was just agreeing with the communists. Oops?
The toxic echo chamber was one of the worst things about working at Google. The pinnacle was being peer forced to walk out during one of the recent outrage events - how can you possibly be the only person on the team to not walk out? To make things worse, you find yourself stuck in public expected to chant anti-capitalist, anti-police, and anti-male slurs during what was supposed to be a #MeToo march, which felt absolutely gross.
The fact that they are starting to crack down on this toxic environment is long overdue. My guess is that they are starting to see tangible attrition of top performers (who happen to be predominantly white & asian males) quoting this as a reason to leave, which threatens their existence. Hence the change.
In which states? I've never heard of an instance where any state legislature passed a rule that forbids employees from discussing politics. I'm surprised there wouldn't be massive outrage over it.
There is no federal law that prevents employer discrimination based on political beliefs. There are some states, specifically California in this case, that prevent employers from discrimination based on political activities and/or affiliations. However, most states prevent employers from controlling political activities outside of work
The First Amendment does not apply to private institutions, only public ones. Private institutions can outright ban political discussion with no repercussions and cannot be liable for termination on the grounds of political beliefs expressed within the workplace sans some states.
So while it isn't "illegal", it can be restricted within private companies.
I think you're confused. It's definitely not illegal in any state to have informal political discussions with coworkers. Maybe what you're referring to is that it's illegal for employers to tell employees to vote a certain a way or retaliate against them for holding certain political views.
Only in some states is this legally protected. If a private company allows it, then there is no problem.
However, most private companies don't allow political discussion and it's not illegal to control this unless you live in certain states, California being one of them.
This is pretty strange to me. I've worked in a bunch of very different places, including Intel Corp. and also defense contractors and US government installations, and people generally stayed away from political discussions unless they were around people they already knew were like-minded. The only place I saw political discussion turn really sour was at Intel when we had a contractor who was extremely religious and conservative, and would talk publicly about how homosexuals "offended" him, etc. We ended up not renewing his contract because he was toxic.
At government places, political discussions were generally avoided. The Hatch Act might have something to do with that (it's illegal to campaign for any political candidate at a Federal workplace), but mostly I think people just had good common sense. They did talk a little among themselves in the run-up to the election, but it was in-person, with a buddy, not meant to be a public discussion.
What's really shocking to me here is this revelation that there's actually "global mailing lists" within the company where political talk is happening. This, I cannot imagine ever seeing at any of my prior employers, ever. I honestly can't imagine why any company would tolerate such a use of its equipment this way. It's just a recipe for trouble.
This matches my experience completely. My current and longest single job is as a US Federal contractor. You might get a political word or two over lunch off base around here, although the civil servants tend to be more tight lipped than us contractors for the aforementioned reasons. You would never in a million years see any kind of political discussion occurring via email, no matter if it was government or contractor email or people. As far as I know, it's not even an official policy (beyond standard government "for official use only" policies), there's just not sane reason to ever do it.
Many of my teammates are immigrants. Visa related uncertainty and progress are major parts of their lives. The H1-B renewal lottery colors all future plans. Finally getting a green card is like having a child or buying a house. When the President tweets about blowing up NAFTA, my colleagues on TN-1s can no longer be sure which country they'll live in six months from now. We tried to go for drinks and couldn't get into the bar: my work friend's driver license is expired and she can't get a new one while her visa application is in a queue somewhere at DHS.
If we know each other at all as people, immigration policy certainly comes up.
>Many of my teammates are immigrants. Visa related uncertainty and progress are major parts of their lives. The H1-B renewal lottery colors all future plans. Finally getting a green card is like having a child or buying a house.
Getting a Green Card shouldn't be that easy for H1B holders. An H1B visa is a temporary visa and in that time they should be transferring skill knowledge to American replacements.
Of course I agree with your sarcasm that it's more likely about population replacement and wage reduction, but I'm just saying the public political justification we were given for H1B was supposedly to temporarily cover our skills gap.
Eh I get where you're coming from but it comes down to the bouncer or whoever. You get people who say an expired license is not a valid ID and they require a valid ID to get in.
Welcome to the US. Things are really wacky here. Another really wacky thing: you can't walk around or be in public with an alcoholic drink (e.g., you can't have a beer in a public park outside, on a picnic, etc.), even though drinking is such a huge, huge, huge part of our culture. Yet in most other developed nations, it's perfectly legal. You can even buy beer in vending machines in Japan.
Just the existence of any kind of active, noisy global mailing lists seems like an indicator of organizational immaturity, let alone ones catering to political discussion.
> What's really shocking to me here is this revelation that there's actually "global mailing lists" within the company where political talk is happening. This, I cannot imagine ever seeing at any of my prior employers, ever. I honestly can't imagine why any company would tolerate such a use of its equipment this way. It's just a recipe for trouble.
I agree. My company has a "no politics" rule spelled out in the employee handbook, and that's worked out really well. At most, some of us will have private, in-person, one-on-one conversations about politics, which is fine because it doesn't drag in anyone who doesn't want to be there.
The off-topic channels on our Slack consist of memes, jokes, and chat about movies and video games, plus the occasional bit of tech news. It's a pretty pleasant place because of the no politics rule.
This is one of the cons of non-discrimination laws. We can't tell people like that why they got fired.
Something tells me that if I could tell someone I fired them because of their support for antifa or the alt-right, that evil nonsense would bleed itself out of our society in a short time.
#bothsides, amiright? On one hand you have the continuation of a 150 year old white supremacist terror movement whose adherents have recently and repeatedly murdered dozens of people solely because of who they are, and on the other you have those scary people with the masks who will throw a milk shake at someone, just because that person is a fascist.
It's really too bad that we can't just empower indifferent moderates like yourself to sort things out in a totally even-handed and proportionate manner.
I think you're minimizing the impact of antifa psychos. And I'm no moderate. Antifa is explicitly about violence, racism, and is associated with the Dayton Ohio shooter as well as the recent attacks on the ICE facilities.
Antifa is literally about opposing fascism, which in America is a violent white supremacist and misogynist movement. When you say that they are "associated with the Dayton Ohio shooter" you mean that alt-right propagandists have found tweets from him that express negative sentiment toward fascists. I am now seeing that an armed man actually associated with a local antifa group recently got himself killed after he "tossed lit objects at vehicles and buildings, causing one car fire, and unsuccessfully tried to ignite a propane tank," so yes, you're absolutely right, they've escalated from milkshakes to mild property damage. Definitely an equal threat to the specific rightwing movement responsible for the vast majority of domestic terrorism in this century.
Evidence point #1: You tried to perpetuate the widely-debunked myth that the Dayton nutbag was some sort of leftist terrorist instead of a troubled spree killer who killed his trans sibling and several bystanders.
(For other readers: that was an unfortunately common false attempt to lump in "a killer who incidentally liked Tweets on Twitter" with "the numerous recent killers who DID leave white supremacist manifestos before going on their rampages.")
Evidence point #2: You said "Antifa is explicitly about violence, racism" in the preceding clause. A moderate would have correctly expanded that clause to "Anti-fascists are explicitly about violence against fascists and the racism that white supremacist fascists espouse."
So I can confirm your assertion that you are not a "moderate." I just think it's a bummer you folks have to call yourselves "anti-anti-fascists" because that's SIX whole syllables.
This article makes it seem like debating politics is a good practices in workplace. It is NOT!
Talking politics in workplace is not professional - different political opinions can wreck marriages, it can certainly wreck your job too! Just think about what if your boss is having a completely different political opinions than what you belief.
Also any major corporations leaning one side of the political party would immediately alienate the other half the political spectrum and may risk losing businesses who believe in the opposition political parties.
In the EU, freedom from discrimination on the basis of political opinion is considered a fundamental right, and is mentioned as such in the European Charter of Fundamental Rights.
Private conversations about politics thus is entirely outside the scope of what the company is allowed to care about. Public comments, for example on global email lists, would be a different topic.
> Google is also building a tool to let employees flag problematic internal posts and creating a team of moderators to monitor conversations on company chat boards, a spokeswoman said.
Though the article's headline is remarkably unclear, it's apparent that Google is focusing on the written word on company equipment.
The issue was that tying political opinion to jobs was what the Fascists did in the 1930s. So it's kind of a "Never Again" category. It isn't entirely enforceable but companies cannot use it to fire people based on private conversations about politics. This has come up a few times where I work actually and the answer is the same. That's off the table.
No stranger than religion, when you think about it. Both are completely arbitrary (a personal choice), people get very emotional and defensive about them, and they seem irrational if you don't share the beliefs.
I assume "political opinion" as in "the way you vote", not so much speech about politics (which would just be protected by rights protecting speech.) Even in the US, you have a right to voting in a way that's protected from others' observation.
Or, to put it another way: if you want to hold a political opinion, and then express it by voting, but otherwise keep it completely secret from your community... that's your right.
Private conversations are protected. So even in Germany if a report to me confides he admires Hitler I can't fire him for that. If he says so on a public channel, that is different (and depending on what is said might be criminal, but that is a time/manner/place restriction).
But the goal is to hold private political discussions as much as possible above economic retaliation.
A useful way to think about this is that the Supreme Court ruled the state cannot punish someone for advocating genocide in the abstract at a KKK rally, not because advocating genocide is somehow a natural right or that free speech is absolute, but because the government had previously exceeded its authority by going after political dissidents (particularly Communists) using similar logic. So free speech protections in the US for hate speech are a reaction to state abuse in the context of the US.
In Europe the abuses were different so the protections are different.
Its worth noting my colleagues and I have very different political views when we talk over lunch but I find it very insightful to see different views and we are all on good terms over it all. And I think we do think about eachother's views and we do try to build common ground, so frankly I find it healthy.
I think that can work for a small group at lunch, and it's great to see. The problems begin on large faceless email/message groups, where the dynamic is less personal.
The American political spectrum is way bigger than the political spectrum in most European countries. There's a lot more potential for deep disagreement in the US when people talk politics.
> The American political spectrum is way bigger than the political spectrum in most European countries.
It has both fewer signficant dimensions and narrower range on those dimensions; it's much smaller, not bigger.
Also centered further to the right, on the left-right axis that is the most significant axis of variation in the US; the whole range on that axis with any substantive representation in the US is about center-left to the solid right.
I'm American and I've had plenty of political discussions on polar opposite political sides at work or with colleagues at a bar or wherever. There's two lines that should not be crossed: the obvious one is threatening someone's job due to politics, but the more nuanced one is mistrusting someone professionally based on their political affiliation or opinions.
What part of Damore's memo do you think was 'discriminatory' in an 'unacceptable' way? Please be specific, because this is into bizarro-world territory from my point of view.
I read it and saw an attempt at proposing policies to increase female representation based on a collection of science papers about differences in behavior between men and women.
The problem is not the spectrum, I believe, it’s the people. People, for some reason, specially educated ones, cannot handle disagreement. My country had a Red & Blue battle that lasted years, where each party would kill members of the other party. At least now there are more parties and candidates you can align with, but I still think parties are the most stupid thing ever: You will never agree a 100% in everything (and if you do, you’re really weird or probably devoid of criterion), so what’s the point? Deep disagreement comes from passionate people, not from any political spectrum. If you cannot keep your passions somewhat in check, you’re just a time bomb.
And what happens when you have a global company setting itself up as the gatekeeper of information and of ranking information by truth value? What of such disagreements then?
>The American political spectrum is way bigger than the political spectrum in most European countries. There's a lot more potential for deep disagreement in the US when people talk politics.
Ummmm....
The entire American political spectrum fits in the center-right of most European countries' political spectrums.
When was the last time you saw a political discussion between a Socialist, a Social Democrat, and an old-school Christian Democrat?
Here's how I describe American politics to Europeans:
In the US we have two political parties. We have the Democrats which you know as the Liberal party.
And then we have the Republicans which you know as the Liberal party.
Yes, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama would be in the same party in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, France, etc.
Then there's Trump, who would be in one of the newer right-wing populist parties, and the religious fundamentalists who wouldn't fit into any party in most European countries.
In policy matters, Trump would still be in Liberal. He isn't threatening to ban importing tropical fruit for example, and he is far more hostile to the idea of a safety net than is the Danish People's Party.
There's no way he'd be in a classical liberal party. He has, at times, said he supports universal government-provided healthcare, and he favors heavy protectionism, both of which put him at odds with liberal economics. His erratic, right-wing populist message would also not fit with a liberal party.
"Bigger"? You guys have two parties, one of which is right/far-right and the other is just regular center/right. Parties on most countries on our side of the pond generally range between fascist and communist with at least half a dozen more in between those, not to mention that each differs in other axii too, like the level of cosmopolitanism.
I just checked my contract again. If the patent is outside the scope of my work activities, and I don't write up the application while I am at work, I don't see how they could claim it.
But then Americans have these funny "all your intellectual property are belong to us" clauses in work contracts....
The larger problem is that the IP assignment clauses are way too broad in the US. When I worked at Microsoft I had one that theoretically covered everything I wrote regardless of when, where, or on what devices. As an hourly worker, though, Microsoft was never going to exercise that due to overtime issues.
I rechecked my contract and under the terms of the contract, if it is specific to my work at my employer, they could claim it, but frankly we prefer to release everything that isn't specific to our industry open source anyway, so.....
My dad is from Russia and he sees the American taboo about talking politics at work as just lame and pathetic. Like we're too sensitive or something. I think he may have even said it was just fine in the U.S. as well back in the 70s (when it was also okay to smoke in the office) but I'd have to check again.
So I gotta wonder if this is generally true or if there are cultural factors.
This is kind of not funny (or rather, a bit painful), but it does mock what the US used to be like in the 50s about both political opinions and allowing certain people to have them:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS37SNYjg8w
The old "strictures" in conventional US polite society were to never discuss, in open, in any group, at work, at church, or a neighborhood barbeque: religion, politics or money.
EDIT: BTW - to your point about changes around smoking in the office - I left the United States for about 10 years in the mid-80s, and people were having beers (or martinis) with lunch when I left, and then when I got back in the mid-90s - they were not. These things do change, and I am not trying to invalidate that point of yours.
> [Google] employees discussed at length [on internal message boards] whether Trump’s win meant it’s time for a violent revolution. “How do people cope with this?” one employee wrote. “I’ve never been part of a military or war effort before. … I don’t know how useful I’ll be.”
It's about time Google tells people to take their political revolution talk somewhere else other than company internal discussion boards!
This sounds like mobs in the French revolution. You don't agree with my political view, so you deserve the guillotine. And people do this all in the name of justice and righteousness.
Clearly if the starving, downtrodden French people had sought a polite debate with the king instead, it’d have ushered the age of democracy and human rights much faster.
The starving, downtrodden French people mainly just wanted to reduce their taxes and the privileges of their local nobility. Getting rid of the king (and to a large extent, the church) was very much a movement of Paris-based intellectuals, not indigent farmers.
Maybe, but the employees of google are not starving and downtrodden. The ones with the access to the official internal gripe boards are, dare I say, "privileged."
People are rabidly dismissive of the project veritas expose, but articles with quotes like this repeteadly show pervasive bias among Google staff which aligns exactly with the accusations and candid management recordings within the video [1]. The video is admittedly obnoxious and overly dramatic, but the candid clips with exec Jen Gennai strongly suggest that these political biases are leaking into technical work with an intended effect on society.
Even if google doesn't have a political bias, there's no way for them to avoid allegations of unfair political treatment. They're in an unenviable position as the arbiter of global popularity and visibility, and there are thousands of mostly far-right groups that are flooding google with garbage. Just by virtue of taking down clearly false, misleading, or violent content, they're already "biased" against one political ideology.
> there are thousands of mostly far-right groups that are flooding google with garbage
Is there a citation for this? I see lots of far-left garbage on social media generally (by which I mean posts espousing violent revolution, racism, sexism, blank slatism, anarchism, and/or communism). I'm sure there are niches of far right racism, but it mostly seems like a niche problem (and given that the far right is largely a reaction to the far left, it stands to reason that we have an opportunity and obligation to kill both with the same stone).
You don't debunk something by saying it's debunked. So her claim is that because she was no longer in the trust and safety team at the time of the video, her opinions are irrelevant?
Of course she's going to claim that the video was "heavily edited." But the validity of the video comes from the fact that there is no context which makes the clips of her speaking any less damning. They clearly indicate a willingness by Google to curate search results.
>The video then goes on to stitch together a series of debunked conspiracy theories about our search results, and our other products.
I'd love to see this debunking.
>Google has repeatedly been clear that it works to be a trustworthy source of information, without regard to political viewpoint. In fact, Google has no notion of political ideology in its rankings. And everything I have seen backs this up. Our CEO has said ”We do not bias our products to favor any political agenda.” He’s somewhat more powerful and authoritative than me.
Oh, well, if the CEO says it, it must be true. This is just a weak attempt at damage control.
Her claim is much simpler. Project Veritas calls her a "powerful senior executive," and she says "I'm not any sort of executive and wouldn't know about any of this even if it were true."
I don't see any reason why a propaganda outfit led by a guy convicted of sneaking into government offices on false pretenses should be taken at their word that a random Google employee is a powerful executive when the employee in question says that they are not one. Seems like "they are an executive" would be pretty easy to establish.
People are rabidly dismissive of Project Veritas and another one of their "exposures" because of their attempts to "make evidence" by tricking people into admitting something, cherrypicking what "evidence" they do display, and having a "answer first, evidence second" mindset to their operation.
If you want to show that Google has "bias against conservatives" or whatever, get it from a reputable source instead of the garbage heap that is Project Veritas.
Where do you go for official sources when the entire modern media establishment has an undeniable (and rather open) liberal bias?
Ignoring bias, do you believe that every given situation that some group may identify as a problem is guaranteed to have a reputable source reporting on it?
I'd love to find a more reputable source, but one is not currently available, and I'm not in a position to create one. That does not imply that the problem being reported on is illegitimate. You should be able to assess the contents of the video with PV's bias in mind - and most of the content really does stand on its own, especially in the context of relevant quotes from employees in OPs article.
There was also a massive trove[1] of internal Google documents dumped on PV related to, among other things, AI development and arguably politically motivated guidance by internal definitions of "fairness", designed to shape search results. Should these documents also be ignored because they're only being hosted by Project Veritas? You can see them yourself...
Ironically, this is the danger of trusting only select biased organizations with curating the flow of information - as you suggest, to most people, if a "reputable" source hasn't reported about it, it doesn't exist. How many years has 4chan been screaming about epstein, as another example, without major media investigation?
The bottom line is that no entity that acts as the front page to the internet should be curating information flow without a massive, blinking disclaimer.
I admittedly only looked at at half a dozen images/PDFs, but I didn't see anything alarming or beyond what I would expect in any large company. In fact your link has had the opposite effect you intended because if you think a well cited document on diversity improving ROI and other metrics is controversial, I am now much less interested in what you have to say.
If media does have a bias, and let's assume it does since it was de-regulated, then I'd put pro-business Liberalism first. Then on a liberal vs conservative spectrum, I would agree it is more liberal than conservative. But why is that controversial when by raw population there are more socially liberal people than conservative?
Now that's out of the way... I do agree that no one media source should have the power Google, FB, Fox, CNN, etc have. And there is no doubt not every interest is covered by the giants. But you should stick to that argument and not bring in PV to actually win people over.
I've seen some of their videos. They seem fairly damning, and rebuttals have always been fairly weak. For example, a google exec was captured on video saying: “smaller companies don’t have the resources” to “prevent next Trump situation”. In what context does that statement not amount to silencing conservative perspective on their platform? I completely agree it is their right to do so, and probably benefits the nation, but pretending they aren't doing it is terrible optics.
Oftentimes the people they say are "executives" are just rank and file employees. I have a friend who is not an executive who got tricked into meeting with a Project Veritas scumbag. Thankfully they realized something was up and left the meeting.
The hidden camera captured an interview with Jen Gennai, Head of Responsible Innovation, Global Affairs at Google. You could at least watch the video and find out for yourself.
I think the real problem here is that people are aware of Google's bias and OK with it, but unwilling to admit as much.
That's a good point. In general I'd say outing a rank-and-file employee is bad form. There are exceptions of course, like if the employee's revealed behavior is at par with Edward Snowden. The only example I have is the Gennai one, which is what I'm referring to above. I'd love more examples of Project Veritas behaving badly
Trump situation. Not Trump. I am not sure what the context of the discussion was, but I am sure a Project Veritas video doesn't give the whole context. It could be referencing something unrelated to the election. Maybe it was about Net Neutrality or some other anti big tech signaling. Large companies have more sway than smaller ones. The fact that you go from one no-context quote to "silencing conservative perspectives" is not good. Please keep thinking critically.
>The fact that you go from one no-context quote to "silencing conservative perspectives" is not good. Please keep thinking critically
There's more context than that single quote, including the other strong evidence of overt bias in other sources, like OPs article. I get the feeling you didn't watch the video.
To a conservative, is "preventing the next Trump situation" any different than "preventing Trump"? I'm not arguing that Google shouldn't do this, I'm pointing out that the optics are garbage if we argue they aren't.
> I am sure a Project Veritas video doesn't give the whole context
Have you watched any? I would suggest you do before trying to convince others of their content. Again, what you are doing is garbage optics.
Another quote from Jen Gennai: "the same people who voted for the president do not agree with our view of fairness"
It is protected discussion under the US Constitution since Yates v. United States hamstrung sedition prosecutions over the government going after dissidents, particularly Communists.
Mind you I sat the last election out because I was so thoroughly disgusted with Hillary's anti-immigrant record and Trump's promise to try to be even worse (and while he is trying, I am not sure he is succeeding as bad as it is, and it is very bad). I have no love for either. But it is protected speech.
Because to vote for someone defending PRWORA would be a betrayal of what my family went through. It was at that point vote third party or stay home. I think if I had it to do over again I would vote third party.
> How is it a betrayal of anything or anyone to vote for the better of two viable options (according to your own opinion)?
How do you weigh two options when one has a record of imposing very long-term harms (PRWORA has now been on the books for almost 30 years and if you remember her response to Sanders' accusation she helped round up the votes for PRWORA, it was to defend the law) vs a more acute set of insecurities?
That's the choice between measles (orange, fast-spreading, kill you or you recover) and polio (not orange, slower spreading, you might not ever fully recover). So I am not entirely sure from the perspective of being married to a non-American who was the lesser evil except to say they were both genuinely horrifying.
Theres a second very important point here as well. If the issues that matter to my family (for example, full inclusion in the protections of the working classes -- even we knowledge workers are working class) are not on the table, withholding my vote may be the only way to get them on the table at all, and voting for someone who has actively worked against those interests is a betrayal of that.
On the issue you originally mentioned – immigration – surely it's clear which where each of these two people stood. Look at their policy proposals, their party's policy proposals, their party's policy history, and their rhetoric. Then you vote for the one that's better. No matter how slight the difference (though in this case the difference is huge).
I'm not sure what issue you're referring to getting on the table. (I suspect it actually already is on the table.) But how does not voting get that issue on the table? It's too late to change the candidates' positions on election day. Are you hoping that years later a different set of candidates will try to address your concern by examining who didn't vote in the previous election? That seems unlikely. Candidates do what voters want, not non-voters. Opinion polls often throw out non-voters, too.
And most people care about multiple issues, so even if your main issue isn't addressed by anyone, you've lost the opportunity to try to make some progress on all of those "less important" issues.
The winning strategy for improving the world is not hard. Vote for the "lesser of two evils". Every single time. This will cause evil to decline. Maybe slowly, hopefully quickly.
Don't get stuck in analysis paralysis. The main two U.S. parties have a lot of differences. It should be pretty easy to figure out which closer aligns with your views.
But what of those other issues? Health care reform that specifically singles out my family for additional burdens if I lose my job because I am married to an immigrant (back to the same issue)?
What I am doing is trying to help a third party organize so that if not this year, if not next year, if not in four years, we can eventually make an impact.
Basic point is: If my family is not to be fully included with the same rights, then you don't need my vote. This willingness to throw elections made the Democrats come around on gay rights. It ought to be used by those of us in mixed-nationality families to make them come around on immigrant rights.
(In addition to organizational efforts, I am in the running for volunteering for various positions in the American Solidarity Party, primarily because they do include families like mine in their agenda.)
I don't understand the issue you're referring to with health care. Can you explain further? I also don't how being "willing" to "throw" elections helped change Democrats' opinions on gay rights? What are you referring to?
Helping a third party is counterproductive and irresponsible. The only "impact" you will make is in harming the issues you care about most. It's the same as just volunteering to help the major party you like the least. It's basically the worst thing you can do. At best, third parties in the US take advantage of well-meaning people by using magical thinking and cynicism. At worst, they're used as patsies to let foreign dictators influence the election[1].
In our first-past-the-post voting system, you have to get a majority to win, not a plurality. The party with the most votes doesn't win – the party with over half the votes wins. This means it isn't possible to have more that two competitive parties under this voting system.
I don't like that system. I think we should have a different voting system that more fairly represents people and eliminates mathematical loopholes. I also think the major political party that most closely represents my views is also the most likely to offer a chance for electoral reform.
It's a much faster, easier, and more plausible strategy to try to move the best viable party in the direction you prefer. There's effective alternatives to third parties – look at the Democratic Socialists of America or the Tea Party. These groups were able to use the major political parties to launch and implement their platform very quickly (like in one or two election cycles). There's more actual politicians aligned with groups like this than any third party, and they have massive influence over US politics. And they don't have the downside of forcing their members to shoot themselves in the foot every election.
The US absolutely needs people like you who are passionate about important issues and have the time and energy to dedicate to making real change. But please, for everyone's sake, do it in a way that doesn't directly harm the only peaceful strategy for political change that we have.
The Affordable Care Act required purchasing of individual health insurance for everyone in your household, and provided a penalty to those who could not. There was a gap between where this requirement was effective (the income tax filing requirement) and the poverty line, which meant that Medicaid was understood to be the coverage of last resort.
But new immigrants are barred from access to Medicaid, meaning if we had returned to the US, we would have had a 5 year period where we could be fined for me losing my job just because I am married to a non-citizen.
Now, the first policy (Medicaid exclusion) was a part of Bill Clinton's re-election campaign (and when Hillary responded to the accusation of helping round up votes for it, she defended that law, guaranteeing there was no way I would vote for her). The requirement to purchase without undoing the exclusion was done entirely by Democrats without any GOP help.
When your family has been sold down the river enough times, there's a lack of trust. I maintain that the Democratic Party treats families like mine as cheap bargaining chips because we only get one vote as a household while other families get two, so there is not much harm in throwing my family under the bus or off the boat if it gets some other votes somewhere.
At the end of the day the only two things politicians want is your money and your vote. And it is only in these ways we can hold them accountable.
Honestly, I don't even know what to say to this. It just makes me sad.
I'm sad because it seems like your reasoning is based on an extreme corner case – a hypothetical fee if you hypothetically moved and hypothetically lost your job and hypothetically couldn't find insurance. I'm sad because no one should have to worry about that anyway. I'm sad that this loophole exists and hasn't been fixed. I'm sad that you're blaming and not supporting the people trying to fix health care. I'm sad that those people didn't do a better job fixing it. I'm sad because I'm pretty sure you're going to make it harder to fix in the future. And I'm sad because I don't know how to have a constructive conversation on this anymore.
Thank you for engaging with me. I hope I'm wrong – I hope your political effort and strategy is able to help the people you care about without hurting others.
Economic insecurity is nothing to laugh at. I have economic security to some extent where I am living. I would have such security in a different way if we moved to my wife's culture despite being excluded from a lot of initial opportunities.
But the first time we moved back, I was unable to find a job and needed that assistance, which was then denied to me.
I don't see how it can be fixed. Both parties throw families like mine under the bus as easy ways to appease others. The only way I see is to try to start a very different approach to our national conversation and that is not going to come from our parties of capital (either one).
I think they just overestimated the ability of their employees to respect each other when they hold differing world views. That's kinda natural once you reach a certain size and your colleagues may as well be randos on the street.
To be fair, that's a learning most businesses stumbled upon decades ago, it's the new generation of "re-invent management" companies that are speedrunning HR policy.
>But the best thing that could happen to this post is that it makes a lot of people, especially myself, figure out how to be more tolerant. Not in the “of course I’m tolerant, why shouldn’t I be?” sense of the Emperor in Part I. But in the sense of “being tolerant makes me see red, makes me sweat blood, but darn it I am going to be tolerant anyway.”
Wow. Yeah. Being accepting and loving is hard. It's one of the hardest things you can do, but only if that person is part of your out group.
I recently had a conversation with someone who works at Google, and she mentioned how in her opinion Google hires a lot of smart people but has a good chunk of them doing very lame work.
So perhaps that's not too far fetched. I've had jobs that didn't keep me interested or seemed menial, and I will admit to holding a lot of online threads during those work hours. Nowadays, when I'm at work I'm often too busy and interested in what I'm doing to think about other things that are happening.
Scrolling through HN while your code compiles != full on political debates at work.
I’m on a group chat with a couple old friends and when someone starts a debate on a topic I’m passionate about we go hard and we go deep. Suddenly it’s two hour later and here I am trying to do some quick demography with raw data from the census bureau to prove a point.
I’ve started blocking the chat until after work because debates do tend to rage sometimes. And we’re old friends with a grounding empathy and shared experiences to fall back on. Doing the same thing with coworkers during work hours? I would’ve banned it too.
But one is just unproductive (you being idle) the other one is counterproductive (you upset others and divert their attention) and multiply the counter-productivity.
Yeah, I've met people with views so different from mine that our professional relationship was at stake.
Once it was a woman who seriously thought white men needed to be excluded from things to make up for all the time they oppressed everyone else. It was like socially-acceptable maliciousness.
When you talk politics, you risk having people reveal extreme views that really accomplish nothing but put a wedge in an environment what's supposed to be collaborative.
I think this is a major point, because even when you deal with really strong sports rivalries, it seems to be mostly play acting like they hate each other's teams. Actual hurt feelings are pretty rare expect for anger at particular events in a game (for example, bad ref call). With politics, it hits something much deeper in people and gets people to be side tracked for far longer, as well as possibly causing reductions in mood that translate to worse productivity.
Right, if counterproductive conversation was the real problem, then Google should shut down access to HN, b/c I'm sure the aggregate drain on Googlers' productivity is much more than point to point office conversations...
And I'm going to brag that my company was lightyears ahead of Google on this one. We don't allow political debates. Such a time waster. But HN is educational.
> I think they just overestimated the ability of their employees to respect each other when they hold differing world views. That's kinda natural once you reach a certain size and your colleagues may as well be randos on the street.
I think it is not so much due to size, but due to the extreme ideological polarization of American society during the last decade.
When before it was normal to hear and accept - and god forbid, even stay friends- with people that had different political opinions from yours, as of late, that has become quite difficult.
I am not sure how well this generalises but, in my experience, it is very possible to achieve this IF you have a business/culture that is motivated.
An example of this working is in investment management. The job is largely about groups of people arguing with each other. Often this comes down to differences in "world view".
Some places get around this by just hiring people with the same "world view". But other places take the more robust approach of hiring different people and encouraging more argument. I am not sure if this works because they just don't hire very dogmatic people (a group that is very over-represented in tech) but it can/does work (and does scale up to thousands of employees).
Definitely, large groups that have members across society ban these discussions (the Masons is one example). If you are hiring/recruiting anyone, then no politics is smart. But this isn't the case here. It is possible...if you are motivated. From what I have seen, the Googler approach is to be actively unmotivated.
It is easier to think everyone else is dumb and you are smart than acknowledge you are wrong or don't know. Investment management is unusual, the feedback loop is clear. You are as smart as your last trade. That promotes a robust self-image. I can see why the average Googler doesn't have these traits. They seem to be in the job description (i.e. a lot of people want to work at Google because that will mean they are smart). You reap what you sow.
I think the magic here is just about the 1% media controlling elite getting better at breaking up the remaining 99% into infinitesimally small factions so oxygen is sucked up from talking about real issues.
When we turn the narrative of everything from "respecting differing world views" into "respecting nazis/dictators/bigots" etc and turn everyone into a world saving moral crusader upon whom humanity's salvation rests on, it's a very invigorating and powerful message that takes intellectualism away from discussions.
I think it goes beyond that. I think they expected employees to accept managements worldview, because after all it’s managements world view. By virtue of their success they are the smartest people on the planet, and the only enlightened ones that can fix the worlds problems or determine basic principles of society like free speech and privacy and freedom of association.
That world view included not only dogmatic stances on religion,on politics on progressivism and a rejection of classic liberalism.
This led to a hyper-bifurcation amplified by their own internal social media - a radical left that saw any compromise with liberals or moderates as a betrayal of their core ideologies and a reactionary right that became more polarized as they became more marginalized.
Ever since the infamous "diversity memo," (which I disagree with,) I've gotten the impression that political discussions at Google turned toxic.
A well run company includes people with diverse political views points. A workplace that's hostile to anyone who leans right or leans left ultimately hurts diversity.
My impression has not been that the memo is when political discussions turned toxic, but merely the first time it very publicly breached the sacred wall of non-disclosure with the outside world. Prior to that, most everyone seemed content to be upset with each other internally.
And they never punished the woman who leaked that internal memo.
I thought that memo was foolish and short-sighted. I don't agree with it.
However, it would have been better solved by a manager first asking him "do you really think it's a good idea to post this at work?" and having him tone it down than trying to publicly shame him and get him fired.
Google picked the wrong side on that. They should have made an example of the leakers.
You're making things up: the leaker was, afaik, never identified. Certainly not publicly. Nothing says they were a woman, except you.
As someone who vehemently disagree a with damore and is glad he was fired, I'd also prefer it if the leaker was fired, but it seems that I'll never know if that happened.
I've seen no evidence of this, and I keep track of such things. An explicit search turns up no evidence of such things. If you have evidence of such things, please share it with me (I'm easy to find @google), but in the absence of such evidence, I'm going to continue to claim that this is wholly unfounded nonsense.
I'm sure there may have been some of that. But supposedly (IIRC) he didn't just post it at work, he very diligently attempted to increase it's exposure through word of mouth, mailing lists, and speaking at internal events.
I think Damore's fatal flaw was naivety. He thought his opinions would lead to a better Google and he thought Google wanted to hear arguments that would lead to an improved Google. He clearly lacked the awareness to realize he was not speaking to a receptive audience to the ideas he had. And he wrote something that lacked the... emotional awareness... to understand where the opposing view came from or how his memo would be received.
You can furthermore see that naivety in how quickly he ended up accepting offers and olive branches from alt-right personalities. It seemed like he wasn't aware who he ended up 'siding' with.
I had a weekly improv class with him and while I don't think that's enough to get a good read on who someone truly is, I think you may be projecting on the naivete bit. In the midst of the chaos he was generating, he had ample opportunity to redact, change, apologize, debate, or even acknowledge other viewpoints, but he chose to broadcast adamantly.
Even as he knew his opinion was generating controversy he didn't take any steps to admit, control, or deal with it, instead he reveled in it. He knew what he was doing.
Do you know if he contacted Breitbart and PV, or if they contacted him? Because if a Breitbart journalist said to him, "We see your opinion, we think it's terrible you're being silenced, we'd love to interview you and give you a chance to say your piece", then it would be very fitting with "naive" for him to say "Sounds good!"
> He does not once, however, use his autism to excuse his actions. He is fiercely resistant to portraying himself as any kind of victim, and says he never informed Google of his autism diagnosis. “I’m not sure you’re expected to,” he says, “or how I would even do that.”
I mentioned it as a point in favor of the "naive" theory. The article also supports it:
> Damore concedes now that he “wasn’t really skilled enough to push back on anything” in some interviews. It’s frustrating, he adds, that he’s now associated with the “alt-right” when he’s “more of a centrist”. He admits he did not look too deeply into Duke’s background when the photos were taken, and asks me not to publish the image of him in a “Goolag” T-shirt with this article. “I can definitely see how it was damaging, but it was a free professional photo shoot and I wasn’t really familiar with politics then,” he says. “I was pretty busy and ignorant.”
> Was his interview with the “alt-right” personality Milo Yiannopoulos an error? “It’s hard to say,” he replies. “I don’t really know what the long-term consequences of any of my actions are.”
He offended a broad class of people. Women shouldn't have to pick and choose who they feel comfortable working with around the office. Or worse, be forced to work with that guy. Once he expressed views like that, his fate was sealed. You don't punish the victims.
I don't know why I'm responding to the most flippant comment here, but I think your argument, however poorly stated, is worth countering.
"I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership."
- James Damore
I don't think the preceding quote is an "opinion they disagree with" as much as it is pseudo-intellectualism covering up outright hate. This is stated as a fact, not cited and not backed up. It asserts that women are not fit to work at Google, and implies that the women he works with are incompetent because of biology. If your coworker asserted that you were biologically inferior at your job, I think you would take drastic measures as well.
Let me modify your statement so you can realize how absurd and sexist it is:
> Men shouldn't have to pick and choose who they feel comfortable working with around the office.
It is just as ridiculous if you make it about race:
> [Black|Asian|White|Latino] people shouldn't have to pick and choose who they feel comfortable working with around the office.
This is the fatal flaw of modern day progressives. They make everything about group identity. To make things worse, they then apply those perspectives asymmetrically.
"ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL,
BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS."
- George Orwell, Animal Farm
I don't think your statements are as self evident as you think they are. You are personally attacking the poster above you, and then just spinning words around to make a point you agree with. We understand you agree with yourself; would you care to help us try and agree with you?
Personally, I agree with your statements. I do not see the issue that you see with wanting all people to be comfortable in their workplace. James Damore outright stated that he believes that women are genetically inferior at the job he does. I don't grasp how people miss how destructive that is.
>James Damore outright stated that he believes that women are genetically inferior at the job he does.
Outright? Certainly not. It requires multiple layers of hostile interpretation to reach 'women are genetically inferior' from what Damore wrote. That's an absolutist, determinist, morally-tinged statement which is nothing like anything he said.
If you think otherwise, please give the quote where Damore outright states women are 'genetically inferior' at anything.
Damore was extremely clear about the difference between "all men have X trait more than women" and "statistically, the prevalence of X trait is higher among men than women (but some women still have a lot of X)". He even included visual aids to help explain these concepts, literally on the first page of the memo.
If your mind integrates the studies Damore cited as stating that women are 'genetically inferior', that's something you need to learn to decouple. We don't have to choose between anti-science denialism and fascistic supremacism, so please don't try to force everyone's opinions into one of those two categories.
> You are personally attacking James Damore, and then just spinning words around to make a point you agree with.
Specifically, this following statement is a gross misrepresentation of the argument he was making, which really was only clear with the bell curve diagrams that most news media companies purposefully omitted:
> he believes that women are genetically inferior at the job he does.
Furthermore, I disagree with the part about either argument being personal. We both attacked the argument, not the person. There was no ad hominem in either my original statement nor your retort.
Shortly before the memo, there were stories and comments in HN about problems inside Google.
I vaguely remember a story about someone in HR getting fired because they didn't pull a white male out of the running for a job. (The details are too fuzzy at this point.)
Most of the memo was citations of studies of sex differences. People can either agree with the studies or disagree with the research used (it's totally cool with me if you do disagree with the research), but the idea that someone should be punished for talking about research at a company that extols "data driven decision making" as one of it's principles baffles me.
The memo made some very poignant points, but then the author expressed some strange opinions that I would never attempt to defend.
(Even worse, there was no reason to put some of these opinions in the memo.)
But what's more scary is Google's official response to the diversity memo. (For context, Google instituted certain hiring policies to increase diversity, which the "diversity memo" questioned.)
If you have the time, I suggest that you go reread the diversity memo and Google's response. Try to read them without taking sides. (It's hard.)
I read the memo before reading the media coverage. I was very surprised at how controversial it was. It's claims were pretty modest: it did not claim that women were any less capable than men at technology, and it repeatedly stated that innate differences likely do not account for all of the disparity between men and women in tech. All it argued was that just because a disparity exists we should not assume that it is evidence of discrimination, and that policies designed to engineer an outcome closer to 50/50 are likely creating discrimination rather than reducing it.
Note that they did not respond to "we should not assume that it is evidence of discrimination, and that policies designed to engineer an outcome closer to 50/50 are likely creating discrimination"
Right they cited "perpetuating harmful gender stereotypes". From which we can infer that Google believes that claiming that absent any discrimination or social pressure women would not work in tech at the same rates as men as "perpetuating gender stereotypes".
There are many reasons why women don't go into IT. And whilst you can look at at it holistically it is ultimately a personal decision.
And so if you take that personal decision and instead make it about some gender stereotype e.g. they aren't physically suited then it discourages women from entering IT.
> And so if you take that personal decision and instead make it about some gender stereotype e.g. they aren't physically suited then it discourages women from entering IT.
The memo did not claim this. The references to innate differences were only in reference to women's choices. At no point did the author claim they women "aren't physically suited" to IT.
> I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.
He's saying that women lack the ability to work in engineering and leadership because they are biologically different. His argument isn't limited to preference.
And this is ignoring the fact that his supporting data used the Big5 psych method, which has been debunked as not being scientific in identifying biological differences due to it's lexical nature.
Edit: Damore says that women more having extraversion and empathy, which "leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading."
Saying they are having a harder time is saying they lack the ability.
Incorrect, you're overlooking the fact that he's referring to the distribution of ability. Nowhere does he say that women have less ability than men. For instance, for 2/3rds of girls reading is their best subject while for 2/3rds of boys math is their best subject. But, girls actually outscore boys in both reading and math. In fact, I believe he cited a study that referenced this sort of distribution in boys and girls.
The differences in the distribution suggest that girls are more likely to prefer reading (because they're usually better at it than math) while boys are more like to prefer math (because they're usually better at math than reading). He's talking about how the distribution of ability affects preference. It does not say that girls are worse than boys than math - it actually says the opposite, that girls are slightly better at both math and reading.
You claimed his argument was limited to preference, I am showing you that Damore was talking about preference and ability.
Splitting hairs over distribution is a red herring. Nobody here is assuming that Damore is referring to women the individual, but women as a whole.
> Nowhere does he say that women have less ability than men.
Damore does, in several places: [emphasis added]
>Women, on average, have more:
> - Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness. This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading. Note that these are just average differences and there’s overlap between men and women, but this is seen solely as a women’s issue.
> - Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance).This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs.
Note that the data he used here is cherry picked from a 90's study that used the Big5 method, which has since been debunked for use in biological differentiation.
> You claimed his argument was limited to preference, I'm merely showing that Damore was talking about preference and ability. Arguing distribution is a red herring. Nobody is assuming that Damore is referring to women the individual, but women as a whole.
If this was your takeaway, then I did not explain it well enough. Every individual has a distribution of ability. Some are better at math, some are better at sports, some are better at reading, etc. 2/3rds of boys are better at math than they are at reading. 2/3rds of girls are better at reading than they are at math. However, girls are actually better than boys at both reading and math - it's just that they score better at an even bigger margin at reading.
Is it inconceivable to think that the fact that girls are better at reading than math 2/3rds of the time makes girls more likely to prefer reading as compared to math (and vice versa for boys)? That's the point that Damore was making: the distribution in ability affects boys' and girls' preferences. It does not say that the average girl has less ability than the average boy.
If you want to split hairs, you could say that making this argument is sexist because it says girls score better than the boys on average in both reading and in math. But I get the sense that this isn't the angle you're making.
> Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness. This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading. Note that these are just average differences and there’s overlap between men and women, but this is seen solely as a women’s issue.
> - Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance).This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs.
Both of these points have to do with specific parts of the job (salary negotiation, asking for promotion, dealing with stress). These factors exist in all jobs, not just tech. Furthermore he later offers suggestions to try and mitigate this - he brought these things up because he wanted to offer positive changes.
The point remains: Damore did not write that women "aren't physically suited" (~~your words~~) to tech work.
>The point remains: Damore did not write that women "aren't physically suited" (your words) to tech work.
Where exactly did I say that??
> Both of these points have to do with specific parts of the job (salary negotiation, asking for promotion, dealing with stress) not that women are less suited for tech work.
Yes, yes, Damore is saying that women lack the ability to lead due to their extraversion, empathy, and neuroticism (anxiety) inhibiting them, because those are specific parts of the job that require abilities. Also, you're ignoring now that he said both tech and leadership, and you are now focusing on just "tech work". This is more splitting hairs on semantics to apologize for Damore.
>And he later offers suggestions to try and mitigate this.
Of course he does. He cherry picked data to wrongly fit his hypothesis from the start. Naturally he would conclude with his own ideas on how to mitigate a problem that he misused data to create.
The previous commenter wrote, "And so if you take that personal decision and instead make it about some gender stereotype e.g. they aren't physically suited then it discourages women from entering IT." I had mistaken this as your comment.
But you did make similar statement s: "He's saying that women lack the ability to work in engineering and leadership because they are biologically different." You did claim that damore wrote that women lack ability to work in engineering.
> Yes, yes, Damore is saying that women lack the ability to lead due to their extraversion, empathy, and neuroticism inhibiting them, because those are specific parts of the job that require abilities. This is more splitting hairs on semantics to apologize for Damore.
These are factors that affect all industries. Saying that this is evidence that Damore argued that women are worse at tech than men is not valid. And again, he brought this up in the context of suggesting improvements to try and make tech more welcoming to women.
> Of course he does. He cherry picked data to wrongly fit his hypothesis from the start. Naturally he would conclude with his own ideas on how to mitigate a problem that he misused data to create.
Let me get this straight: somebody does their best to try and investigate why women have a hard time in a certain field, and proposes ways to make this better. And this is a bad thing?
Even more ironic is that Google and other companies actually have used this research to establish practices that are better for women:
> Allow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive. Recent updates to Perf [Google's performance reviews] may be doing this to an extent, but maybe there’s more we can do, especially in our interviews.
So he's saying, "women are more cooperative. We should make policies that help cooperative people thrive." He's not saying that women are worse at tech because they're more cooperative or more neurotic. He's saying that Google should be more welcoming to people with these traits and help them reach their full potential.
Your comments have devolved into into a gish gallop. You claimed that his paper was based solely on preference, nothing else.
- Damore said that underrepresentation of women in tech and leadership is because of their differing preferences and abilities due to biological causation.
- He misrepresents Big5 data to list neuroticism, extraversion, and empathy as biological reasons why women "have a hard time" in leadership. These are not preferences.
- He claims that women have more anxiety, and as such Google should cater to women's anxiety more to help them with tech leadership. That is not "women prefer".
This isn't the memo of someone who says that women just prefer other jobs, this is someone who misused data to try to fit his hypothesis that women's biological differences mean they are not as capable in tech and leadership.
> Your comments have devolved into into a gish gallop. You claimed that his paper was based solely on preference, nothing else.
Wrong. Now you're not just putting words in Damore's mouth, you're putting words in mine as well.
What I wrote was, "The memo did not claim this. The references to innate differences were only in reference to women's choices. At no point did the author claim they women "aren't physically suited" to IT."
He offers a variety of explanation as to why women have different preferences such as attraction to things vs. people, and the distribution (but not aggregate difference) in ability. The point remains, though, his claims were limited to women's preferences. He used differences in the distribution of ability to explain why this difference in preference exist, but his claim is exclusively about women's preferences.
If if you do insist on focusing in on the mere use of the word "ability" absent the context, Damore did not write that women are any worse than men.
> - Damore said that underrepresentation of women in tech and leadership is because of their differing preferences and abilities due to biological causation.
> - He misrepresents Big5 data to list neuroticism, extraversion, and empathy as biological reasons why women "have a hard time" in leadership - i.e. lack some of the ability requisite for the job.
But crucially, he does not say that this make them worse at tech. Quite the opposite, he says that Google should better recognize extroversion expressed as cooperation in performance reviews. This only hampers them insofar as Google is not creating a good environment, and he's asking google to change that environment.
> - He claims that women have more anxiety, and as such Google should cater to women's anxiety more to help them with tech leadership.
Aagain this is not saying that women are worse at tech. Anxiety can be detrimental if the company does not accommodate it, but it is not a barrier to success if tech if the company does. And he is asking Google to be accommodating.
> This isn't the memo of someone who says that women just prefer other jobs, this is someone who misused data to try to fit his hypothesis that women's biological differences mean they are not as capable in tech and leadership.
False. At no point did Damore write that "women's biological differences mean they are not as capable in tech", and it only hampers them in leadership insofar as Google does not appropriately recognize the way women display extroversion (and he subsequently offers suggestions to address this). You're trying to portray calls for Google to make its environment more friendly to women as saying that women are biologically worse at tech. This is absurd. It also makes people adverse to offering any suggestions to improve the experience of women in tech. Have an idea that you think will make things better for women in tech? Well, you better keep it to yourself otherwise you'll be branded a sexist.
The incorrect statements you are making about the memo are characteristic of someone that read the misleading (and at times outright false) media coverage of the memo. People who read the memo without being primed to see it as sexist do not make these errors. Make no mistake. Damore was not fired for the words he actually wrote. Remember his memo was circulated for about a month without causing a storm. It was only after the media's misrepresentation coverage that he was fired.
> Note that the data he used here is cherry picked from a 90's study that used the Big5 method, which has since been debunked for use in biological differentiation.
Can you expand on this please, cite some references or something?
Wikipedia echoes exactly what you claim Damore wrote:
> For example, women consistently report higher Neuroticism, Agreeableness, warmth (an extraversion facet) and openness to feelings, and men often report higher assertiveness (a facet of extraversion) and openness to ideas
This peer-reviewed journal article elaborates on it more:
>In other words, the Big Five was developed based on research that used subjective selection of lexical descriptors, and self- and peer assessment of correspondence between (only these) descriptors and observable behavior. And that is what the Big Five represents: a consistent model of how humans reflect individuality using language, no more. There were no considerations of findings in neuroanatomy, neurochemistry, experimental psychology, observations of behavior of people or animals in real situations – none of this was used at the research stage leading to the development of the Big Five. In this sense we can say that the Big Five does not represent the structure of temperament or the structure of biologically based traits, even though lexical perception reflects some elements of it.
Basically Damore cherry picked a Big5 study to support his hypothesis that it is biological cause, not bias, being the differentiating factor in gender underrepresentation, but the data doesn't scientifically support that.
That doesn't say that they aren't suited, only that it might explain the reason "we don't see equal representation".
There is no mention of "lacking" anything.
Someone can be fantastic at something in particular ways and still be unmotivated to pursue it for various reasons having absolutely nothing to do with particularly a "lack" of ability - and that premise aligns superbly with that sentence and the entire memo.
And thusly argues that we make appropriate changes because of seemingly biological differences - not inadequacies, to make that clear. I posit that that's a good thing.
Maybe you should be editting the wikipedia page on human sex differences? Because currently it strongly gives the impression that those differences are real and substantial
The Big5 study that Damore chose specifically has been debunked as being not scientific for claiming biological differentiation in human psychology, because of it's lexical nature.
This is a few steps above "boys and girls have different sex organs" on wikipedia.
Yeah but why have a discussion group about politics if you can only defend the mainstream points of view?
Because people typically don't discuss politics to be persuaded or to have their mind opened. They do it to circlejerk, flame, and re-inforce their own existing beliefs. Whether they are on the left, or the right.
It was not just a lit review. It drew conclusions from the synthesis of the citations and advocated for specific policy changes within Google. That was the part that pissed people off. Lots of people don't believe that the studies support the conclusions that he drew.
This was the reaction at my company (at the time of the memo) as well. The psychology claims were not as big a deal as much as the fact that the author alleged discriminatory hiring policies.
This led an exec to publicly state that our diversity policies "isn't code for favoring women over men" and that "being an equal opportunity employer is a commitment to following anti- discrimination laws and maintaining a workplace where everyone matters, everyone has a sense of belonging, and everyone is held to the same standards."
This was in stark contrast to our diversity hiring policies which include giving larger bonuses for hiring diverse (women and URM), giving diverse candidates two chances at passing the phone screen instead of one, setting "outcome-based goals" for hitting specific % of diverse tech employees, and even setting up a system of reservations for diverse tech workers (though this last one wasn't established until after the memo).
I guess the exec might not be lying if he is speaking from the point of view that anything less than 50/50 is discrimination and that balancing this out with discrimination in the other direction is how to create an equal hiring process.
People observe data points, draw conclusions and then expose them to other people. This is a good thing, this is how we start talking about things, by exposing our conclusions to the outside and refining them based on that. Not liking someone's conclusions doesn't give them the right to silence them.
>Damore cited two studies, three Wikipedia pages, and an article from Quillette, a contrarian online magazine that often covers free speech on campus and alleged links between genetics and IQ.
Quote from the recent WIRED article on Google culture, easily verifiable but I'm too lazy right now. But that's hardly 'most of the memo was citations of studies'.
An intentionally misleading quote. The memo has over 30 references, looks like about half of which are either to a research paper or reporting about some research.
Even the Wikipedia links are either to a general definition, or a well-referenced section that cites research papers, not to baseless claims.
I'm surprised at the lack of skepticism in the discussion here. The term "politics" - even assuming there is a problem with fiery discussions of what we traditionally view that term to cover - could easily cover dissent over programs like Dragonfly. Most controversy within Google that is publicly known is politically motivated. Don't take this term at face value.
Yeah politics is an extremely broad topic. What’s common sense to one person is a insane governmental overreach to another. While I don’t think politics should hold a large place in the work place I’m always mindful when speech is restricted in pursuit of restricting “toxicity.”
A small group of people always ruin these things for everyone else.
ie, the people who can't handle politics and think the worlds constantly on fire so they think they're justified in ignoring social grace and time/place taboos. The internet news machines have generated many thousands of these people.
I feel like they are becoming more popular and giving even less of a shit that other people don't want to be forced to listen to their politics at work or in other forced proximity environments. And then there's the people who judge you for not talking or 'resisting', as if not being politically engaged is equivalent to supporting the 'other side'. Then there's the overly-excited drunken political rants at parties, that's when they really let loose! /rant
The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority
"It suffices for an intransigent minority – a certain type of intransigent minorities – to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences. Further, an optical illusion comes with the dominance of the minority: a naive observer would be under the impression that the choices and preferences are those of the majority." [1]
That effect and illusion has really been amplified with Twitter and how the news media uses a handful of those loud voices as though they're the dominant or established opinion.
Combine that with the fact that the most intolerant don't budge, while the majority is flexible.
> ie, the people who can't handle politics and think the worlds constantly on fire so they think they're justified in ignoring social grace and time/place taboos.
That is likely correct but it doesn't change the fact that as an organization grows the chance to have such people in their midst grows and it's enough to have a few of these that culture shift will be required to deal with it.
That is, you can't really fire someone for "starting threads about politics at work"[1] until you come up with a rule that bars such discussions.
[1] Which of course will be portrayed by those fired as "silencing <social issue they care about>" but having published rules enforced equally usually should provide sufficient protection in court against such claims.
I hear you, but have you considered that the world's actually on fire? Perhaps you wouldn't notice because you don't live in the Amazon.
I don't mean that seriously, but it does serve a point. How can you tell if people are just ranting "because of the internet" and not because they are suffering and think your political inaction is contributing to their pains?
Because of your comment I will try to be more cautious about people complaining as they might just be attention grabbers but it's also dangerous to fully ignore them because it makes us uncomfortable.
We should be grateful people rant to one another, because it means we still believe we can help ourselves. If this was a dictatorship we were living in there would be no point in complaining to the neighbours.
You're proving his point. The Amazon is experiencing a more or less average amount of fire during its dry season as farmers clear/maintain cropland like they do every year. However, the internet media has turned this into sensationalism that captures people like you and turns them into doomsayers.
From nasa.gov:
> As of August 16, 2019, an analysis of NASA satellite data indicated that total fire activity across the Amazon basin this year has been close to the average in comparison to the past 15 years.
Who is to say that the status quo isn't alarming, "things aren't worse than last year" isn't a valid argument that things are fine in any logical setting.
And the internet has helped spread information, some of these issues may have been captured by Nat Geo in the 40s but others will have been missed. A status quo progression may be championed as an issue not because everyone previously accepted it but because no one was previously aware of it.
"As of August 16, 2019, an analysis of NASA satellite data indicated that total fire activity across the Amazon basin this year has been close to the average in comparison to the past 15 years. (The Amazon spreads across Brazil, Peru, Colombia, and parts of other countries.) Though activity appears to be above average in the states of Amazonas and Rondônia, it has so far appeared below average in Mato Grosso and Pará, according to estimates"
A status quo isn't inherently bad, and this one looks like it's been consistent for many years.
I wanted to clarify that my statement above isn't specific to this article. I was trying to make a general reply, with consideration to the rest of the thread, to that original point and general statement.
I'm not in a position to evaluate how dire this specific instance is with any sort of confidence in my findings.
I wasn't being serious about that. I was trying to say is that just as they can't tell if the Amazon is on fire because they don't live there, they can't tell if someone is being opressed by the system because they simply aren't this certain someone.
But this is true of everything, everywhere, all the time. The world is a complex place, and we have to make do with the knowledge we have at hand. It doesn't mean that we should be brash and unwavering in whatever our current judgement is, but we also can't endlessly refuse to form own judgements simply because we don't know everything there is to know in the universe.
I think even in wartime, people don't want to talk about the war all the time?
Also, there is a difference between specific calls to action and gripes that someone ought to do something. Some complaints are more useful than others. It seems possible to tell the difference?
Political discussions are an important component of Internet addiction and we shouldn't be naive about the bad effects of large amounts of low quality conversation in distracting us from more important stuff.
> How can you tell if people are just ranting "because of the internet" and not because they are suffering and think your political inaction is contributing to their pains?
In many cases, it's not the group which is allegedly suffering that is doing the alledging, but rather elites who are far removed from that group, and the "alledging" takes the form of straw men, motte/bailey fallacies, and definitions that are ultimately circular. Often, we _are_ in the groups that are allegedly suffering or surrounded by those group, and there are no clear signs that we/they are suffering as described (and indeed, the descriptions are often incoherent).
So yeah, bonafide suffering is pretty easy to spot, as is opportunistic "compassion".
There's a difference between ranting on a subject and creating this "You're either Wonkru or you are the enemy of Wonkru. Choose!" kind of atmosphere on a permanent basis.
The former can be eye opening and it can provide the necessary emotional push to get something rolling. The latter is meant to shut others down and suppress opinions - it's a playground for sociopaths thriving on ad hominem aggression.
Why shouldn’t employees of the company with the goal of organizing all the worlds information debate politics? Everything is political. Especially information.
If I'm working on a team that is rolling out a new Google drive feature, I really don't need to hear you talk about why drinking straws are a phallic symbol and used by the patriarchy to keep woman down.
It's very easy to decry literal straw man arguments. As a googler, I don't think I've seen much discussion of drinking straws at all, and certainly none about how they're phallic.
If you think any discussion of politics is that infantile, I don't think there's anything I can do or say to convince you otherwise, but for everyone else, just recognize that this example is ridiculous. And real, actual, conversations about political topics aren't anywhere near as asenine. They're about important things, that often are relevant to work: privacy, discrimination (inentional and non-, by both people and machines), and literal actual government policy that affects google and googlers: immigration, taxes, etc.
I'm not sure how you could avoid those topics and still be an effective employee, or in some cases still be an employee at all.
Yup, and Google is letting those people know that there may now be consequences for their disruption. If those people still think their disruption worthwhile, they're free to proceed.
I think this is very telling, as a symptom of a diseased democracy.
People wouldn't take their fight to these environments if democracy was working, because they'd have faith in the due processes of government. But once they start thinking things aren't working, they'll go to their next seats of power. In this case it's the workplace where they can influence their coworkers and the policy of a big tech corporation.
These people are not a majority so democracy isn't fully broken yet, but the cracks are showing.
I wish your comment was top level, because most of the comments in this thread are snarky responses that don't understand how politics turned Google's workplace toxic.
I'm sure the oppressed party in your example feels the polar opposite and don't want to hear your whining about how feminism doesn't matter in modern society because it's good enough as is. And I think that's the point :)
I assume you're being sarcastic/exaggerating, but even so.
This is just a perfect example of how polarised politics is today. Society just needs to calm down and evaluate itself instead of bickering over nonsense.
Plenty of Google Drive features are political. For example, allowing people to monitor who has read a document. Or deciding what the default permission set should be for new files. Or whether or not the files should be encrypted at rest. Or whether the Drive client should download and sync everything, or download stuff on demand. Etc, etc.
That's a strawman argument. I think we both know there's a distinction to be made between 'political' and mainstream political conversation. Of course if you're stretching the definition it will include everything.
Political discussions in the work place effectively become denial of service attacks on some co-workers. Since you have to collaborate with others at work to get your job done, anything that "DoS" your co-workers "DoS" you as well. Plus it hurts the value of the equity portion of your compensation, so it a way, it's theft too.
These conversations primarily occur online and are thus easily avoidable.
>Plus it hurts the value of the equity portion of your compensation, so it a way, it's theft too.
I doubt it. The culture has probably done more positive than negative for company value. And even if it hasn't, short-term shareholder value definitely isn't the best measure of long-term success. Calling it "theft" is a big stretch.
When you organize the worlds information, then some amount of politics is a necessary part of the job. The product you are selling is built by political talk.
To give a fairly tame example. Lets say someone googles "Can crystal healing cure cancer". Do you put a box saying no? Do you put put a box saying "according to authority it does not". If you defer to authority to do you defer to different one in different countries? What if they disagree? Maybe we need a list of FUBAR countries?
I think there are a lot of reasons someone at work may not be doing work, that have nothing to do with talking about politics. BRB...gotta get to work ;)
Their job is to create a forum for others to debate, and to try and maintain neutrality. Their own politics aren't necessarily relevant. Everyone wants to be able to have their political opinions, try and convince others, and not get fired. It's kind of a pick-2 situation. Feel free to bring politics in with ya so long as you embrace the philosophy that you can say anything you want on your last day.
Trying to convince other people of MY political leaning goes against one of the central political leaning that I have: Everyone should have freedom to believe in whatever they want to believe in. I also find it annoying when other people try to shove their believe down my throat.
I try to view political discussions as helping to spread information and confront one's own biases. Most people don't seem to though. I've had people that I agree with politically on a subject yell and curse at me because I don't believe every bullshit "fact" they sling my way.
Others as in not their employees. Google indexes all the worlds information, who says their goal is to impose their opinion on it? Isn't neutrality in indexing the assumption?
They do not collect anything even remotely close to "all the worlds information".
> who says their goal is to impose their opinion on it
Their goal is to make money. Whether they impose their opinion on the index is a business decision.
> Isn't neutrality in indexing the assumption?
Why would it be? What if the people that run google have a fundamental disagreement with certain political ideas and have a desire not to index those things?
Yes and no. Ranking by definition means not being neutral, it's just that society has decided that it's acceptable to rank spam lower than other content. Neutrality looks a lot like bias from the perspective of spammers.
When you're dealing with more complex signals at scale there are so many second and third order effects that are hard or impossible to predict.
For example, the conservative bias everyone's talking about doesn't seem to me to be literal bias against the right, but bias in favour of mainstream news sources which are overwhelmingly left-wing.
I'm sure there are many issues in Search like the one I just described, and being able to have these conversations is what makes it possible for Googlers to spot these issues, decide if it's even an issue and fix it. If you ban a certain type of conversation, you'll change how people think about a potential issue.
It would be up to the details of their individuals contracts. It would be possible for someone's contract to either directly (unlikely) or indirectly (far more likely) allow for debating of politics to some degree. That freedom would be part of their compensation package, though one often not considered in simple models. I think Google is realizing they have undervalued the cost to them of allowing such an action and want to renegotiate. Since it is likely an indirect benefit, this would largely be done by changing corporate rules and culture concerning politics where workers could respond in numerous ways.
While it is possible for a contract specifying 8 hours of work without a single thought other than work (and any legally mandated breaks) in exchange for the given salary and benefits, I've never seen any organization that actually operated using such contracts.
Because political discussions are incredibly polarizing, specially these days, and once they are allowed they pulverize the company into factions that cannot work together until the more strident or powerful of these factions takes over and pushes everybody else out or into silence. And when this happens, you have an homogeneous political body as the gatekeeper to the worlds information. What could go wrong?
In this day and age, with the gutter level of discourse used daily by politicians? With a media designed to elicit outrage and a populous that has been led to believe that what divides is far more important than what brings us together? Absolutely, at least until the madness goes away.
The politicians are a product of the media environment imo.
The blame lies in the race to the bottom that happened in news once it got competetive.
Until the innoculative meme of having an intuitive understanding of sampling (both of individual incidents and individual aspects of a thing) spreads throughout a decent portion of the populatiob, this awful situation will continue.
This is counterintuitive. If you emphasize politics, you end up selecting for the dominant viewpoint, thereby reducing diversity. If you don't emphasize politics, you end up selecting for the people who can do the job, which is almost certainly more diverse (to the extent the pipeline doesn't suffer the aforementioned political biases).
One of the keys to a diverse organization is to adopt policies and practices that don't strongly encourage uniformity. Political compatibility is one form of uniformity that can work to reduce diversity and inclusion. Perhaps "Handle With Care" might be a wise attitude?
Politics and religion are uniquely divisive subjects, and when you allow endless arguments about them, you create a rigid and hostile atmosphere that kills comity and intellectual collaboration. Everything becomes an argument about politics, and then activism, and than ostracism and purity spirals. It's a classic pattern.
So yes, you really should taboo political arguments if you don't want to drive away people with independent views.
Really, maybe focus on what you have in common and not what's different -- people have a lot more in common and agree about a lot more things than they realize.
If all the discussion stayed within the confines of the company and away from headlines, and they never generated lawsuits, and HR never had to hear employees complain about how such and such had an argument with such and such, then I doubt anyone would mind.
It doesn't matter what the philosophically correct definition of politics is--what matters is reducing HR complaints, lawsuits, and negative headlines.
Because in theory, a debate is a thoughtful discussion where opponents are respectful to opinions of each other and have the common goal of finding the truth.
In reality, political debating at workplace quickly becomes just ugly.
And for companies like Google it's also costly, because media adore leaked scandals in big corporations.
> In reality, political debating at workplace quickly becomes just ugly.
I don't think it really has to. I debate politics with people at work enough. I won't get into specifics too much but it's not uncommon to meet someone who has a controversial opinion. You talk with someone, find out why they believe what they believe, and then question a few things (mostly asking why they believe they believe - what lead them to their beliefs). It doesn't have to get heated - it can be a boring lecture to one another about why you believe what you believe. It only gets ugly when you do things that won't lead to change like: "No - you're dumb! You should think what I think!" Which I don't think people who are emotionally and socially competent would do that often...
That said - I don't think of people at Google (or other big companies) as being particularly emotionally or socially competent because they don't hire and train for that.
Do you discuss politics at work in an online forum where 100 000 persons can pitch in? It is very different from discussing politics in person, things gets way more toxic online since there are more people who can take offence so arguments often escalate.
It could depend on multiple factors, such as: number of people you're debating with, their demographics, and the fact that some people are more ... shall we say... "trigger-happy" than others.
Yes, but that should be determined by subject matter experts in policy and politics.
For example the issue of who controls the three different areas of “Kashmir” should not be settled by the opinions of college graduates who have little exposure to international politics and policy and or history.
Because Google is not a publisher, and selectively choosing how to present information according to the predominant internal politics is unethical without a disclaimer, which currently does not exist, given Google's status as the defacto gateway to information on the internet.
Curating information in such a manner is, ironically, marginalizing the groups who's views are being suppressed. Information should flow freely for people to make their own decisions. This is a dangerous amount of power for an increasingly biased private entity, particularly given certain choice quotes in this article and others regarding googlers' views on the current presidency.
Exactly. I find it quite bizarre when some folks suggest divorcing from politics as if the possibility exists. Everything is political. Even this very conversation is political.
The joke only works using math with a base of 9 or above and in a language where '8' and 'ate' are homophones, making the use of it biased against people who use other languages or counting systems.
A joke not being funny for one group doesn't mean that it is political. And if people are offended over not understanding a joke they would be offended over not understanding a sentence, meaning that every utterance ever is offensive since there is always people who doesn't speak your language. You are absurd here and only strengthened my view that people who say "everything is political" are just trying to sow discord.
We can see here more politics, as rejecting the interpretation of cultural elements as political is itself a political act of reinforcing the unexamined status quo.
Or, to reverse the situation: consider how you'd feel about things if you came into a workplace where everyone was telling jokes that only make sense if you know Chinese culture, and then if you mentioned that you felt left out, told you to stop complaining because you were only trying to 'sow discord'.
And they I told you to go ahead and expand your horizons by learning about Chinese culture so that you wouldn't feel "left out". Are you seriously arguing this or are you trolling?
> And they I told you to go ahead and expand your horizons by learning about Chinese culture so that you wouldn't feel "left out".
No, you defaulted to responding to the very idea of a possible cultural clash as something "absurd" and "trying to sow discord". Again, more politics: that kind of response is regularly witnessed in status-quo-reinforcing political actions.
Problem #1: All models are invalid, some are useful. You need to stop ignorant actors who don’t understand that 3 is not a valid approximation of Pi, while simultaneously stopping pedants who want to everything to be accurate in ways that are not compatible with the IEEE standard for float.
Problem #2: There are lies, damned lies and statistics. People who want to push $NOT_YOUR_VIEWPOINT will cite more studies than you have time to evaluate to prove you wrong.
Math is probably one of the if not the least political thing out there, but there are still politics involved. For starters, all mathematicians need funding and choosing who to fund is partially political. Deciding awards is partially political. Even the importance of taking or rejecting some axioms and if certain fields still have value for further research is political. There are even different axioms one can use to derive math from, and choosing one over another is partially political (though it is interesting to see how each one deals with Russell's paradox).
You can find a way to relate politics to any endeavor, but politics is central to things like tax policy in a way that it's not central to, say,
N-dimensional manifolds. Equating the two kinds of relationship is a fundamentally dishonest intellectual tactic used by people who want to inject political activism into every human endeavor. People need to stop doing that.
I think people are too quick to forget the importance of funding and the impact it has. For example, if a study comes out that A suffers from f, but no study exists that says B suffers from f, is that because there was a study that didn't find it or because there has not been such a study, perhaps due to lack of funding. This then has an impact on actual law when attempting to base law on science (should we set aside funding to help A but not B with f?).
With math in particular, the way statistics are used to represent and draw conclusions from data can be highly political, especially when dealing with a very unpopular study and the level of criticism it receives compared to a popular study.
> Math is probably one of the if not the least political thing out there
If you can concede that some things are less political than others, then how difficult is it to assume that "No political conversations" is a shorthand for "conversations about things which are not highly political"?
Quite difficult, when the example was used in response to the statement "Everything is political." I would even say the contemplation of such a concession would be evidence of the original point as it suggests that we should just accept that everything is political and thus when someone says not everything is political they mean that some things are far less political than others.
Yup, that's my point. Saying "everything is political" might be true, but it misses the point that some things are far less political than others, and almost everyone who says things like "no political conversation" probably means "no highly political conversation".
The question of whether a certain discission have more "politics inside" than another is a very political one, especially when someone tries to have a right opinion (even if the advocated opinion is "let us promote diversity and respect different political opinions) and use it to achieve some goals.
I think any reasonable definition of "politicalness" must respect consensus, and I think you'll find significant consensus that things like "abortion" are more political than things like "math". Arguments like "everything is political" are almost always an excuse used by firebrands to legitimize their pet issue--in this case, to make talking about their politics as appropriate in the workplace as getting their work done.
It is in their mathematical expression that the laws of nature find their most precise form. Math, therefore, is the single most objective kind of knowledge. But, at the same time, that also means that Math cannot be political. (I am not talking about the impact of mathematics on the society, which is what the book is about.)
The context here is that someone is claiming math is a counterexample to "everything being political" unfortunately I don't think there is a counterexample.
> which is what the book is about
Many of the chapters are about this. There is a chapter about mathematical rhetoric and how math is used to persuade people.
I would add that mathematical abstractions represent a particular philosophy of viewing the world. For example greek geometry is heavily biased by Platonism.
Just look at the phrase you used: "law of nature". Is nature governed by "laws"? This is certainly a position in an argument about how the world works.
Consider the difference between a culture that uses base 10 and a culture that uses base 25. They're going to have different conceptions of "manageable amounts", which could have all kinds of knock-on effects when it comes to the management of political entities.
I find the notion that think that you think that its even morally appropriate to have a debate on skub to be absolutely reprehensible and disgusting, and I refuse to engage you further.
This is exactly right. At my small startup we may have heated discussions about monads, or tabs vs spaces, but you'll never hear any talk about any elected official or laws or current events.
It's not that we don't care. It's just that it's not the reason we spend 8+ hours/day together.
The difference is that Google's product is almost inherently political, especially when it comes to how they tailor search results and rank news results. I think it is productive that people who work on products that have political ramifications should be allowed to talk about politics because what they do has political ramifications.
I would hate for dissenting voices within google to be silenced and everyone to simply follow orders from the top regarding how they make search ranking decisions. Especially considering the recent whistle-blowers from within google alleging political bias in google search results. Surprisingly, none of which seemed to make any waves here on HN.
But not for the vast majority of people working there. Most folks are running infrastructure and building products completely unrelated to their *news offerings. And I think a big chunk of this discussion is just folks sitting on internal boards and wasting a lot of time arguing with people they've never met in some other corner of the company.
In most professional settings, it’s considered a norm not to talk about sex, politics, and religion unless your business is dealing with one of those areas specifically.
No, I'm arguing that most large, "professional" companies would not have allowed employees to create create chat groups whose sole purpose was to discuss politics or any other non-work-related topic (whether on mailing lists, Slack, or whatever). In doing so, Google was treating its employees more like adults, which is the opposite of what a previous comment in the thread was suggesting.
How did Google “treating employees like adults” work out? The only reason an employer goes to work is to make money. The only reason an employer hires someone is to make them money or to save them money.
Bringing anything else into the workplace is an unnecessary distraction from both the employee’s and employer’s standpoint. I go to work to have money deposited into my account twice a month and go home to spend time with my family and friends. The more time I spend at work spending energy not doing work either I will be less effective or spend more time away from family/friends/hobbies to be effective at work.
HN does this, we aren't even employees, and it's far far less serious of a site than a workplace message board. HN isn't even paying for my time like my employer is.
Seems completely reasonable for an employer to moderate internal message boards, of all entities.
This is wonderful when your very existence isn’t political. So cis het white men. For the rest of us we don’t have this luxury. This is the pinnacle example of white and male privilege.
I know a couple of non-white/cis/het/male developers who are able to behave like mature, goal-oriented adults and do stellar work. It's not a luxury, it's called being professional.
I guess the issue is people no longer act as adults (having rational discussions over differences) when confronted with differing or worse opposing views?
A small but large enough group (on many issues) get enraged and genuinely feel threatened by alternate opinions.
Google probably has a higher concentration of "children" (loose sense of the word) than your average tech employer, as it aggressively poaches junior engineers, focusing heavily on academic technical proficiency over other professional aspects, and then many don't stick around long term.
If someone spends a significant portion of their day in heated debate about subjects unrelated to their work they aren’t performing to their ability no matter how they spin their output story to make it look like they are performing well. I think freedom to step away from work for an hour or two to unwind is great but it needs to be in moderation - I think people going too far and spending multiple hours of a day in flame wars is what the policy is meant to address.
I try to just do work at work, but to play contrarian:
If one agrees with Aristotle in that: "Man is by nature a political animal," the cultural acceptance of no politics at work seems almost nefarious. Most of us spend more time at work than perhaps any other activity, barring sleep.
One could perhaps even hypothesize that without some political discussion at work, people exclusively talk with friends who share their political opinions, causing larger lateralization of political thought.
There is also a shared understanding that you don't debate politics with family, which would also be a pretty big block of time for many. Perhaps the forum isn't the problem, its that a good deal of people feel uncomfortable with politics and choose to not engage. I guess what's pretty funny here is we all have a shared understanding that there are problems in politics and the cultural landscape, but also there's a lot of common sense that keeping your feelings bottled up isn't good for anyone.
Where I grew up, the saying went "there are three things you don't talk about in polite company: money, religion, and politics." Where I used to work, I found out someone I worked with a lot didn't support gay marriage. I had a really hard time working with them after that.
Maybe this is the inevitable outcome of trying to make work a social hub. It's great to say that we should be able to discuss anything with anyone, but the reality is that we're not all perfectly mature people and we can't handle it.
Worked at Google for a short time (2013-2014), during the height of Trayvon Martin and other murders of black folks around then. The internal discussion could really be hard to read for me (I'm black). Still, I don't think it should really be stopped. I was glad to be able to express my actual opinions at work.
I think they'll have a really hard time totally stopping it though. Internally it's really like a college atmosphere, at least in terms of exchanging ideas via their intranet. I was amazed that it was so open in that way, and I hope they find a way to keep that culture alive.
On the other hand, it was hard to work with people that help views that I considered racist or nearly so. No easy solution here.
>The internal discussion could really be hard to read for me (I'm black)
Was it a minority of people who had views that were hard to read or the majority? I was under the impression that most people at Google were not supportive of his acquittal.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the recently leaked posts that shows google staff used the google search front end to target specific demographics they expected to vote for a particular candidate and then were shocked and upset when a substantial minority portion of those populations voted for different candidates?
If discussions are leading to credible allegations that a company was promoting candidates using their marketing resources in violation of campaign finance laws, it would be easy to understand why they might want to get those discussions offline.
I could, but the google leaked documents have been aggressively removed from any site I've seen them posted on (HN, reddit, etc.) presumably under (BS) legal threat from google. If you give me an email address, I'll send you links privately.
I presume your talking about one of the two leaks via veritas. Those don't say what you claim they do. I also expect your assumptions about legal threats are wrong. But such claims are easy to make sans evidence, and they do feel good.
> I wonder if this has anything to do with the recently leaked posts that shows google staff used the google search front end to target specific demographics they expected to vote for a particular candidate and then were shocked and upset when a substantial minority portion of those populations voted for different candidates?
That's my thought. It sounds that the discussions were always inflamed and lively. But why the change now, right after all that stuff came out? I suspect they are afraid of more leakers, and are afraid of lawsuits which would trigger discovery and then all the internal politics will get dump out.
I expect them to loosely categorize politics, while still encouraging open corporate discussion of LGBTQ, racial, and other such issues. People may have different opinions about that.
Telling people to stop talking about politics because one don't feel like the discussion is important or productive can be viewed as its own form of covert political discourse. "The status quo is fine, I'm doing fine, discussion to the contrary hurts my worldview".
Exactly. Every one regards his issues as too important to be merely political. My point is many people don't agree with your interpretation of what ought to be allowed/banned, and you've presented no reason why those issues in particular ought to be discussed. Again, my best solution is to just avoid talking politics at work.
I never had the need to discuss politics at work. Just don't do it, why open that can of worms. Absolutely no need to do so. One time a coworker asked me and I said "I don't discuss politics at work". Be professional, people.
Once had a coworker out of left-field start telling me how one should be free to assault someone based on the arbitrary assessment of their speech being "harmful." This coworker wrongly assumed I would agree with them, and was rather taken aback when I shutdown the conversation as opposed to expressing my agreement.
Now you've gone and run the risk of creating a hostile working environment. Why people feel this is a sane mode of being is beyond me.
>One time a coworker asked me and I said "I don't discuss politics at work".
These days, even that is seen as taking a side. People get suspicious when you don't join in with the group political affirmations, and start suspecting you to be a secret "other." That's how toxic it's become.
Of course there is a need to discuss politics. It isn't a separate thing that can be divorced from what it's about, i.e. everything. That includes work.
I'm not at Google but my guess is that the number of Chinese employees and the current protests in HongKong might create some internal political fights.
I haven't been at Google in 5 years but I worked with a lot of Chinese coworkers from all three of mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong when I was there (as well as ABCs of those descents). Honestly, I never saw a Chinese employee get into a political argument. Mostly they were just happy to be in the U.S. and draw a Google-level salary. ABCs (including myself) would, but usually about American politics, not Chinese.
I think most Americans underestimate the extent to which most Chinese are apolitical and pragmatic. Chinese culture doesn't have the tradition of civic engagement and vigorous debate that Anglo-American culture does, and skews more towards Exit than Voice. A typical Chinese response to a looming civil war is more akin to "Well shit. Better emigrate (if I can) or pay off the right soldiers and officials (if I can't) so this doesn't harm my family" than to demonstrate in the streets and call for the ouster of the leaders in question. This is a double-edged sword: it's how the CCP maintains social controls that would be unacceptable violations of civil liberties in Western democracies, it's also behind the "model minority" image of Asian-Americans, but it also means that you don't get a lot of disruptive political talk in groups with Asian immigrants.
The action in question involved 3 mainland students and one Hong Kong student.
How many people live in mainland China? 1.3B. How many people live in Hong Kong? 7.4M. How many overseas Chinese are there? 50M. How many overseas Hongkongers? About 1.5M.
You can bet that if there is any one such incident happening in the globe, the press will seize on it, because it fits the current media narrative and gets clicks. By the numbers, though, you're looking at 1 in a million.
I heard from some friends in NYC that there was drama over the lego flag sculptures, where the Taiwanese lego flag was mysteriously smashed several times and the rebuilt flag hidden behind a larger PRC lego flag.
> Chinese nationals inside Google have at times clashed with its techno-libertarian culture. One infamous example, detailed in a book by the former head of Google’s “people operations,” comes from 2008, when the company cafeteria offered employees a “Free Tibet Goji-Chocolate Creme Pie.” This offended a Chinese national at the company, who sent an email to Chief Executive Larry Page. The chef was immediately suspended — then, after a companywide email thread that at the time was the longest in Google history, reinstated. An engineer who was at Google at the time told me the whole controversy was “ridiculous.”
Exactly, the relationship with China is way more fractious and important. Very unlikely triggered by domestic US opinions as almost nothing will affect their relationship with the US (specifically because there is no consolidation of single-party power), so people debating “stretch goals” in advancing US inclusion and US civil rights doesn't really change anything. If you know “how to America” then you know how to take advantage of anyone in charge and it doesn't matter how divided the country is.
But Hyper-patriotic Chinese employees dealing with US ideology towards China certainly would change things.
Its not so different than vocally disagreeing with Israel’s “foreign” policy and expecting to still remain employed anywhere. Not gonna happen!
You have to recognize who the masters are or who they are beholden to.
Being from China, which bans Google, while working at Google and arguing in favor of China's policies toward Hong Kong must make for some severe cognitive dissonance.
As far as I know Google isn't banned in China; it's just blocked. In the sense that there are no legal consequences for using a VPN to get around the firewall.
I think this was inevitable in the long run. From the very beginning, Google has tried to have the atmosphere of a college campus rather than a normal workplace, probably (at least in the early days before every tech company started doing this) to help them stand out among job applicants as an alternative to stuffier companies.
The thing is though, professional work environments (where there are typically norms around never discussing politics) are the way they are for a reason. Just like Bitcoiners are rediscovering why finance regulations exist, Google is rediscovering why the cool, relaxed workplace ends up causing more problems than it solves.
> The thing is though, professional work environments (where there are typically norms around never discussing politics) are the way they are for a reason.
The reason is the same as for not talking about salary at work: To prevent workers from developing class consciousness.
We don't talk about politics or religion at work for the same reason that we use money instead of barter.
If we only used barter we could only trade when we could find matching goods/services between trading partners, by using money instead we avoid the matching.
If you discuss politics at work you risk a situation where some people cannot work together because of incompatible views which are essentially irrelevant to the work being performed.
On the contrary: Politics have to be discussed at work because that's where "incompatible" people meet. Discussing politics with those who share your views isn't all that enlightning.
The work being performed is generally completely irrelevant compared to politics so it has to take a backseat. The capitalist will just have to deal with the fact that their workers are not mindless unpolitical drones.
That might be good for political discourse, but it's not good for commerce.
And if someone has a weaker position in the workforce it may not be good for their financial welfare: No one has to just deal with someone they can fire. How much is political discourse improved by communication in the context of that kind of asymmetry?
Exactly! They sent out regular email to all employees asking for contributions to NETPAC when I was there. But now don't discuss politics among rank-and-file - they just want to control the dialog and power among the execs.
The politics of $RICH_GUY_WHO_WORKS_AT_TECH_IN_THE_WEST_COAST are not secret, I was just laughing at the prospect of a seemingly neutral "project" which is just a way of denouncing companies that use their advertisement power to show how leftist they are (because in this day and age they have no other choice) while, at the same time, they give money to those eeeevil conservatives.
"Pinboard has been keeping track of political donations from big tech companies" does not seem to imply that it's a completely biased report, but yeah, I should have known better :P
Yeah so far from what I've seen all the big tech companies PAC's give with roughly 50/50 distribution of funds between left and right wing politicians. Whether that is good or bad is up to your own judgement. Personally I stopped donating to my company's PAC because I want more control of who my donations go to, but from what I've seen the corporate PAC's are all pretty well balanced.
50/50 doesn't necessarily mean 50/50. If I give to my preferred candidate and give to an opposing candidate that I think would be easy for my candidate to beat, then I'm not really giving 50/50.
The donations are capped by law at $5,000 per candidate+election (so typically a corporate PAC can give $10,000 to a congressional or senate candidate).
The amounts are not as important as the fact that Google's name is attached to them. But I agree with you that the overall figure is tiny, which makes it more mysterious why Google continues to make these donations, which amount to legalized bribery.
IBM and Apple do fine without a corporate PAC. Microsoft suspended its own PAC after strong internal pressure from employees over donations to some of the same terrible people.
My first reaction (to the general topic) was, "Well, of course they had to put a stop to that. And international message forums with many participants? What a recipe for disaster."
But then I had to be honest with myself: I'm at work at least 45 hours a week (not at Google, but in tech). My commute time is 45 minutes each way. So out of 11-12 hours of not-me-time, you want me to completely keep my trap shut? That's a hard ask.
Here's an example. Earlier this week, I'm on my way to the subway and I see a fight, and I also see piss on two sets of seats on both sides of the subway car. Then I'm at work and my colleague, unprompted and as I come in, remarks how many more heroin-addled people there are in Midtown, Manhattan than he's ever seen. I then blurt out a rant about the Mayor, criminal justice policies I consider wrong (such as the push to lower incarceration without consequence), and a few other things that were aggressively opinionated and political, in an open office environment. Shortly thereafter I somewhat regretted it (but I never expected any consequences).
We're only human.
It just needs to be channeled. Keep it to your local work friends, or at the bar, or whatever that ISN'T on a message board.
Avoiding topics that are not work related and are likely to make a large group of co-workers angry seems like an obvious, professional thing to do, regardless of the specific policies of the workplace.
Talk about work at work. If you meet someone at work who you think you want to be friends with, invite them for coffee before work and talk about non-work stuff then. But at work, just talk about work.
What's remarkable is how the media narrative surrounding this rule change seems to suggest that it's a bad thing, while the popular response is overwhelmingly positive. I've yet to see one of these articles quote someone who isn't an internal activist or present the perspective of any employee who likes the change.
Well, no, many jobs are much more complicated than that. Honestly, a contractor relationship where you are taking orders from one person and only have to worry about what they think is refreshingly simple compared to working in a highly collaborative environment.
For example, at Google, your manager is one person whose opinions are important, but things like promotions also depend heavily on peer review and your general reputation.
There is a reason you keep away from discussing politics and religion in certain places. We all get excited when discussing them and nothing gets solved. Work is the wrong place for it. Google should have known this by now. It's about time they start doing something about it.
It's almost as if embracing "the personal is political" makes people feel morally obligated and virtuous for airing every half baked and divisive political opinion. And now they want to put the genie back in the bottle? Far too late.
This is the norm at most companies right? Like Microsoft etc.? Whether de factor or de iuro, politics is usually left at home unless it's personal conversations among close colleagues.
Ownership of a multinational conglomarate corporation whose practices effect the lives of billions requires either governance or real stewardship. Google is driven by one thing making profit. There stewardship is morally defunct. their profits are driven by the sale of the never ending stream of consumer information they glean from the electronic fields where they harvest. That info is all encompassing some you or I would consider private some nonsense. others might percieve that very same data differantly. All of it can be used to map and monitise people, placea, ideas and things. All of it used to know you. To not deamand or hold google accountable for their caveat emptor and lasie fair monopoly is foolish. to allow them or their users a free hand is naive. Ideas are more powerful then weapons. Greed a larger motivator then morals. Google launched in the U.S. has taken those profits and used them to court profits in countrys where their motivations are not the U.S.s motivations but googles remains the same. Harvest information and sale it. Dont ask what the info is used for.
If I had to guess, the individuals demanding that google employees be allowed to debate political subjects because "everything is political" are the same people who would argue that consumers of google's services shouldn't expect that google won't censor them. An odd position to take if you ask me.
Meanwhile, google shuts down more than 200 youtube channels that criticize the hong kong protests. (N.B.: I do not oppose them, im just pointing out how hilariously hypocritical it is for an organization at the center of global politics to be telling its employees not to debate politics.)
I feel like Google should have started their orientation with a link to jwz's rba gruntle (not linking because HN people hate what his referral headers redirect does). The lawyer in that article is now an SVP of Legal at Google.
Finally common sense prevails!
Get to work on time, eat your free lunch, work, go home.
To those of you who disagree; if you want to "make a difference" take a cue from Gandhi, Mandela, Martin Luther king Jr. etc. Mahama Gandhi didn't work for the East India company while simultaneously fighting for freedom.
If you are serious about it put your money where your mouth is and stop being empty vessels.
> Mahama Gandhi didn't work for the East India company while simultaneously fighting for freedom.
LOL!
I worked at Google for about two years as a "TVC" (a programmer in a cubical, not a "real" Googler) and it was like being kidnapped by aliens, after I left that's how it felt: Like I was one of those people who had just been returned to Earth.
One thing that doesn't get talked about in re: Google and values: there's an entire "underclass" of employees that are of definite inferior status. The janitors, re-stockers of cafes, and maintenance people, etc. They wear special uniforms, and are trained not to fraternize with the "real" Googlers. They don't get to ride the fancy buses to and from work.
They are also of a different racial mix. Googlers are generally white or Asian but the staff are generally Hispanic. So there's politics, and then there's politics...
This is arguably because of ERISA and Google's decision to make their 401(k) plan highly optimized for software developers. ERISA says that you have to offer the same 401(k) to all employees and that it has to meet fairness criteria for "highly compensated" employees, but it doesn't say what labor inputs have to be provided by employees vs contractors.
Maybe, but if you loudly espouse progressive values as Googlers seem to do more than most tech workers, maybe you should put some of those values into practice, and actually make a real effort to integrate those contractors into the group?
Is this in California? I've noticed in California that food service workers (at any establishment) tend to be Hispanic. In Toronto, they tend to be Asian.
Since these companies are required to be race-blind when hiring, they are going to be a reflection of their local job markets.
if you want to "make a difference" take a cue from Gandhi, Mandela, Martin Luther king Jr. etc
To elaborate the examples/options:
1) Become a lawyer -- Real change can be enacted through legislation and litigation. Knowing how the law works is power in this context.
2) Be involved in politics -- Again, real change can be enacted through legislation. This doesn't just mean running for office. One of my ex-girlfriends' step-fathers worked at a juvenile halfway house, and he regularly acted as an unpaid lobbyist. I have another friend who has also acted as an unpaid lobbyist for environmental causes. Anyone can do it. It's just a matter of being articulate, preparing, and having the time. (Also, everyone knows that lots of paid lobbyists are basically like mercenaries, so if your sincerity comes through and you know your stuff, there will be people open to your alternative take.)
3) Public speaking and writing -- All of the above did that.
Also, with regards to 2 and 3, do this in the larger community, outside of your workplace. This makes your activism a pull for people, instead of a push. Just imagine if people of _political_party_you_dont_like_ started to get involved in committees at your job and started to foist their particular beliefs on you there in the form of policies. It's not a big stretch to see how that could be interpreted as a subtle form of political attack, through the sensitive area of one's livelihood. It's easy to see how that can close minds, where otherwise there might have been a chance to convince, instead of coerce.
This brings me to number 4:
4) Convince. Don't coerce. -- In particular, in the startup community, we should know that getting people to pull can work much better than a push, which can even elicit a backlash.
As an aside, I came to Gandhi's views on nationalism while living in Indonesia. Gandhi was a genius there and his views on the rightful place of nationalism have shaped a continent for the better.
This insistence on purity seems kind of naive and unsympathetic. I assume real history is more complicated. Do you really think there weren't blacks fighting for civil rights while working for racists?
But I'm pretty certain most, if not all, African Americans who worked for racists were fired if they found out that they were part of the civil rights movement.
As Jordan Peterson says, clean up your room before you go fixing the world. Go up from Shoreline towards 101 and see the number of homeless people; what exactly are these enlightened Googlers doing for them other than ignoring them and driving away with their expensive Maserati's, Tesla's etc. and complaining about how expensive it is to live in the bay area. How about NIMBY laws? The list goes on and on..
I have a feeling that many of the activists who were just protesters alongside those big names didn't quit their jobs to pursue of lifetime of pure activism. I'm not sure why having a job precludes you from being political.
> Mahama Gandhi didn't work for the East India company while simultaneously fighting for freedom.
Given that the East India Company was dissolved when he was 5, this would've been difficult.[1][2]
He did however work in the ambulance corps for the British Army in the Boer War. And advocated for cooperation with the British government in WW1 right up until the Jalianwala Bagh massacre.[3]
The East India Company analogy doesn't fit. Google doesn't have a private army to subjugate the countries it trades with. Gandhi working at some other company might be a better fit, but even that isn't a good analogy. A lot of these people don't see themselves as Gandhis, Kings, Mandelas, etc. but only as their followers, who did have regular day jobs.
> Some employees have used internal chat boards to rally other workers against some Google projects, helping push the company to end work on a censored search engine for the Chinese market and an artificial intelligence contract for the U.S. military.
Oh. So they don't care about bullying or alienating people with unpopular political views, they're upset that employees are questioning their material support of antidemocratic governments. For a second I thought they were actually making something close to a good ethical choice here, I see I was mistaken.
They are right. It's ridicule that it has to come to this. Debate politics in your personal time. There's already too much shit keeping people from their workstations (massages, free food, ...)
Big tech and hiring practices and internet privacy and google itself are political topics this election cycle. Should googlers not talk debate about tech and hiring and privacy and google?
One of the their core values is "don't be evil", isn't that statement inherently political? I think a lot of people chose to work at Google (instead of say Oracle or etc) because of those ideals. Kinda disingenuous to advertise that reputation and then switch to a policy of "actually shut up and do the work".
I don't work at Google. But, I wouldn't even discuss politics with people that I know agree with me. It's just not professional. I am a little surprised it's taken this long for this to come to a head -- the HR department must be breathing a sigh of relief.
Am I the only one who thinks it’s totally okay for a Company to allow or not allow certain kinds of discussions within their offices. Why is this even a debate ? Companies are not run like democracies !! You dont loke the rule, change the company.
This is so hilariously wrong that I don't even know where to start.
Google's culture was predicated on hiring intelligent, emotionally-continent adults. Free discussion of politics wasn't banned during my time there because everyone was capable of understanding precisely the opposite of what you're describing: that differing views on the world exist and are attributable to more than just whether someone is a good or bad person.
When you scale to a hundred thousand employees, you can't keep your bar that high, and you have to start letting in people who more closely resemble the average narrow-minded, maximalizing dumbass. For a little while that meant the company needed to bow to the more culturally-powerful regressive left (esp when things leaked, for PR reasons), but as the culture war heats up, the only winning move for a company with a (classical) liberal founding culture is to discourage political engagement at all.
I've worked for a lot of small startups some mid-sized companies in California over the last decade.
I would never ever share any views that are non-liberal because when I've seen anyone else do it it didn't go well for them at all. And I'm not at work to change people's political views so there's no reason to take the risk.
I don't think this is a new shift at all. I think it's typical when you have smart but insecure people which is most software engineers.
"Over the last decade" is a critical qualification, I think. This phenomenon emerged in the early 2010s, by my best reckoning.
This sounds an awful lot like nostalgic pining for the good old days, but there was a time not too long ago that daring to hold an opinion that others around you disagreed with wasn't an existential threat to your career. Things shifted really hard, really fast.
> I would never ever share any views that are non-liberal because when I've seen anyone else do it it didn't go well for them at all. And I'm not at work to change people's political views so there's no reason to take the risk.
I'm not making any statement about "small and mid sized California companies". I'm talking specifically about Google. The more time I spend away from there, the more I realize what an incredibly unique place Google is (or perhaps, was).
> I think it's typical when you have smart but insecure people which is most software engineers.
The distribution of "techies" has changed dramatically as everyone else in the world discovered how much money was in it, but this couldn't be further from the truth as far as classic tech culture goes. Perhaps they were "smart but insecure", but it manifested as a hyperindividualist, chaotic marketplace of ideas culture, precisely because you could be fairly confident that the people you were talking with were intelligent enough to handle disagreement without thinking of everyone as heretics, infidels, or faithful to the dogma.
It's the mainstreaming of tech, and the influx of people more in thrall to social conformity over independent thought that's tempered tech culture's famously anarchic tendencies. (I know this is a little reductive but I don't want to write an essay in a single comment. If you have a particular complaint about the way I phrased this, I'd be happy to clarify).
I should note that, to the extent that I'm focusing on the left's abandonment of liberalism, it's because I am and always have been a left-liberal, and most of my milieu has been as well. I hope it's not controversial that the right is abandoning liberalism too: I just don't have exposure to spaces where they're culturally powerful enough to illiberally enforce their dominance.
I'm the first to say how horribly broken tech hiring is, but that's relative to an ideal. I frankly don't know of any other way to hire at large scale and ensure a baseline of quality across the company. Google leaned heavily on whiteboard interviews during my time there too, so that doesn't explain shifts in employee norms and culture.
I think they should give the option of completing a larger project on their own instead of whiteboarding questions. For example, Symantec gave a practice problem where you had to basically build a mini-virus checker with wildcards (* and ?) and they selected the submissions with the fastest times to interview. I really enjoy performance-based problems and trying to optimize threading, memory, and caching but whiteboard interviews don't really give me that opportunity to showcase those talents. I like solving big problems and whiteboard questions really test your ability to memorize trivial ones.
The actual interview was much less whiteboarding and more explaining your code to make sure you actually wrote it. It felt like a more classical interview where they aren't trying to see if you are full of BS because they already had an actual work sample that was representative of an actual type of problem likely to be experienced on the job.
I think that's usually used to describe group dynamics, but my model here has less to do with that and more to do with having to lower the bar for each individual, because scaling hiring massively (in an increasingly competitive labor market) is difficult without lowering standards.
Just FYI for anyone reading the above comment, "regressive left" and "classical liberal" are right wing dog whistles used by the likes of Dave Rubin/Ben Shapiro/Steven Crowder/Tucker Carlson/etc, to co-opt the word "liberal" and pretend being right is also being liberal and to cast a broad net over anything left of center right Democrats.
Additionally, emotionality being cast in a disparaging light is another tactic used by the right to paint people left of themselves as "hysterical" and therefore wrong, which is logically fallacious. You can both be emotional and correct.
Google's culture always was, and always has been to hire people to generate profit, as all for profit businesses (and I'm not assigning a moral judgement on profit, profit is fine). Having a collegiate and ostensibly intelligent atmosphere was for hiring PR.
More people have more access to more information and unfortunately a lot of that information is cherry picked and provides confirmation bias. Kids these days haven't gotten dumber at Google, technology has changed, and the political discourse has changed.
The person who commented has demonstrated himself to be logically fallacious, ill tempered and steeped in culturally right talking points, and this is the same person saying that Googlers these days are less intelligent and hysterical.
I am pretty sure they still assume that. Discussing that particular 'single correct world view' will be labeled 'common sense' and allowed, discussing all and any dissenting views will be labeled 'political' and will get you fired.
They never really did, but they used to assume Googlers would have "strong opinions lightly held", i.e. while you may have strong viewpoints it wouldn't get in the way of doing your job or allowing your coworkers to do theirs. I guess they're finding that's not really the case anymore.
> prevent leaks about their practices from becoming public
Google is a company that provides gyms, cooking classes, non-work discussion forums, extensive cafeteria service, massages and so on and so on to make sure employees are living within the company as much as possible.
But discussions on such random forums don't reflect company practice just as the gyms don't exist to make every employee a professional marathon runner in Team Google.
Since the forums became quite the distraction, there are more rules about them now. I'd fully expect gyms to be limited or shut down if they had adverse effects on the workplace, too.
(Disclosure: I work at Google, but the above is my very own, personal, slightly cynical take on the company)
> Google is a company that provides gyms, cooking classes, non-work discussion forums, extensive cafeteria service, massages and so on and so on to make sure employees are living within the company as much as possible.
I would argue these perks exist because they are what top tech workers can command in the market, not because of some nefarious purpose of wanting people to work longer hours.
Sort of like how MLB players have all kinds of nice perks written into their bargaining agreement like always flying first class, etc.
I think what’s actually happened is that it’s become more obvious that aome world views are actually more correct, which has reduced the ability to engage in respectful debate
Judging from the comments there are basically two stereotypes of people in this discussion:
1) The people who "just want to do their work". While they might care about the ramifications of what they're doing they don't think about it actively while working on it
2) The people who care A LOT about their ethics and try to respect them in whatever they do
I guess both sides are important and the way Google phrased these new rules doesn't seem to exclude either side but "banning politics at work" surely isn't good for type #2 and, by extension, the company at large.
I would've categorized those people as type #2. People who constantly talk about totally irrelevant topics (no matter if political or not) I would've just regarded as "chatty".
Ok, so are senior executives going to follow that rule?
One recalls the transcript from the all-hands meeting after the 2016 election where Sergey Brin said “Most people here are pretty upset and pretty sad, “I find this election deeply offensive, and I know many of you do too. It’s a stressful time, and it conflicts with many of our values. I think it’s a good time to reflect on that. ... So many people apparently don’t share the values that we have.” and in doing so put a target on the back of every centrist and conservative at Google.
I don't blame them. Even aside from the President and GOP media machine attacking them for anti-conservative bias, Why would you want people to talk politics at work in the first place? At work you should be working. Argue about politics on your own time.
(He said, posting from work.)
And the difference is my employer doesn't host Hacker News. I'm posting on my own recognizance.
> disrupting the workday to have a raging debate over politics or the latest news story does not,
Why do googlers engage in this at work? They don't feel their political conversations deserve a wider audience? Or do they feel the wider audience does not deserve their political conversations ?
It was ok until it started impacting the business... Like when the workers prevented the sale of AI technology to the people droning wedding parties in the Middle East. Yawn.
It's funny how we pigeonhole "things that actually matter" as "politics" and that those things are somehow taboo. I mean, what's MORE worth talking about than human rights, the environment, history, etc.?
What's more important to talk about than your immortal soul? The problem is when I think those not saved by Jesus will burn for eternity and you think religious people are the bane of advanced civilization, and there's no way to reconcile these views, this is a problem. It doesn't matter how fervently you or I hold our beliefs, discussing them is only going to lead to discord.
Does this mean you and I cannot work together towards shared goals? I don't believe it does! We can each hold very strong and opposing views on some things, but if we both agree that e.g. we want our rivers to be cleaner, why shouldn't we work together on a river cleanup?
Forcing divisive discussions in every context makes collaboration on those goals you do share difficult or impossible. There are very good reasons to compartmentalize political/religious feelings (and the two don't seem that different these days).
> It doesn't matter how fervently you or I hold our beliefs, discussing them is only going to lead to discord.
In one of the companies I have worked, I participated in exactly the discussion you mentioned, on many occasions, and no discord was created. All involved remained friendly and effective co-workers.
To my knowledge, this freedom of discussion was widespread.
Fair point. Personally, I'm also comfortable disagreeing with people strongly & still being friendly. Unfortunately this trait is not widespread. If you don't think so, I would ask why you think "Don't talk about politics or religion [at work, at the dinner table etc.]" has been such a common maxim for so long? (In case you're not from North America: this is a commonly understood practice in North America.)
I see no reason why one should not be able to recognize a common desire and work to achieve it regardless on disagreement on other issues.
However when a person's point of view is objectively fallacious (Evangelical Christians, national socialists) and advocates doing harm or passing fallacious moral judgement of a class of people (Heathens, hedonists, homosexuals, jews) and that class of people includes you I do not believe you should ever be expected to tolerate or abstain from challenging that point of view.
If an individual is advocating harm to others and can't withstand scrutiny of their agenda then that's their problem. I don't see this any differently than suggesting you should avoid challenging sexual harassment or physical abuse in the place of work in order to minimize friction. Certain "points of view" should encounter friction at all times and from all sides, because they are reprehensible.
To these people it must. They are aware they're disrupting the workplace but they do it because they have a sense of urgency and responsibility. They are willing to break ties with their fellow coworkers because they carry a larger social mission.
That's an interesting point - especially when it comes to the urgency a lot of people feel when considering climate change.
I feel like part of the partisan leak into the workplace might be due to the lack of responsible governance that most Americans are feeling right now - since the entities responsible for fixing the big problems are out to lunch everyone is feeling a need to try and help solve those problems themselves.
Most of this political fervor is simple grandstanding. If these people really, truly cared about the issues they advocate, they'd have abandoned their cushy jobs at Google and gone on to make a real difference.
I fully agree that the American consumerist lifestyle has run its course, and has done tremendous damage to the planet. However, those who yell the most loudly about it should also be the ones to quit it first. Go live on a self-sustaining farm in Montana and show the rest of us how it's done. Until then, stop disrupting the office: people are trying to work in order to make ends meet.
I disagree, that's of the same vein of reductive arguments that try to shame rich people who want higher taxes into paying higher taxes voluntarily - for these big problems we actually need to act together or there will always be a more efficient way to pursue wealth by over-exploiting the resources other people are leaving on the table to preserve.
There's a huge difference between taxes (an aspect of societal behavior encoded in law) and personal lifestyle choices. We (supposedly, allegedly) exist in a political system that allows for some participation by citizens. One could choose to run for office, or campaign on behalf of a political candidate who might pursue progressive policies when elected. Over time this adds up to real change. I can see the point that perhaps slowly nudging a large political system towards real change is too little, too late for some issues. If this is indeed the case, then change must happen outside the bounds of normal political action. Take the tax issue you brought up: there is no law that would levy a tax on wealth. This law doesn't exist. If it existed, and if it were written without loopholes, it would achieve the goal of redistributing all this wealth. Unfortunately, this law isn't a reality, so until that changes we're stuck with other ways of making the rich pay. We can shame them, refuse to do business with them, and so on; but simply bitching about this at work won't move the needle even a little bit.
Personal lifestyle choices, on the other hand, are called that for a good reason: each person can make that choice for themselves. There's a liberal echo chamber in which the choice of one person, along with the right amount of advocacy and education, can be greatly amplified leading to a critical mass of people making a similar choice. Imagine an emergent group that is just like hipsters, but focused on environmentalism and sustainable living instead of rushing to tightly pack themselves into increasingly sparse and really expensive apartments in Brooklyn. Imagine communes springing up in agriculturally productive regions, helped along by technology and innovative thinking, operating fully on renewable energy, and doing brisk business selling food. Make this model repeatable by someone without extensive education, and you have yourself real change.
Google employs plenty of people who have the right ideology, drive, and technical skills to make this happen. Instead all they do is work for a giant advertising and surveillance firm.
Quitting civilization to live on a self sustaining farm is a perfect way of limiting your political influence. It's the exact opposite of what you should do if you want real change in an issue where everybody needs to do something.
How did you arrive at "quitting civilization" after starting at "living on a self-sustaining farm"? Does the Internet experience 100% packet drop around manure or in the presence of a critical mass of agricultural specialists?
The Internet gave everyone a voice. If "everyone" includes only those who are forcibly compacted into big cities, I think this should be made clear to the rest of us.
Lastly, living on a farm does not remove a person's ability to vote.
> they'd have abandoned their cushy jobs at Google and gone on to make a real difference...Go live on a self-sustaining farm in Montana and show the rest of us how it's done
There are plenty of examples of people doing this. It hasn't made a lick of difference. No one listens to a lonely voice out in the middle of nowhere.
Maybe people work at "cushy" jobs so they can make money and donate it. Or influence their company to do the right thing, rather than the profitable thing. These things really do make a difference. For example, Google has been carbon-neutral since 2007.[1] Surely that has been influential for other companies.
Human history is littered with holy wars. Unfortunately we're also really good at bulldozing away the resulting wreckage, which ironically feeds back into history's tendency to repeat itself.
One thing I learned in Europe is to discuss politics over food.
Food is like CS Lewis said about smoking a pipe: It gives a wise man time to think and a fool something to put in his mouth.
What that means is that people get to spend time thinking before they respond and that makes a big difference. When I did a contract in Denmark we used to discuss all kinds of politics -- immigration, cultural differences, which parties were insane, etc but always over food. And it meant we could discuss and disagree without feelings getting hurt.
Not every place where people discuss "politics" has to be a place for political battles.
People get into arguments and fights over football, for heaven's sake. Should we ban that, too?
I and my friends regularly discuss politics (on Discord, of all places) and we all have different viewpoints- everything from classical liberal to Bernie Sanders-socialist to conservative to libertarian and we all manage to get along- it's hard sometimes, and there are heated discussions, but we all leave having a good time, and, more importantly, we've learned something.
The way I see it, the problem here is that as political polarization increases, the need for frank discussion without hating people afterwards only increases, and the tolerance for it only goes down. If we want to recover even a little bit from the edge, stuff like Google's "no discussing politics" policy needs to be stopped, and replaced with "discuss politics politely or not at all" instead.
There are times in history and political issues where politics must spread to everywhere, including workplace. Everything must be disrupted until things get fixed. There could be general strikes etc. Like what is happening in HK for example.
Where the limit goes varies. Personally I hate children and don't have them, so concentration camps for children are not the breaking point for me. For many others it may be.
You say that but the person you replied to is right. Suppose China steps in and murders another 10-20,000 people. What then? Do we just look the other way and keep doing business there?
Suppose China gets really ballsy and invades Taiwan, or even Australia. What then? You still going to virtue signal about leftist bullshit or will you help defend the free world?
It's taboo because it's human nature to have fixed opinions (which only change over extended periods of time) about your worldview, be it politics or religion. Few political arguments have outcomes beyond disagreement.
That's really the crux of the issue. I agree that people should probably leave most of their personal beliefs at home... unless it's something that directly related to what the company is doing. So Google employees are supposed to just shut up or leave?
>Brings to mind the attitude of "shutup and play ball" when sports athletes try to use their platforms for some aspect of social change or another.
But even then there's a difference; NFL players aren't protesting the actions of the NFL. If Google employees were using their position to push some agenda the company did not agree with and had nothing to do with then I'd agree.
It's certainly within Google's rights to take a "shut up and work" position, but I don't imagine it will work out well for them in the long run.
NFL players aren't protesting the actions of the NFL.
Oh yes, they absolutely are.
Miami Dolphin's player Kenny Stills directly protested his team owner's involvement and affiliation with a charity donating funds to the Trump administration.
Seattle Seahawks player Earl Thomas, in addition to protesting criminal justice inequalities, directly protested his team and how the league was, at the time, addressing and handling player safety, right before he himself got injured and gave his coach the finger while being carted off the field. He has since been traded.
Well, yeah... of course there are instances of that. None of those are examples represent "social change". When you talk about protests in the NFL in the context of this thread, anyone who doesn't live under a rock is going to think of taking a knee during the anthem.
C'mon, helmet disputes? In what way is that relevant to your quote here?
>Brings to mind the attitude of "shutup and play ball" when sports athletes try to use their platforms for some aspect of social change or another.
I don't know what to tell you, then, if you really don't think two players putting their careers on the line, 1 by directly challenging and publicly calling out the organization that pays his salary for their relationship to the sitting President isn't political.
You claimed players weren't protesting the actions of the NFL.
I gave you three examples of it. Two of them squarely political, one over connections to the president, the other over criminal justice reform.
Please stop moving the goalposts.
None of those are examples represent "social change".
I'd argue the recent attention the league has been placing on player safety and the conversations emerging about brain injuries in sports represents a pretty important social change.
Are you arguing just to argue?
No and I'd appreciate a better characterization of my viewpoints on the topic, than a reductionist accusation of arguing for sport simply in the presence of your apparent disagreement. We can disagree how valuable these topics are to a larger political dynamic, but I'm not going to engage if this is how you choose to label my opposing viewpoint.
We're talking about speaking out on political/social issues at work.
My position is that I'm fine with it (and I think Google should support it to some extent) assuming that it is relevant to the actions of the employer or working conditions.
You bring up the NFL. The exact quote is
>Brings to mind the attitude of "shutup and play ball" when sports athletes try to use their platforms for some aspect of social change or another.
Obviously people are going to assume you're talking about what began with Colin Kaepernick taking a knee during the anthem.
I point out how that is different because it does not directly relate to the NFL.
You then bring up three examples of 'protests' (because they're not even protests, they're internal disputes):
>Kenny Stills and Trump donations
Agreed, this is relevant.
>Antonio Brown and helmet guideline policies.
We're talking about helmets now and this is somehow a "social issue" (It's not. Really, it's not.)
>Seattle Seahawks player Michael Bennett, in addition to protesting criminal justice inequalities, directly protested his team and how the league was, at the time, addressing and handling player safety
Those two things have nothing to do with each other. One is relevant, one is not.
Honestly at this point I think you're either confused or a troll.
So not only are you taking statements and removing them from the necessary context to understand WHY I drew the comparison I did, you’re continuing to launch personal attacks in place of forming a more cogent disagreement.
Wow you went through quite a few edits before the reply link popped up for me.
I didn't take anything out of context. The entire reply was
>So Google employees are supposed to just shut up or leave?
>An important question, I think. It would seem some think they should, and some probably think they should do both.
>Brings to mind the attitude of "shutup and play ball" when sports athletes try to use their platforms for some aspect of social change or another.
>An attitude I find personally disheartening, but I'll stop there because these discussions never end well.
That changes exactly... nothing. You're impossible to talk to. The funny thing is, I don't even think we fundamentally disagree on anything material here.
The bit you had about your prediction of how "this wouldn't end well" is a "prophecy" as you put it, but one of the self fulfilling types. Have a good one.
1. use designated/official channels to report such issues (ex. talk to their manager or their HR representative or even bring it up at TGIF)
2. if #1 fails they have a choice: continue working or walk away. Nobody is forcing them to work for a company that doesn't listen to them for issues they deeply care about (presumably)
A company is not a democracy. There should of course be plenty of channels to get feedback up the chain but the decision is ultimately that of those hired to make such decisions, not of software engineers hired to do something else entirely.
Agreed, but it's Google's approach that's up for discussion here, not whether or not they have the right to shut down such discussion. I don't think a company who shits down reasonable debate is going to do well over the long term.
You can have proper workshops/apps/meetings to discuss these things and gather input from all employees in a way that doesn't disturb the regular day-to-day work.
The problem is that discussing politics at any time in your workplace to people that have opposite views and/or don't want to discuss politics at that time is counterproductive.
I think I can agree in the affirmative with the first sentence, not so much the second one, with the context of my original comment in mind. If your company is demonstrably involved in issues that affect global, heck or even local politics, speaking to those affairs is an imperative.
Whether or not people enter those conversations with the intent on solving problems and actually discussing in earnest is where things get weird, admittedly.
The most political most Googlers work gets is what to call variable names. We decided to not use master/slave, so we are A-OK now!
But seriously, I know a few roles have immense influence over peoples lives, but most of us just try to efficiently plumb data we don't see between black boxes we don't understand.
Just because you can't see where the data you're plumbing touches the world doesn't mean it doesn't have impact.
I work on one of the edges of those engineering efforts. On one side I see first hand how detached engineers at Google are from the things they build and on the other I see people's lives being defined by using those products / services. That impact is real and I think it's at a level that very few googlers respect because they're not lucky enough to be on an outside edge like me.
For profit companies should not choose sides. Google's only discussion of politics in the workplace should be on how to make their systems be as unbiased as possible.
The problem with statements like this is that not choosing sides is exactly as political as choosing sides. There is no such thing as ignoring politics — it's an essential part of the human experience, so any organization must grapple with it.
People who think everything is political are usually authoritarians. They believe in order for progress to be made, you have to force or coerce people into doing the right thing.
I think we pigeonhole "things that most people are too stupid and childish to discuss without losing their minds" as politics. There're a million critically important things that government does that people don't tie their identities to that we don't really count as "political discussions".
Precisely. These aren't "merely" politics. These are the issues that shape peoples lives, for now and for future generations. One of the greatest cons of all time was the casting of Climate Change as a "political" issue. It's our lives we're talking about. Our very existence.
It's funny how there's always some weird overlap between "human rights and public policy" and "culture war over which cartoons are problematic or who was honored with a Google Doodle today".
Well, that depends what you regard as important. Many of the things I'd guess you regard as important I don't, and vice-versa. Who decides? Why are you the arbiter of what's "obviously" important? That's a fallacious appeal to common knowledge.
Also if we can't discuss politics over disagreement in a civil way seeking to learn from each other even where we find the other points of view difficult, then all hope for a better future is lost. Nobody ever learns from mere agreement. Disagreement is a precondition to learning from other people.
I mean, what's MORE worth talking about than human rights, the environment, history, etc.?
Those are indeed important. Fundamentally so. This is also why sociopaths and scoundrels will try to wrap themselves in those flags to further their own ends.
Also, many of the taboo topics are very efficient in calling forth human group instincts and group-think behaviors. This makes the aggregate less intelligent and more prone to being led to concerted action. That is also precisely why scoundrels and sociopaths seek to be the ones out in front, waving the banners.
This is not to say that all such leaders are sociopaths. Just that everyone should be aware that there are incentives which attract them. This is also why, in traditional culture, leaders can be held to high standards.
Sex, politics and religion have long been held up as the bane of polite society. This is why polite society is pretty fucking boring and rarely achieves much of any value.
Those topics are also the most likely to devolve into hostile confrontations because they are emotionally loaded and highly complex. No one person is going to be able to devise a solution to the major problems in those domains, let alone be able to hold that solution in their head and effectively argue it. This is why we have vastly complicated social and political structures for dealing with these things. It all has to be broken down into the simplest possible parts and handled in a case by case manner by whole institutions of people in order for us to even have a hope of approximating a correct solution.
hyperbole doesn't make an argument so try it elsewhere.
the simple matter is those subjects are not likely the issue at hand but instead of politically sensitive issues. worse when one side is more than willing to declare opposition to any position as racist or bigoted because their own presumptuous moral superiority there is no room for intelligent discourse
Can you imagine how soulless work would be if you couldn't talk about your family and friends? These are the things that make us people. We can't just put them in a box at 9am and take them back out at 5.
There are small talks and talks that elicit a response. Small talks about family which mostly draws wows and wahs are totally fine, but you want work to be centered around the work itself and not get drawn into lengthy discussion about politics. At least do it during breaks.
Work is not meant as a substitution of life, it can be incredibly fulfilling but it's still work.
This isn't new. In 2011, a bunch of right-wingers (people we'd recognize as fascists) got one of the smartest people in tech burned out of Google in 6 months. They did whatever they could for years to ruin his career and may still being doing it. Executives stood by and let it happen.
>I think they just overestimated the ability of their employees to respect each other when they hold differing world views.
I think this can be quite difficult to do just because of the political views involved. For example, how should a gay man respect a colleague who honestly thinks that homosexuality should be punished with death. In such a case, I would say that even asking the first individual to tolerate, much less respect, the second is itself a form of disrespect.
Now, that is a pretty extreme view for today's society but good for making an example with. It is also not too far off from many views that I have personally seen, especially when you begin to imagine the legal changes involved to implement those views.
Tolerance isn't considered a virtue because it's easy. Tolerance is a virtue because it's difficult. It requires us to put up with people who may adhere to worldviews we find utterly alien or hold views we find abhorrent.
It's easy to come up with an example and find yourself thinking "It's unreasonable to tolerate that!". Instead, consider asking yourself why people a century ago might tolerate views you think of as perfectly reasonable today.
Tolerance of someone who thinks such things is certainly possible.
Tolerance of someone who says such things in a work environment--knowing that the subject of the speech might be a coworker, boss, or direct report--is another thing entirely. Employees should not have to tolerate that, and employers should not expect them to.
To be super clear about this, making bigoted statements is a behavior in the workplace, and it is smart of businesses to set and enforce expectations for acceptable workplace behavior.
You're absolutely right! Being difficult does not in any way make something a virtue. However, in cultural terms we generally don't aspire to traits that are trivially achievable (example: having skin).
I would say difficulty is a neccessary, but as you so right point out, woefully insufficient condition.
Tolerance didn't become a virtue solely because it was difficult. It became a virtue because it was difficult and the alternative was war - total, global war that could've annihilated the human race a lot more quickly than global warming.
We've largely forgotten what war was like - it's become something that we send disenfranchised young soldiers from poorer economic backgrounds to so corporations can make more money. I suspect that if people were actually faced with a direct choice between tolerance and war and could make the choice rationally, they'd choose tolerance every time. But of course, usually once wars happen it's because people are no longer acting rationally. And right now few people really believe that the alternative to tolerance is war, they just believe that the people they can't tolerate will willingly give up the beliefs they find repugnant.
> it's become something that we send disenfranchised young soldiers from poorer economic backgrounds to
I know this is an article of faith in some political circles. Promising poor kids money for killing Those Other People is the only way military service makes sense.
Tolerance of someone who wants to deny your whole existence is not something anyone should ever tolerate. That‘s not a virtue, that‘s madness and potentially suicidal.
So can we please not jump from "this person disagree with me or thinks something about my life choices are immoral" to "this person denies my whole existence"?
Yes, there are some people who fall into the latter category. But there are others somewhere in between, and it might be useful to exchange world views and increase mutual understanding, and maybe even change some minds.
I think it's ridiculous so many political discussions these days jumps to an existential fear of your side's complete eradication, and a mindset that any action is justified to avoid that outcome.
That’s what I mean when I say denying one’s existence. There is clear intent behind those words. I didn’t pick them arbitrarily. That’s a necessary condition for tolerance to become abhorrent.
You are either attacking some weird fantasy or you honestly believe that being gay† is a life choice.
—
† This obviously includes everything heterosexual people are able to do with no one blinking an eye, like mentioning their partner in casual conversations, bringing their partner to work events when partners are allowed to attend, etc. That just logically follows. Obviously how openly you talk about your romantic partner to someone else is definitely a life choice – I’m just saying that it logically follows from being gay not being a life choice that gay people have to be tolerated to talk about their romantic partners as openly as heterosexual people. Or else there wouldn’t be equality at all.
The issue with refusing to tolerate intolerance tends to be the difficulty in defining intolerance. There are strong incentives to define intolerance as today's political foes, and weak incentives to resist this urge.
For my own part, I exist in a political context where I know that lots of people want to deny my whole existence. And so long as society is willing to keep them to nothing worse than the occasional unkind word, I'm willing to live with that. I prefer it to the endless mission creep that all too easily comes when the ostracism and purges start.
I know that this didn’t work out in the past and the result were not hurt feelings, the result were millions of murdered people. I know that tolerating intolerance is not solely to blame for that, it probably didn’t even play a major role, but it did play a role. And that‘s why I want to avoid making that deadly mistake in the future.
Yeah, deciding when it is ok is then a hard problem but I’m willing to accept that.
It might be worth recalling that historically, trying to supporess interolant viewpoints often helps make them more popular. Which is to say that intending to avoid repeating a historical mistake may wind up encouraging the exact opposite. Cautious consideration of the possible effects of deliberately adopting intolerance may be worthwhile.
It may also be worth inquiring about what a person means when they refer to their own lives before going on to describe genocide. There's potentially some awkward outcomes there.
Be careful that you do not want to deny their whole existence in return.
The example given was a gay person who encounters someone (a Muslim, say) who thinks they should be sentenced to death. But if the gay person decides in response that Islam should be eradicated, that's (at a minimum) cultural genocide.
Note well: I am not an apologist for Islam. I consider their theology to be wrong. But in opposing them, don't become them.
Yeah, something has to give and we as a society have to find out what.
I don’t get why people shy away from making these hard calls. I mean, I don’t even think this one is a hard one to make.
Of course all of this does not exist in an ideology free completely politically neutral space. You have to make some assumptions and some value judgements. That’s ok. There is nothing wrong with that.
I’m also so weirded out when people try to construct working societies from this maximalist non-interference maximalist neutrality point of view. I don’t think societies have to be neutral.
You are also constructing one very weird case that just doesn’t work at all and makes no sense.
> There's a significant difference between an ideology and an identity.
I suspect that many Muslims consider that to be their identity, not just their ideology.
> Why—whenever the question of hate comes up—is HN so quick to rise to the defense of the hateful?
Because I'm hateful (to at least somebody). And so are you. We don't defend the hateful because the hateful are so wonderful. We don't defend them because we agree with them. We defend them because we're defending us some time down the road.
"I'm a shitty person, and so are you." is a cop-out and frankly insulting.
> I suspect that many Muslims consider that to be their identity, not just their ideology.
I can't believe I have to explain that the difference is between what's a choice and what's not: You can't change your identity. Ideology is arbitrary.
That isn't what I said. I said that there is someone who thinks you're a terrible person. It doesn't matter whether you are or not. They think you are, because you're too gay, or too straight, or to conservative, or too liberal, or your skin is too dark, or your skin is too light, or you're too old, or you're too young, or you're too religious, or you're not religious enough, or you have the wrong religion, or whatever. There are people who think that you are a terrible person.
So be careful of justifying intolerance of the terrible. That rationale can be used against you, perhaps by people a whole lot less well-meaning than you are.
We let literal Nazis March in Skokie, the world did not end. Tolerance except for those one thinks are immoral beyond reason is gives just as much license for, say, an anti-abortion activists who genuinely sees abortion as murder to remove people who support abortion.
I disagree. In the interest of peace, I "tolerate" working alongside people who I know believe that, for instance, I will doomed to a fiery hell because I don't believe in their Savior. (I'm Jewish).
And you know what? I work alongside these people just fine! We talk about computer engineering at work, not religion. And everything moves along.
The problem with Google is they have a bunch of immature children who are not interested in "peace."
Tolerance for tolerance's sake isn't useful though. The hypothetical Nazi / Hitler example shows up: if Hitler existed today, are we supposed to tolerate his views?
Tolerance breaks down because morality kicks in: a good moral person tries to wipe out evil when they see evil. The problem is that we can't agree on what is, and isn't evil.
Which is a problem when people increasingly believe the "other side" to be evil. (Abortion is murder vs Anti-choice are womanizers). Both sides want to wipe each other out, not necessarily kill them, but they want to politically negate the opponent's argument.
In many cases, ideas, ideals, and philosophy are incompatible. That's just how the world works.
Does action include hateful speech? Not being facetious just genuinely wanting to know. I've always found it difficult to dissociate views vs actions when it comes to espoousing a hateful view.
Pretty much every political position is considered "hate speech" by people on one side of an issue or the other. The term has been over used so much it's losing much of its meaning.
> I've always found it difficult to dissociate views vs actions when it comes to espoousing a hateful view.
Views: giving a speech arguing abortion should be illegal
Actions: blowing up an abortion clinic
I find it very troubling so many participants in this discussion having difficulty distinguishing between speech and action, and why they should not be treated as the same thing.
So, if my view is that trans women should be called men, and I call a trans woman at my work a man, is this speech or an action? This is where I'm having difficulty distinguishing speech and action.
In the US? Would be protected free speech, and the government cannot make any laws about it.
For your company, though, they could fire you for violating their internal policies.
To categorize the speech, I would say it's just being an asshole. Even if you believe biological sex is assigned at birth and is immutable, going out of your way to not address someone the way they wish to be addressed is just being intentionally rude.
So is it okay that the company does not tolerate that view, even if that view is only expressed through speech? We're not in the context of a government, only an employer. Is that fine?
Someone, at some point, probably regardes some of your views as hateful. With that in mind, how much would you like to be subject to prior restraint based on someone else's internal emotional understanding of your views?
Generally it's worth dividing hateful words from hateful actions. Saying something racist in hateful, and might have political or social consequences, but wise societies are aware that getting into the game of policing speech is a mess. Attacking someone for being the wrong race is much more clear-cut, and society generally has an interest in discouraging violence to begin with.
> Someone, at some point, probably regardes some of your views as hateful. With that in mind, how much would you like to be subject to prior restraint based on someone else's internal emotional understanding of your views?
How does ME accepting tolerance cause the OTHER guy to be tolerant as well?
I don't swing the first punch during fights, but I'll absolutely punch back. That doesn't change the fact that fights happen to break out. One day, you will find yourself up against an intolerant person, and your only defense is to also be intolerant against them.
> One day, you will find yourself up against an intolerant person, and your only defense is to also be intolerant against them.
No, being a tolerant person means tolerating people even when you find their views wrong, immoral, or heinous. There's nothing impressive about tolerating the views you like and not tolerating the views you don't.
When you find an intolerant person, the right thing to do is to tolerate them. Let them see that you are willing to accept them, even if they are not willing to accept you. That is how views are changed.
This notion that the defense against intolerance is to be intolerant yourself is how society sinks into tit for tat tribalism.
> When you find an intolerant person, the right thing to do is to tolerate them. Let them see that you are willing to accept them, even if they are not willing to accept you. That is how views are changed.
If the opponent is more charismatic than you, you will lose this fight. There are some very intolerant people out there who are more charismatic than you, and are better able to recruit supporters to their cause.
> This notion that the defense against intolerance is to be intolerant yourself is how society sinks into tit for tat tribalism.
This notion that YOU are more charming than the "intolerant" people is naive. What if the other guy is more charming, and manages to rile up crowds better than you can?
There's a reason why Obama signed papers to just kill Anwar Al-Awlaki with a drone strike. At some point, you just stop playing the "tolerance" game and gotta get your hands dirty. The idea that we can teach tolerance to everyone else is naive and counterproductive at this age.
If your opponent has view you consider intolerant, and the majority of society agrees with them you're saying the right thing to do is use suppression to enforce your minority view on the rest of society. Do you really realize what you're saying here?
Under this logic if I think abortion is murder, and I consider everyone who supports abortion is intolerant then I am justified in suppressing pro-abortion speech even if the majority of society is pro-choice.
The end result of your line of thinking is civil war. Coexistence with people who have values and morals different from each others becomes impossible when people's response to views they find wrong is to be intolerant toward those views.
> If your opponent has view you consider intolerant
If my opponent thinks I'm intolerant, then ME increasing my level of tolerance does NOTHING to fix the problem.
> The end result of your line of thinking is civil war.
Not if the other side down backs down first. Which is usually what happens. Why should the onus be on ME to back down?
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Yeah, its complicated. But play with the game-theory of the model. That's the current direction we're marching towards politically. My point is that your philosophy of "tolerate the opponent" does NOTHING to stop this game-theory matrix. My optimal move is to be intolerant, especially if my opponent is intolerant.
Yeah, its a prisoner's dilemma. But that's the reality of politics.
> If my opponent thinks I'm intolerant, then ME increasing my level of tolerance does NOTHING to fix the problem.
Yes, it does. Responding to intolerance with tolerance provides the change (however slim) to engage with these people and change their views. Responding with intolerance of your own deprives you of this chance. The former offers some chance of change, however slim. The latter offers none.
> Not if the other side down backs down first. Which is usually what happens.
The problem is, the "other side" is thinking the exact same thing. Also, the way you frame tolerance as one "side" against another highlights the way people use "intolerance" just justification for the exclusion of the out-group.
> Why should the onus be on ME to back down?
The onus isn't on anyone to "back down" the onus is on society to foster a culture where the response to encountering someone with view they find heinous is to engage and try to bring them in alignment with society.
> Yeah, its complicated. But play with the game-theory of the model. That's the current direction we're marching towards politically. My point is that your philosophy of "tolerate the opponent" does NOTHING to stop this game-theory matrix. My optimal move is to be intolerant, especially if my opponent is intolerant.
No, it is not because we're all on the same team. By selecting the option that causes a net loss but a personal gain for yourself, you're leaving all of society worse off. The "other side" is still part of the society to which you belong, like it or not.
I am seriously disturbed by this line of reasoning, the thought that it's better to leave all of society worse off as long as the "other side" is harmed more than "our side". The end result is that the two "sides' cannot coexist, and one either destroys or expels the other.
As I've challenged other posters before... this whole discussion is taking place in reality. Your theories about peace and quiet are all nice and all, but it doesn't work in practice.
Go hangout at Stormfront. Talk to white-nationalists. They're all gathering there, and you can go try to convince them to stop being racist if you so desire.
This isn't some hypothetical la-la land. You literally can go to white-nationalist websites and talk with them and try to convince them to be otherwise more tolerant of others.
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In any case: I've got slanty eyes since my parents were from an East Asian country. I can't change how my eyes look like, I'm distinctively Asian (although I'm unable to speak or write in any language aside from English. I've lived here my whole life).
I can change my viewpoints because I'm a rational person. But if white-nationalists make an enemy out of me, there's nothing I can do about it. I cant change my eyes or skin color.
Fortunately for me, white-nationalists are more scared of other races than my race. But they're still not exactly welcoming of me either.
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As I said before: how can My life (or society in general) get better if I become more tolerant of the white-nationalists who want to make America whiter and with less immigrants? They want to kick me out of the country (well, starting with Hispanics first. But I know I'm on their list). How am I supposed to "tolerate" that viewpoint?
> I am seriously disturbed by this line of reasoning, the thought that it's better to leave all of society worse off as long as the "other side" is harmed more than "our side". The end result is that the two "sides' cannot coexist, and one either destroys or expels the other.
Do you wish to "tolerate" white nationalism, and their philosophy to kick immigrants out of the country? To the point where some of them are going out to El Paso and literally shooting people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_El_Paso_shooting
This is what we are dealing with:
> "In general, I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto. This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion."
> As I said before: how can My life (or society in general) get better if I become more tolerant of the white-nationalists who want to make America whiter and with less immigrants? They want to kick me out of the country (well, starting with Hispanics first. But I know I'm on their list). How am I supposed to "tolerate" that viewpoint?
Because if you do engage with them you can figure out why they think those things and try to change their views.
By comparison if you behave intolerantly towards them, then they will become even more entrenched in their belief that immigrants do not tolerate whites, thus reinforcing their xenophobia.
> Do you wish to "tolerate" white nationalism, and their philosophy to kick immigrants out of the country? To the point where some of them are going out to El Paso and literally shooting people:
Speech and actions are two different things. People can talk about hanging wall Street bankers all they want, but that becomes illegal the moment that this becomes violence. Same with white nationalism or any other belief.
> Have you tried to do this? Because I've tried. It doesn't seem to work.
Yes, I have talked to many people that hold views that are labeled as "white nationalist" and engaging with them can change their views. Case in point, I managed to convince people to support immigration tied to employment. I sought to understand why this person opposed immigration, and learned that they feared that immigrants would become dependent on social services. So I made the point that immigration policy can be structure in a way to avoid state dependence.
You often won't be able to make them pull a total 180, but you can usually make them more nuanced in their opinions.
> Because I want to live here, a location I've lived my entire life, they believe that I "don't tolerate whites"? This is ridiculous on the face of it.
You're right, it is ridiculous. But that's what they believe. And if you treat them with intolerance (which is what you've been trying to justify throughout this thread) you're only reinforcing that belief.
> No, seriously. Go try arguing against a white nationalist for a while. Its utterly hopeless to get them to change their opinions.
Not with this kind of attitude, it isn't. But actually try and engage meaningfully, understand why they believe the things they do, and show them that you are willing to tolerate them even though they don't want to tolerate you and the chances of changing their minds improves considerably.
> Maybe it should be illegal before the violence breaks out. You know, to prevent violence, instead of reacting to it.
You'll have to start by repealing the first amendment. And after you do, there will be people that will seek to label your views as violent and ban them.
> Case in point, I managed to convince people to support immigration tied to employment
I appreciate your honesty, but that's not what I'm talking about. Immigration or anti-immigration is a solid political subject but its "safe". That's the stuff normal people talk about.
Have you ever met someone who believed in The Great Replacement or White Genocide? Its basically a conspiracy theory: these people are not rational anymore. No amount of arguing can convince them otherwise. I'm Asian. Just talking with a white-nationalist reminds them of the Great Replacement. Just seeing me enforces their viewpoint.
Yeah, being tolerant of other viewpoints works... when the other person is also a good person at heart. But when you meet truly despicable nutjobs on the white-national spectrum, you lose hope in that "tolerance" viewpoint rather quickly. The only option I've concluded from my experience in that matter, is to censor them and prevent them from recruiting more people.
I dunno, maybe you can figure out a better plan. But I'm perfectly willing to use the censorship button to mitigate this problem. And unfortunately, I don't think I have any better option.
> Have you ever met someone who believed in The Great Replacement or White Genocide? Its basically a conspiracy theory: these people are not rational anymore. No amount of arguing can convince them otherwise.
What is your plan for these people then? Kill them? Put them in reeducation camps? Deport them?
Like it or not, these people exist and they're not going anywhere. We can either:
1) be intolerant towards them, thus making them form their own communities and grow more and more extreme because they're surrounded by like minded people.
2) be tolerant towards them, and try to change their beliefs.
Do you think that thes people are more likely to change their views if the rest of society is intolerant towards them and the only people they talk to are other white nationalist? Or if society does act treat them with tolerance, and they interact with more non-white-nationalists.
If we treat them with intolerance, then the only community they will find is with other white nationalists. If we do this, the problem is going to get worse and there are going to be more attacks.
Tolerance doesn't somehow prevent white supremacists from forming their own communities or becoming more extreme. If anything, it encourages them to continue doing so, because tolerance is a signal that society will accept their behavior and beliefs as normal, and that there will be no negative social consequences for them, at least until their plans for mass murder become action.
And white nationalists talk to non-white nationalists all the time. That's how they recruit new white nationalists. They're not ignorant of the arguments made against their beliefs - they're well aware, and yet they reject those arguments and persist, because irrational beliefs can't be rationalized out of. Most conspiracy theories would vanish in a puff of logic if that's how people worked.
Simply letting them organize where they will to spread their hatred unabated on any and every available platform, and then only politely and respectfully trying to convince them that their plans to throw the perfidious Jews into the ovens is a bad idea isn't going to do anything but push the Overton window of tolerance for their intolerance in their direction.
> What is your plan for these people then? Kill them? Put them in reeducation camps? Deport them?
Censor them, and prevent them from recruiting more. Wipe them off of Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter. Ban hate-speech.
> 1) be intolerant towards them, thus making them form their own communities and grow more and more extreme because they're surrounded by like minded people.
And take down these communities as they pop up. Its like weeding, you gotta keep knocking it down. I don't expect perfection. But make it a hassle for them to organize.
> Censor them, and prevent them from recruiting more. Wipe them off of Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter. Ban hate-speech.
Again, not possible unless you repeal the first amendment. Not really possible even if you do, since TOR exists.
> And take down these communities as they pop up. Its like weeding, you gotta keep knocking it down. I don't expect perfection. But make it a hassle for them to organize
Do you realize that part of the reason why these people hate immigrants is because they think immigrants hate them and want to get rid of them? Referring to them as "weeds" that need to be purged is playing straight into their narrative.
Knock down their communities and they will see it as proof of their persecution, and use this censorship to appeal to more peole. Deprive them of the ability to use words, and they will use violence.
White nationalism has been around for over a century. The attacks only started to accelerate when they started getting deplatformed. Make no mistake, this approach has been making them more violent and it will make them even more violent if it continues.
1st Amendment only applies to US Government. It doesn't apply to webpage administrators. As such, it is certainly possible for Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter to start to clamp down on the subject.
The daily stormer runs its own website. Genuine white nationalists have been kicked off Facebook and YouTube for a long time now.
You cannot knock down these communities. It is not possible without drastically reducing civil liberties. Freedom of speech and association are not going away. The only viable option to engage and attempt to change their views.
I know. But that website is hosted somewhere, and maybe we can convince those hosts to take it down.
> The only viable option to engage and attempt to change their views.
And you're free to attempt to do that at Daily Stormer / Stormfront / any other website where they pop up. But I'm telling you that trying to convince them doesn't seem to work.
> I know. But that website is hosted somewhere, and maybe we can convince those hosts to take it down.
And then they will set up their own servers. Or move to Gab. Or go to TOR. You can't keep people from communicating on the internet. It's not possible. Countries like mainland China have spent a lot more time and money trying to do it, and it doesn't work.
And even if you do somehow manage to kick them off the internet, they'll organize through regular mail. The daily stormer was (and I think still is) a print publication. The post office legally cannot stop them from using the postal service.
> And you're free to attempt to do that at Daily Stormer / Stormfront / any other website where they pop up. But I'm telling you that trying to convince them doesn't seem to work.
I'll take something that "doesn't seem to work" over something that is actively making things worse. Again, these communities have only become more extreme and more violent the more that society has tried to shut them down.
"Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that."
> Go hangout at Stormfront. Talk to white-nationalists. They're all gathering there
And lots of those people didn’t use to hang out there before we banned them from mainstream forums for having simple disagreements about what good policies and governance is.
We threw them out to the loonies, and wonder why they come back crazy. How about we take some responsibility for that?
Leave them on mainstream forums where their words can lead to greater amounts of recruitment from the population? Reducing their recruiting arm to smaller-and-smaller portions of the internet is the goal.
The white-nationalist idea of White Genocide and "The Great Replacement" holds a great deal of power. As they discuss this nonsense in the mainstream, it only makes more and more believers come to their side.
> For me, that day was a long time ago. And that was not - and is not - my defense.
Please share your experience. Did you run away? Did you actually change their opinion?
Here's my story: for a month, a man with an anti-Asian sign would be marching around and pointing his "Go back to China" sign at me. (My parents are Filipino and I'm born in America) What do you expect me to do, walk out and have a reasonable discussion with the guy?
No. You call the police and get that man out of my life. No one has to tolerate this kind of hate. And no amount of reasonable discussion can convince a crazy man to tolerate others.
Deal with the problem. Get them out, kick them out. I'm not going to wax-philosophical and think "oh, he's demonstrating his freedom of speech / 1st amendment rights". Nah, he's trespassing on private property and I want him out of my workplace.
True story. This is how you deal with problems. "Tolerating" the hate only makes it fester and get worse. Hoping for the man to stop marching (after he's been marching for literally weeks) is the height of insanity.
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Look, we've got Christchurch mosque shootings and El Paso shootings. There's a hateful philosophy which is GROWING. Its pretty clear to me that "tolerance" has lost the fight. There's literal blood in the streets now, as the hate is beginning to fester and spread even further.
We can work to slow down the hate today, or we can sit still and "tolerate" it for the years to come, hoping it goes away by itself.
I'm genuinely struggling to understand here, because on one hand you talk about tolerance being a difficult thing where we should tolerate the viewpoints of others. On the other hand you're expressing that saying somethign hateful might have political and social consequences. But I was under the impression that, in your view, saying hateful things and recieving a social consequence as a result of your hate is a sign of an intolerant society.
Political and social consequences as distinct from legal or physical ones. Voters don't always like their candidates being hateful. I tend to drop racist friends.
I still think racists deserve emergency medical care and effective fire departments, though.
I'm quite certain I work with some racists - my employer is too large and diverse for the number to be zero. As long as they keep their mouths shut in the office, I'm more concerned with whether or not they're good at their jobs.
> If they want to run their racist mouth at work, they might be fired for it.
That's all we want. For people to be fired when they mouth-off racist views in the workplace.
Aka: being intolerant of intolerance. We can't be thought-police, no one has a mind-reading device. The best we can hope for is to kick people out when they demonstrate themselves to be an intolerant person.
Based on your comments, it seems to me that you want a great deal more than people to be fired for violating corporate policy. Perhaps I have misread you?
Lets put it this way: I have no problem with the assassination of Anwar Al-Awlaki. The ultimate solution: killing leading figures of dangerous philosophies, should only be used in times of war. (And the USA is certainly "at war" with extremists like ISIS and Al Qaeda).
I don't believe we are "at war" with white-nationalism. We are certainly not at the point where we should be imprisoning or killing people, yet. But I do believe we are at the point where we should seriously be considering to take down their websites and fire them from our workplaces.
The general hope is to clamp down on the philosophy and hamper them, so that this issue doesn't grow into an "open war" situation. One side has already demonstrated a willingness to spill blood on the matter, so we are marching closer and closer to violence on this issue.
There was a time when we could hope for better tolerance. But unfortunately, we're at the point where we need to be seriously considering our "strong soft-options": censorship, website bans, propaganda, infiltration / counter-intelligence, and spy-games, and other such tools.
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Ex: I HOPE we have tasked the FBI to infiltrate white-nationalist websites, not only to keep tabs on them but also maybe try to grow into leadership positions within white-nationalist groups. Full on infiltration / spy-games need to be going on (if they haven't happened already).
This is the least we can do in the wake of the El Paso shooter, especially since other political options (ex: background checks) seem out of reach.
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Note: Martin Luther King Jr. was subject to this kind of infiltration. This is literally the FBI's job: to infiltrate groups within the USA, keep tabs on influential figures who might be dangerous. Its unsavory, but only through infiltration can you figure out who is dangerous, and who is safe.
> His views are his own. He should be free to express them.
Hitler didn't do anything but talk and lead others. Hitler just inspired an entire country to attempt genocide, through inspiration ALONE.
Hitler wasn't a man like Stalin (Stalin would personally execute people). Stalin "swung the axe", made sure his hands were as bloody as the people he led. Hitler in contrast, was a coward who ended up killing himself in a secure bunker as soon as the world turned against him.
Words alone have huge effect on people. The words of a powerful man can alone be enough to cause issues.
Yes, we let literal Nazis March in Skokie. Tolerance except for those one thinks are immoral beyond reason is gives just as much license for, say, an anti-abortion activists who genuinely sees abortion as murder to remove people who support abortion.
We absolutely cannot let evil stand when we identify evil. Otherwise, it marches in and kills many. On the other hand, if we misidentify evil, then innocent people die.
I'm not saying I have a solution. But the idea that "tolerance will save us all" is hopelessly naive. The sad fact is, a large number of people are systematically intolerant.
> We absolutely cannot let evil stand when we identify evil. Otherwise, it marches in and kills many.
No, you let evil speech stand. And you call it out as evil, and make clear reasoned arguments why it is evil. That is the solution.
Only when that evil speech turns into action does the society step in.
Resorting to censorship only demonstrates weakness and an inability or unwillingness to argue against evil. This leads to people questioning whether the target of censorship really is evil at all.
> No, you let evil speech stand. And you call it out as evil, and make clear reasoned arguments why it is evil. That is the solution.
That doesn't work.
If you really think you can "convince" people to tolerate others, feel free to go to Stormfront and convince the white-nationalists to stop being racist.
Go and try it. Its not like these hateful locations are unknown, its a free and open internet. Go an talk with them for a week. You might learn how easy it is to rationalize bigotry and racism.
At some point, you gotta just shut it down, like what the world did to 8chan. And these situations aren't hypothetical at all. You literally can go test your theory at Stormfront.
> Only when that evil speech turns into action does the society step in.
We're too late for that. Christchurch shooter, and then El Paso shooter. We've got a strain of intolerant speech that are inspiring lone-wolves to go into literal suicide missions to shoot people they don't like right now.
Gun control debate is locked. Its been like 2 weeks and everyone's already forgotten about the El Paso shooter. Nothing will come about with that.
But at least we shut down 8chan, one of the hangout spots for this hateful branch of people. We should probably shutdown other hangout spots too, like Stormfront.
No, quite the opposite. Shutting it down often makes things worse. Deplatforming (both in the social sense and in the technological sense) gained traction around 2013 and 2014. Do you think that bigotry and racism as reduced since then? The daily stormer was kicked off cloudflare in 2017. Do you see a reduction in hate and bigotry?
No, if anything we have seen an increase. You can't change people's minds by ostracizing them. Shutting down speech, especially the speech you think is immoral, makes the problem worse.
And to your point, yes people have changed the minds of white nationalists by engaging with them. It's hard but it can happen. By comparison, how many white nationalists do you think had their minds changed by having their speech censored? Usually this only reinforces the belief in a {Jewish | Globalist | immigrant | etc. } conspiracy against whites. If people think big tech is run by George Soros and is censoring conservatives and is working to the detriment of whites, then getting kicked off th internet is pretty much directly reinforcing their conspiracy.
We can look at Germany as the best example of how to do this correctly. In Germany, it is literally illegal to portray Nazi imagery. They did their best to fully "kill" the Nazi movement after their loss in WW2.
Shutting things down works. The (modern) US just doesn't want to go that way. In fact, shutting things down and erasing history is perhaps one of the most effective methodologies from a historical point of view. But historically, the US had an office of censorship for a reason during WW2, so that public opinion could be unified against Nazi-ism.
People often ask why WW2 was so effective at unifying the country. Well... yeah. Office of Censorship and clamping down on speech, and systemic advertisements + propaganda funded by US Government and pushed by Walt Disney.
It just needs to be done from the top down. You can't expect the free market to do it on its own.
> By comparison, how many white nationalists do you think had their minds changed by having their speech censored? Usually this only reinforces the belief in a {Jewish | Globalist | immigrant | etc. } conspiracy against whites.
The idea is not to change their minds. The idea is to prevent them from talking, and changing the minds of others.
And we can also use Germany as an example demonstrating the ineffectiveness of suppression: the Nazi party members were repeatedly imprisoned, yet this only reinforced their movement. The primary Nazi party newsletter was raided by police over 30 times. The attempt to shut Nazis down did not work and was likely counterproductive.
The Allies may have reinforced aversion to Nazism after it was defeated. But political suppression did not successfully stop Nazism in Germany.
> The idea is not to change their minds. The idea is to prevent them from talking, and changing the minds of others.
They'll still be talking to others, you fundamentally cannot stop that. The only difference is that we are depriving ourselves of the chance to challenge them on their bigoted and hateful beliefs.
And lastly, you're making the dangerous assumption that the people deciding which views are getting suppressed agree with you. There's a good chance many of the views you hold dear are ones that a significant portion of the population want to get rid of.
Hampering is sufficient. Forcing them to rebuild newspapers and reform their membership over and over again means they are spending less time recruiting members.
In the most extreme cases: killing works too. Bin Laden / Anwar Al-Awlaki. Both were more "inspirational" figures than actual day-to-day management, but their ability to spread and inspire others was still better than the typical ISIS / Al Qaeda member.
Destroying the mouthpiece works. Full on killing / murder is only condoned in war-like situations, but there are "softer powers" like knocking websites offline. Sure, they are tenacious and spring up again (and will continue to do so unless we actually kill them), but every hour those websites are down is another hour where they fail to recruit members into their philosophy.
Considering that we refuse to utilize the ultimate solution (assassination / killing) vs these people, the best we can hope for is to just inconvenience them over-and-over again. Its just like banning troll accounts at a highly-moderated forum. The trolls inevitably pickup a new VPN and get to post again for a few hours. The idea isn't to stop the troll from talking, its to hamper the troll from talking.
> They'll still be talking to others, you fundamentally cannot stop that. The only difference is that we are depriving ourselves of the chance to challenge them on their bigoted and hateful beliefs.
Nah, we can totally do that. You and I can talk about white-nationalism right now. Do you believe that white people are "being replaced" by immigrants? And if so, do you think its a long-term negative for this country?
Bam. Now we can talk about the subject. And I trust you (and most random strangers) to have decent opinions on the subject. The issue is that a large group of white-nationalists are working to recruit young people into their hateful philosophy, and to grow their base. And this growth includes violent action (with them cheering the actions of El Paso shooter + New Zealand's shooter).
I'm not against intelligent discussion of these subjects. I'm against the recruitment and growth of power of hate-groups.
Hampering the troll from talking had been thoroughly demonstrated to be ineffective, or even counterproductive. Again, what evidence do you have that deplatforming works? Deplatforming gathered momentum starting around 2013 and 2014. Since then, white nationalists and other bigoted groups have only become an even bigger problem.
Not only can I not see how this supports your assumption that suppression works, it actually demonstrates a positive relationship between suppression and these sorts of movements.
Especially when these groups allege a conspiracy to suppress them, the the last thing we should be doing is the exact thing that hate groups allege. When we start banning white nationalists sites, it makes lots of people think "oh shit, there really is a {Jewish | Globalist | Muslim} conspiracy out to get us."
> Not only can I not see how this supports your assumption that suppression works, it actually demonstrates a positive relationship between suppression and these sorts of movements.
You've got cause-and-effect backwards. More and more people are deplatforming as they realize that white-nationalism is a bigger problem than they once thought.
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Deplatforming works. Lets not look at white-nationalism, but lets look at "Elsa-gate" instead. Children were watching creepy "Elsa" videos (from Disney's "Frozen"). How do you stop this? You ban them from the site.
Bam. Children don't watch them anymore, cause those videos are banned.
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How do you solve the problem of white-nationalists recruiting on this webpage? Well, you ban hate-speech.
The problem is that White-Nationalists can simply... go to Facebook... or Youtube... as recruitment grounds. The big websites aren't cooperating yet. This needs to be a systemic top-down effort, unified across the major websites.
> You've got cause-and-effect backwards. More and more people are deplatforming as they realize that white-nationalism is a bigger problem than they once thought.
And yet, despite (or perhaps because of) increased deplatforming, these groups are stronger than ever and are committing more attacks.
If what you say is true, we should have been seeing a decrease in white nationalism since 2014 when deplatforming started to accelerate. We've seen the opposite.
> Deplatforming works. Lets not look at white-nationalism, but lets look at "Elsa-gate" instead. Children were watching creepy "Elsa" videos (from Disney's "Frozen"). How do you stop this? You ban them from the site
Elsagate wasn't a political movement, it was a group of trolls gaming the YouTube algorithm for views and lulz.
> The problem is that White-Nationalists can simply... go to Facebook... or Youtube... as recruitment grounds. The big websites aren't cooperating yet. This needs to be a systemic top-down effort, unified across the major websites.
We keep cutting off the heads of the Hydra of white nationalism and it keeps getting stronger. Bans and suppression is useless at best, counterproductive at worst.
> Elsagate wasn't a political movement, it was a group of trolls gaming the YouTube algorithm for views and lulz.
Nonetheless, deplatforming them worked quite well.
> Both of those websites ban white nationalism.
Not well enough. Moderation on Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, and other sites is extremely subpar and plenty of people can get their recruitment efforts in.
Especially with the "black-hole" of algorithmic "recommendations", these systems automatically pull white-nationalists (and child-pornographers, etc. etc.) together.
We have given these groups the tools they need to automatically find each other (through recommendation listings) and coordinate with each other. Of course their connections and organization are going to get stronger.
> Not well enough. Moderation on Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, and other sites is extremely subpar and plenty of people can get their recruitment efforts in.
Find me three examples of actual white nationalists or child pornographers on YouTube. Every time someone makes this claim, I challenge them to substantiate it. Most of the time, people don't respond and the rest of the time people provide links to generic conservative channels that are anti-immigration, do not believe in the mutability of gender, etc. but are nowhere even remotely in the realm of believing in the supremacy of the white race or supporting the expulsion of non-whites from the country.
I don't have a link, but you can trust me when I can say that I've had discussion with white-nationalists on Youtube.
They gather around conspiracy-related videos. The "discussion" is mostly in the comments / private messages, not actually in the videos themselves.
Its been a long time since I've actually hunted down white supremacist groups on Youtube, maybe things have changed. Follow enough conspiracy theorists, and you eventually get to comment-sections which are almost entirely composed of white-supremacists talking about nonsense.
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With regards to child-porn, its less actual porn and more compromising positions (links to child gymnastics, children playing in pools with wet shirts, etc. etc.). Not actual porn, but its clearly sexual in nature (even if not originally intended). I'm sure you're well aware of the problem however, its been discussed to death. I'd rather not revisit that subject personally.
In any case, the COMMENTs are the goldmine for child-pornographers. Its clear that they are sharing child-porn off Youtube. They just use Youtube as a methodology to find each other and communicate.
Youtube comments are practically unmoderated. Youtube practically has no moderation on comments what-so-ever.
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That's the thing about Youtube's recommendation engine: its really good at preventing people from seeing some groups. But if your Youtube history matches a profile (ex: child porn or white-supremacy), you actually find those groups rather quickly.
It takes some effort to actually pull yourself into those groups however, and you taint your Youtube account history while doing so. So its not really something I like to do on a whim.
I know Youtube changed some stuff this year (fewer comments on gymnastic videos, high-school wrestling competitions, etc. etc), but its all automatic. Without actual moderation, the problem will only arise once again.
> I don't have a link, but you can trust me when I can say that I've had discussion with white-nationalists on Youtube.
As usual, when challenged to back up the claim that YouTube hosts white nationalism and child pornographers the commenter fails to do so.
At best you managed to show that some videos of kids had creepy comments, which YouTube promptly banned after it was brought to light. I recall this phenomenon, and YouTube's response was swift and decisive. So much so that many creators actually complained that YouTube was being too aggressive.
> How do you solve the problem of white-nationalists recruiting on this webpage? Well, you ban hate-speech.
> The problem is that White-Nationalists can simply... go to Facebook... or Youtube... as recruitment grounds. The big websites aren't cooperating yet. This needs to be a systemic top-down effort, unified across the major websites.
Sure sounds like you're saying YouTube and Facebook host white nationalist content to me. Saying that YouTube and Facebook are lax in kicking off white nationalists is still saying that they let white nationalists on their site.
It's only after I challenged you to back up this claim that you pivoted to talking about comments.
> Sure sounds like you're saying YouTube and Facebook host white nationalist content to me.
That's not my intent. You can take at my word, or leave it. Your choice. There's plenty of other issues we can talk about without getting wrapped up about this particular point.
Youtube _comments_ are poorly moderated. Do you agree or disagree?
Play around on that side of Youtube long enough, and the white-nationalists eventually show up. Last time I went down hunting for white-nationalists, they were somewhere around that area.
Yeah, I'm finding more and more stuff the more I look. As I stated before: the more you fill you search history with this stuff, the easier it gets to find.
"Normal" people aren't able to enter the black hole, because after seeing one video, they click on something else. Conspiracy-nuts continue to click into the hole, filling up their history and getting drawn in more and more. Its just how Youtube's algorithms work. The more you click on these things, the more Youtube serves you this kind of content.
That's enough conspiracy / white national hunting for me though. I think I've proven my point now and don't feel like dirtying my history anymore.
> It's funny how these basic nationalist thoughts are now "far right-wing" In the past these were beliefs that most of the population understood. You dont let your own nation be ethnically and culturally replaced by outsiders.
> I love how Jewtube welds the Wikipedia article to the Great Replacement and tries to dismiss it as a "nationalist right wing conspiracy theory".
> Europe taxes it’s citizens to import Africa
Whilst Africa kicks out europeans
Found em. Took about 10 minutes but I'm pretty sure I found what you were looking for. Do you believe me now?
So now I've shown you what's out there. Now I ask you again: what should we do about this? Should we just... let these people continue to collaborate on their mission of hate on Youtube? Or should we like, do something about it before they decide to shoot someone else (El Paso / Christchurch)
> So now I've shown you what's out there. Now I ask you again: what should we do about this? Should we just... let these people continue to collaborate on their mission of hate on Youtube? Or should we like, do something about it before they decide to shoot someone else (El Paso / Christchurch)
Ban them and they will likely become even more extreme, and more violent. Again, you keep assuming that more censorship will make these people less extreme... which is pretty foolish when being subject to censorship is a big reason why they ended up in white nationalist circles in the first place. Do you think that if that commenter talking about "Jewtube" will become less extreme if her or she gets banned? Heck no, they're going to think "oh shit, the conspiracy to silence us is real!"
Ultimately, that is YouTube's decision. Personally I'd ban the comments despite knowing that it will make the situation even worse, because I would want to make as much money as possible and these comments make it harder to sell ads.
So the answer is yes, I'd ban them for my own greed. Not because I think banning them reduces white nationalism - quite the opposite I think it strengthens it - but because it's financially optimal.
Alas, this very discussion we're having only shows how suboptimal your strategy is.
After... what is this, 60 posts in this sub-thread? Neither you nor I are anywhere close to budging on the issue. Discussion is useful for discovering the point-of-views of other people, but it doesn't actually change opinions.
Proof of the pudding: I couldn't convince YOU of anything. And you have similarly failed to convince me of anything.
------
And after this full discussion, I think I can firmly conclude that you and I are both rational people. You just don't necessarily see things from my perspective. That's fine.
But it really just goes to show how hard it is to do things "your" way, to convince people one-at-a-time to hold a different point of view. After all, if you've failed to convince me to change my opinion, I don't believe you'd be able to convince the "Great Replacement" nuts to change their opinion.
> Now, that is a pretty extreme view for today's society but good for making an example with.
It's not so extreme... I've actually experience this!
I'm gay and worked with an orthodox jew in New York for many years. We got close enough to have honest conversations about how scripture literally says gay men should be put to death.
For a long time he would talk his way around it. Eventually all he could say was, "it doesn't apply to you, you're not jewish" (ok, only murder gay jews, as if that makes it ok?) or "those laws won't apply until the third temple" (still, not ok!)
But you know what? We still liked and respected each other and worked very well together. So, I suppose it's possible.
I think I moderated his opinions a bit over time. That wouldn't have been possible if I would have berated him constantly and/or refused to work with him.
Sounds like a typical story of how one changes. First it's everyone, then everyone but Mark, than everyone but people who remind me of Mark. than it's no one but Ben.
I've seen people at work defend trans hate as a "conservative value". It's fine if people have different opinions on taxes but to reject people's identity like that, especially one held by some of their colleagues, should cross a line and they shouldn't be able to hide behind "conservative values".
Not disagreeing with the idea that people shouldn't express hatred.
However I'm very nervous at some of the Orwellian redefinitions of words like hatred, racism, sexism, white supremacy and so forth.
Sometimes when you scratch under the surface of an accusation, you get a string. If you tug the string, it turns into a complex worldview, and it turns out the thing is a straw man used against political opponents. One red flag for this is when someone starts by saying, "So, you're really saying..." or, "The logical conclusion of your argument is..."
I was told recently that Louis CK's joke (recent underground taping that ended up on YouTube) was transphobic. I then listened to the joke and didn't come to that conclusion. Who's correct?
I read on HN someone coming out supporting law enforcement in the US. Someone responded that that made them racist, due to the history and the logic of institutional racism.
Did they call it trans hate? Or did they object to unisex restrooms and/or pronoun usage rules?
I usually see “hate” used very loosely here, when the reality is much more nuanced, and mischaracterizing it as trans hate (or hate in general, for whatever the issue might be) is contributing to the problem.
Is it merely a viewpoint to disagree politely upon that people should be called using pronouns they identify as? For example, if I repeatedly called a cis woman a man, and insisted she was a male, should this be objected to any differently than if I repeatedly called a trans woman a man and insisted she was a male?
I understand the former (calling a cis woman a man and insisting on referring to her as he pronouns) to be incredibly rude. But the idea of calling a trans woman a woman is a political move?
I don’t care to get into it or take a position on the matter, I am just pointing out that it’s possible to have disagreements about where the boundaries are without it being the case that there is an element of hate involved.
It’s possible for someone to disagree that a man is a woman without hating them for thinking they are a woman. It’s also possible for them to be sensitive about how they express that without unnecessarily harassing or harming the other person. And it goes both ways. The degree to which others, particularly those with incompatible views, are willing to modify their own life in order to accommodate yours, is going to vary greatly. Figuring out where to compromise is the difficult part.
Do you think it’s disrespectful for someone to eat a big juicy steak at work while sitting right next to a vegan animal rights activist who sincerely feels anguish at the thought of us factory farming and slaughtering animals for food?
I think that issue is a lot simpler than some of these other issues, and yet I doubt that polite society can even agree on that.
Yes, and at certain points how you refer to a person is political because they are trans, what do you do then? What is the sensitive, non-harmful way to refer to a trans woman as a male? What is the sensitive, non-harmful way to refer to a trans woman as a woman (if you believe referring to trans women being seen as women is a hateful thing)?
Similarly, what happens if you believe espousing homosexuality as normal is hateful? What is the sensitive, non-harmful manner to ask your co worker to never bring up his husband, ever, in the workplace?
I'm not asking meanly, I genuinely don't understand.
I don’t think those examples are the more difficult ones, and those aren’t the issues that the detractors have. It’s not symmetrical. Some people think that it’s rude or even hateful to intentionally call a trans woman a man, but nobody thinks it’s rude or hateful to call a trans woman a woman. Where that becomes a problem for that side is where things get complicated.
Can trans women fight biological women in MMA? Can they compete in tennis? If you think they shouldn’t, is that hate and misgendering? Who is allowed to apply for scholarships reserved for women? Do trans women get lower insurance rates? Should we even be discriminating on scholarships and insurance rates to begin with? Is it reasonable to expect someone to use other pronouns that didn’t previously exist in English simply because someone requests it? Is a man allowed in womens change rooms because he puts on high heels but otherwise has taken no steps to transition his/her/their identity, or is there some arbitrary level of transitioning that counts? Who decides that? Everybody seems to have strong opinions on a lot of these issues and nobody is going to agree anytime soon. Yes, sometimes it’s hate, but it doesn’t take an ounce of hate for two individuals to be radically opposed on how this is supposed to work.
Could you clarify how this is the case that it isn't the issues detractors have, when another comment responding to this is in fact exactly whether or not trans people can ask to be called by their prefered pronouns?
Yes, that's the point I'm making. Their identity and their claim is a political statement, so banning politics at work puts being trans in a confusing situation which I'm curious about.
> But the idea of calling a trans woman a woman is a political move?
You are arguing that we should accept a man who’s feeling “womany” as a real woman, and that he should legally be treated as a woman.
Personally I think that’s absurd. I think we should let everyone be who they are, but I disagree about having legalities determined by what someone claims to feel.
Feelings are feelings, and very much soft and fluid. The law should be hard.
Clearly though, you think that the base argument makes sense, so my question is: do you accept it universally? The full way out?
Should a person who feels like or identifies as an animal (a furry), be considered a “real” animal? Should he legally be governed by the laws which governs real animals?
If not, why so? How is that different?
Or how about the famous attack chopper? Again it’s the exact same argument: someone claims to feel something, and demands you to respect the consequences of it, no matter how ridiculous.
Being opposed to such is a rationalist view, and has nothing to do with so “hate” no matter how much someone want to frame it as such.
I'm not saying anything except that what does one do when a workplace bans politics but being LGBTQ is a political act? How does one avoid politics when calling someone 'he' or 'she' (either way) is a political act?
Clearly that’s not the case, unless you make it your mission to make it so.
> How does one avoid politics when calling someone 'he' or 'she' (either way) is a political act?
If you allow this to be a treated as a political act which can only 1. be applied by someone who wants to exercise power over others, and 2. Can be used by former group to claim discrimination universally...
> what does one do when a workplace bans politics
Clearly politics is not banned, only certain kinds of politics is. The other kind is being enforced hard.
> Clearly that’s not the case, unless you make it your mission to make it so.
I don't know if it is so clear, since the poster I'm responding to is explicitly claiming that trans women are not women, they are men. As far as I understand this is something referred to as politically charged subject matter.
> Clearly politics is not banned, only certain kinds of politics is. The other kind is being enforced hard.
Can you clarify? What is the other kind?
> If you allow this to be a treated as a political act
Is referring to a trans woman as a man or as a woman inherently apolitical, as it does not reflect on one's belief on if trans people are the gender they identify as?
> Is referring to a trans woman as a man or as a woman inherently apolitical, as it does not reflect on one's belief on if trans people are the gender they identify as?
My personal view is that people should be free to be who they are, and as long as it doesn't negatively impact others, it should be their own bloody business, and should have no legal implications.
So you're gay? You're a queer? Good for you! And no legal implications, please.
So you're legally man, with XY chromesomes, and you somehow feel like a woman, and maybe even like to dress as one? Good for you! Have fun, be proud, defy conventions! I do not hate you, but you are still a man, so no legal implications please.
To me, that's a statement of facts, and there's nothing awfully political about it.
The people who oppose that simple rationalist approach, are the ones who are rallying for a political platform, while at the same time claiming that opposing viewpoints must absolutely be denied a voice.
Despite the popular notion that these people are "liberals", there's nothing liberal or moderate about such a view, quite the contrary.
If you company has an anti-discrimination policy that includes gender identity (most do including places like Google) you should report them to HR for creating a hostile work environment. HR usually has an anonymous way of reporting things to investigate such as a phone number you can call.
> I've seen people at work defend trans hate as a "conservative value".
As long as you don’t define what you mean with “trans hate”, there’s no way for an outsider to judge if your “conservative” colleague held a reasonable position or not.
Constantly defining opposing views as “hate” is IMO one of the most effective ways you can kill reasonable discourse and increase polarisation.
And if “everything” is “hate”, clearly “hate” is no big deal, so why should we care?
Maybe what you encountered were not actually “hate”, but something we back in the days used to call “disagreement”?
Taking the other side, how do you counter the "So some opinions are okay to state publicly, while others are not?" I think this is the rub... For any given X, you'll find groups of people that are pro-X, and someone anti-X.
There's a big difference between fiscal policy and sexual orientation, though.
If you say "taxes are theft" I may disagree with your viewpoint, but I'm not personally attacked by it. If your viewpoint is a challenge to their personal identity, you should probably keep that to yourself.
Some things shouldn't be okay to say. That intolerance actually hurts people, if someone says "the Nazis were right" that really doesn't end up being a victimless crime, America is an example right now where the rhetoric is leading to actual violence towards certain groups. While I think the government regulating it too much is not good I don't see the issue of doing it collectively as individuals.
Edit: just as a final thought, I've been on both sides of this, I've been silenced and I've silenced other people and honestly they both suck. I hold this view with the believe that some middle ground of things not being okay is the only one that works. If someone thinks that a free for all of ideas works well they are welcome to try it on their social media and at their company and I could be convinced if I could see it work at scale. It's really a practical view more than a philosophical one
The example given by the person you're replying to seems, to be understated about it, to be in a bit more complicated of an area than "just don't talk about it and things will be fine." If Bob and Alice have significant disagreements about health care policy and taxation, they can probably still get along by just not talking about it. If Bob believes Alice should be put to death because she's a transwoman, that could, you know, lead to a bit of workplace tension even if they don't have casual conversations at the La Croix cooler over how he thinks she should be stoned and she thinks she shouldn't.
Nobody should be having that discussion at work, but sadly that discussion does occur. It mostly occurs behind the back of "Alice" so if you ever hear that type of talk it is your job to report it to HR who can investigate. No one should have to fear for their safety when they come to work.
I was responding to the exact argument made in the post above me. Since people are downvoting me, presumably because I used sarcastic humor and HN is populated by people who are just too darn logical for sarcasm,* let me make the point more explicit: no, Bob and Alice aren't literally going to have that conversation at work. I get that.
However, even if the work has a strict "no politics" policy, if Bob does have significant prejudice against transgender people, then having Bob in the workplace with Alice at all potentially puts her at risk. There doesn't need to be a conversation about trans rights for him to know that she is trans, and for that to translate into harassment and even violence.
I don't have a solution for that problem. But that doesn't mean it's not a problem. And it's not a problem that's solved by prohibiting employees from talking about controversial topics in the workplace -- which is the argument that was made by the poster I was actually responding to.
> Since people are downvoting me ... let me make the point more explicit: no, Bob and Alice aren't literally going to have that conversation at work. I get that.
You were trying to use an outlier, an extremist situation (badly representing the opposing part) to frame a discussion about general principles for politics.
Of course you will get downvoted. It’s not a constructive contribution.
I think you should not discuss politics at work. Unfortunately I agree with you: this will lead to only feelgood (i.e. leftist) politics being talked about.
Its traditional how a rule of law was created in most older societys. Ostracice a caste of sexual deviants and give them social power at the same time.
Things didnt change, the church is just called diffrent, the dogma of social contracts and the heresy to break them is still the same.
Explain to me the social construct difference between a catholic procession and a gay pride parade.
Serious question, what do you define as trans hate (in regard to the people you are talking about)?
This is because, what you may be describing as "trans hate" may simply be someone that simply doesn't accept the non scientifically proven theory of gender fluidity. And may be people that simply are stating that transgenderism should be approached and supported like other cases of body dysphoria.
I draw the line at compelled speech. I don't want to have to remember your "pronoun" in order to have a regular conversation with you. At some point the politeness of inclusivity pervades upon the efficiency of getting your job done.
Being offended and upset is a personal problem, not a public one. Requiring colleagues to bend over backwards to accommodate your needs should be a matter of politeness, not company policy.
> I don't want to have to remember your "pronoun" in order to have a regular conversation with you.
Good thing, then that the debate is about third person pronouns, which are used to talk about someone, not with them.
I have literally never seen anybody use customized second person pronouns (although of course honorifics are traditional — try refusing to address a judge in court as "your honor" because you don't want to remember their honorific).
the best way to dispel such ugly beliefs is for the homophobe to get to personally know gay folks, so yes, at least civilty if not respect needs to be shown by the lgbt person toward the homophobe.
compassion needs to go both ways, and someone has to offer their hand first. it's not fair to the lgbt person, but it's highly unlikely that the homophobe will make that first move.
> I think this can be quite difficult to do just because of the political views involved. For example, how should a gay man respect a colleague who honestly thinks that homosexuality should be punished with death. In such a case, I would say that even asking the first individual to tolerate, much less respect, the second is itself a form of disrespect.
But if politics are not allowed at work then you wouldn't KNOW what your coworker's opinion is on the subject. That's one of the main points of not discussing politics at work, it's hard enough to get many people in one place to agree on technical things, it's impossible to get them to agree on everything and as every one of us feels strongly about one issue or another sooner or later we'll find things about our coworkers that we strongly oppose and that would make working with them hard.
The problem with this approach, is the belief that punishing the expression of a belief, extinguishes the belief itself.
Looking at world politics right now, I don't think that approach is being very successful. It just fosters a narrative of oppression and persecution of those who want to rebel against the prevailing norms of discourse.
> It is also not too far off from many views that I have personally seen, especially when you begin to imagine the legal changes involved to implement those views.
I think it's also important to be careful to avoid hyperbole.
It's easy to from "I don't support government run healthcare" to "WHY ARE YOU MURDERING ALL THE PEOPLE WHO CAN'T AFFORD HEALTH INSURANCE?" with no nuance.
No one at google was calling for the death of their homosexual coworkers.
This is the exact kind of polarization that googles own internal media has amplified which has led to a radical left that refuses any compromises with liberals and moderates and for conservatives who were marginalized becoming increasingly radicalized as a response.
Putting the entire argument into the most extreme case is just another reflection of take no prisoners arguments that have ranged on both sides of the ideological debate.
This is exactly why attacks on tolerance cannot have special exceptions. It becomes too easy to define the most extreme cases as being representative of the mainstream.
Recent research has shown that both left and right constantly miss characterize the other. Unfortunately with the left that mischaracterization becomes more prevalent the more “educated” one becomes.
When discussing politics in the abstract it’s useful not to talk about specifics to avoid a derail.
Personally I would have gone with. Someone suggesting a person in group X should subsidized by group Y. When the person speaking in in group X and the listener is in group Y.
Actually listing the groups as say income level, farmers, parents, elderly, ev drivers, or whatever is not actually helpful. That said you might have a reasonable debate on taxes, but that’s much harder when someone wants to send some group to prison etc.
I tried to pick an example that is both held by people in the world today, thus it couldn't be easily dismissed as unrealistic, while at the same time not being something people here would actually debate, so as to not sidetrack the point.
The problem with your selection is that it's interpreted as the most outlandishly fringe extreme religious/conservative viewpoint, and thus it has a political angle. I would have gone with something like the government being run by lizardmen aliens (which some people in the world claim to believe).
> I tried to pick an example that is both held by people in the world today, thus it couldn't be easily dismissed as unrealistic
It is very easy to dismiss a "death to homosexuals" discussion among Google employees as unrealistic.
> so as to not sidetrack the point.
Hrm, I understand that logic, but it seems like an attempt to frame disagreement with the current popular political view in the most extreme way.
Maybe that's not what you intended, but since that is a commonly employed technique ("everyone who doesn't disagree with me is a nazi") it does seem that way.
From the other side - if the world is on fire but a portion of the population thinks everything is just fine and dandy... is it appropriate for everyone to be politely quite until that portion comes to their own realization that the world is on fire? What if that never happens?
I feel like the gun control debate is particularly relevant - whenever a shooting happens one side calmly says "This is unfortunate but unavoidable given the cost to freedom we'd need to pay to remove firearms - please stop trying to use a tragedy politically" while the other side says "How many times does this need to happen before you realize 12,000 Americans died from this last year and I don't want my kid to be one of them."
Here's an issue where I think half the side thinks the world is on fire and the other is content - without getting into the merits of either side I do think it's unreasonable for the anti-gun control side to continue to argue against having a discussion for the sake of decorum. This is a divide we need to resolve.
I agree that it's unreasonable to argue against having a discussion for the sake of decorum. If the discussion needs to happen, it needs to happen, but I think you're ignoring the fact that many anti-gun control advocates think the current state of affairs is fine. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you think a conversation is important to have because you believe that such a conversation would reshape the world in a way that is more closely aligned with your preferred policies. Anti-gun control advocates don't want that.
This is exactly why a lot of people don't discuss politics at work. You first sentence also kind of assumes that the side that believes the world is on fire is correct. It would probably be beneficial to allow the discussion of politics at work if the side that believed the world was on fire was indeed always correct, but sometimes they aren't, and what then?
I personally would prefer, for example, if someone didn't try to convince me to do something to save my immortal soul, regardless of how ardently they believe that my immortal soul needs saving.
> You first sentence also kind of assumes that the side that believes the world is on fire is correct. It would probably be beneficial to allow the discussion of politics at work if the side that believed the world was on fire was indeed always correct, but sometimes they aren't, and what then?
I was trying to avoid wording the above with any bias one way or the other - presenting both sides in their self-promoted light... The problem is that I think it's unclear when the world is on-fire or not and when you feel that a discussion isn't world ending it might just be that your thoughts are trapped in a bubble and you're having difficulty empathizing with the reason why the other side thinks the world is on fire. Certainly the world isn't on fire in every conceivable way, but evaluating whether a problem warrants a discussion or not is already a potentially opinionated decision.
The question is how much of that needs to be hammered out at work.
Part of the problem may be that we've tied the workplace so intimately into our lives that it's cramming out activities vital to the civilization's health, like participation in local civic, religious, or charitable organizations, where such topics are generally not only welcome but often the rasion d'etre.
Employees have a very understandable impulse to do something to influence social health for good, and if work becomes the only place where such an impulse can feel effectively fulfilled, it's no surprise that political discussion spills over irrespective of management dicta.
Rather than decreeing political discussion off-limits, maybe Google could consider something like reorienting and/or resurrecting 20% time to focus on allowing employees to effectively practice good citizenship, rather than using that time to generate new IP for Google to hoard.
A lot of people have real trouble contextualizing statistics and videos because they can't really conceive of how many people there are. This makes it really easy for motivated media activists to manipulate opinion by heavy reporting of particular incidents, while ignoring trends that are killing literally hundreds of times more people.
Gun control?
THAT's your example of the world being on fire?
If nothing is done about it 12k Americans a year will die, that isnt really going to have much of an effect in the long run for the vast majority of us.
There are plenty of actual "world on fire" debates you could have used, including:
* Climate change
* Nuclear proliferation
* Antibiotic resistance
* Aquifer sustainability
* AGI
* Dystopian trends
* Dysgenic trends
Things that are on the actual "this has potential to kill or drastically reduce quality of life for billions of people" level (even if some are pretty far fetched in my view).
"World on fire" topics do exist, and for some reason they aren't the ones that result in toxicity.
This isn't the other side. The other side would be that because people don't express their political opinions effectively enough, people aren't motivated to enact political change in actually dire situations.
What's at question is the way people treat each other and approach these topics, not their actual positions (half of people think there's a huge problem while the other half don't believe there's a problem)--which is what you're discussing.
No one pro-gun is refusing a discussion: they’re refusing emotional manipulation, whereby you use dead children as totems for emotional impact, but fail to discuss the actual costs and facts.
As you’ve done here.
“I’m emotional about something that might happen to my child, look at these dead kids!” while refusing to address their point — guns used for self defense and civil freedom — isn’t having a discussion, and isn’t a way to reason about a complex trade off in society. It’s using dead children as a grotesque banner for your emotional manipulation.
The problem is that what constitutes politics? Guns shouldn't be political, who you have sex with shouldn't be political...but in our current climate, they are both considered political.
..and no debating? Most people at Google are shades of left. It sounds like they are just trying to drown out dissenting views once again.
Everything is political, and politics affect everything. If you think there are no politics in something it's likely that the politics involved in it are not close to you, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
Identity isn't political, until you have one that isn't an accepted norm. Sexual orientation isn't political, until people want to deny you insurance over yours. Race isn't political, until people refuse to sell you houses because of it. And so on.
"Keep politics out of $thing" is the purest expression of privilege. Doesn't make you a bad person or anything, but it's worth keeping in mind.
Shifting back to topic some: this idea that Google has had for years about platforms and now about it's internal one, that you can somehow keep the ugly elements of our society out and just have a nice, clean, advertiser and marketer-freindly area (ala YouTube) has permeated everything they've made. The problem is any place that people gather and collaborate will, eventually, get political. It can't not. As a species we have dragged politics into everything since long before we tricked silicon chips into thinking. I don't know why people keep thinking the Internet can be different, but it can't.
It does not silence anyone, it just means that their speech needs to take place outside the workplace.
In my experience, most people who complain that curbing political discussion in the workplace amounts to silencing them have views that are well in line with the status quo at the company.
> In the context of work "silencing" could mean preventing workers from raising (valuable) concerns about the ethics of their work.
And again, the only people I've seen making this argument have ethics and hold values that are in line with the company's values. I've never seen a liberal at a conservative company call for more political discussion, or vice versa. It's always been conservatives in conservative companies or liberal in liberal companies making this argument. People who hold views contrary to the company mostly stay quiet, because making their views known results in ostracism and other negative consequences.
I think the primary motivation is that people whose views are in line with the company enjoy the situation of voicing their positions while being immune to challenge because people who disagree with them are pressured into silence. It produces a gratifying sense for the people in th majority, but comes at the expense of people in the minority. For that reason, there's good cause to not allow political discussion in the workplace.
Interesting POV but you could apply it in the opposite way as well: As management, I could issue a "political ban", then start changing corporate policy and my employees couldn't say anything against it. Without a ban, they could at least spark internal debate.
You're still missing the point: without a ban, there rarely is any internal debate because only the prevailing company opinion gets a voice. Changing company policy doesn't alter this dynamic. If a company shifts from being liberal to conservative all that means is that conservatives get to use the company as their soapbox instead.
It's better to just not let anyone use the company as a soapbox at all. If they have disagreements about the culture of the company, there are plenty of reporters looking for a scoop.
Or it can be to create a neutral environment to get work done, as a professional environment should be. I just want to put in my hours and go home. Keep your politics to yourself.
Except by virtue of being neutral/centrist/apolitical, you are in fact still making a political statement in favor of the status quo.
I’m not commenting on Google allowing or disallowing. I don’t really care and to be honest, if my workplace has a discussion board internally I’d probably not talk politics on it anyway. What I will say though is I think it’s interesting that google found it appropriate to allow it when google itself was disrupting the status quo, and it now disallows it when it more or less has become the status quo.
He didn't say he had neutral views, he said he wanted a neutral work environment.
The attempt to guilt people into rolling around in the mud, or perhaps 'resistance' as you call it, is exactly the mentality that's ruining political conversation for everyone else.
But again, that presumes it's possible to detach politics from everyday life, work included. It isn't. You can pretend they aren't there, but before you just sign up for that, you might want to consider which groups of people benefit from you doing that.
I'm not trying to guilt anyone into anything. If anything, I'm putting forth the call to action to recognize that being apolitical hurts almost everyone, yourself included. You may be apolitical, but your boss probably isn't. Your landlord probably isn't. Your local politicians definitely aren't. The owner of your workplace almost certainly isn't, either. And all of those people have the capacity to make their lives better, by politicking in a way that will make your life worse.
I don't care what side people want to get on. I just want them to know that whether they've chosen one or not, they are on one.
I'm tasked with keeping infrastructure up and running. I'm either doing it, or I'm not. If the company is unethical, I wouldn't sneak in and not do this work, would you?
Assuming it's the power of influence you're after... What do you truly hope to influence, the Board? Shareholders? Good luck.
I think the problem with this view, especially in software development, is that it will pretty soundly continue the current status quo in diversity. We won't get more diversity without some political discussion.
If you believe diversity is not a worthy topic of discussion or debate at the workplace, well, therein lies the political divide. Silencing political discussion is then its own form of getting a leg up in that debate.
I think the problem with this view, especially in software development, is that it will pretty soundly continue the current status quo in diversity. We won't get more diversity without some political discussion.
What if the opposite happened, and political discussion resulted in people arguing for less diversity?
The status quo might seem pretty appealing at that point.
What exactly is this point you keep trying to make all over this thread? Accept the status quo and don't talk too much, or it might get worse? What on Earth kind of philosophy is that?
I thought my point was obvious, but I suppose you need to meet your audience half way.
I suspect people want to discuss politics at work if they feel their politics matches the politics around them. What they really want is a bit of a circlejerk or (at worst) a mild debate within narrow confines of what they consider acceptable.
If they thought most people disagreed with them, or that they were a political minority, they'd want politics off the table.
In a post above you said
"Keep politics out of $thing" is the purest expression of privilege.
You could not be more wrong. "Let me discuss politics in $thing" is the privilege of someone who wants to ruin apolitical situations for the people that disagree with them - who they suspect are in a minority.
Of course I don't want total mayhem to happen but workers should have the ability to talk about issues at their workplace or raise concerns about the work they're doing and the resulting discussion will probably be political. Shutting down political discussion entirely (100%) will prevent employees from raising concerns.
> By definition there are two camps of opposition to the current status quo - one to the left of it, and one to the right of it.
That is not true “by definition”. It would be true invariably (but still not by definition unless the conditions were also) if political variation were unidimensional, linear, and unbounded in actual (not merely potential) range.
It's pretty clear that the main, salient, tribal divide is between left and right. But I will agree to disagree there.
My key point is that if you open up the floor to politics so people can try and change the status quo, you open up the possibilities that people will want to change the status quo in a way that makes it even further away from where you think it should be.
When people advocate political discussion at work because they are against the status quo, I don't think that's a scenario they consider.
You point out the truth: Everything controversial is political.
Political aka controversial topics should be avoided, unless they are relevant to work.
For example, unless you work at a real estate agency, it would be a poor idea to discuss federal or state law for racial guarantees around the sale of houses.
(Not that you can't discuss them; certainty do. But your workplace will make a poor forum.)
Excellent comment. I agree with the parent's notion that google is trying to force their employees not to point out the bad things about their conditions, but this notion that there was ever a time where politics were absent is 1) ahistorical 2) reactionary. Politics is what happens when two or more people try to discuss an observation or explain a thought.
Your attempt to argue this is somehow vague or a slippery slope is silly - most workplaces seem to have not a tremendous amount of trouble with this, even though it is not rigorously defined.
Agreed. I am transgender, lesbian, asexual and polyromantic, and none of these things have I ever had so much as a discussion about at my office, nor have they sparked any 'political' discussion. (I work at one of the major 5 banks in Canada).
Serious question, how does being lesbian (sexual attraction description) go along with being asaxual, which I understand to mean the lack of sexual attraction to others?
"lesbian" is not a "sexual attraction" description, it is an "attraction description" for which one possible dimension of attraction can be sexual. Same-sex attraction is no more exclusively about a desire for intercourse than opposite sex attraction. It's entirely possible to have a romantic attraction of any kind without also feeling a desire to engage in intercourse.
I shudder to think about your love life, if you solely define your relationships on sexuality alone. Sexuality is a step from an emotional state to a physical expression of that, of course outside of prostitution and casual hook-ups. And I don't mean that in a negative way, I just...feel sorry for you.
I'm a trans lesbian as well. I've had discussions about it at work. When coming out, I asked my coworkers to use she/her pronouns. I might mention my partner, or I mention to my manager that I'm going to need to leave work at X for electrolysis. I consider my being trans as an "open secret", where I won't open conversations with it, but I will mention it when I find it naturally relevant to the conversation. This works well for me because I have the privilege of passing as cis.
All of these are regular everyday things for me, but I've had people tell me that even asking for basic respect is "disagreeing with their political opinion". The real problem is where the line is drawn, or whether a line can even be drawn.
I'm baffled by the level of ignorance in these comments, I'm used to a far higher awareness and intelligence in HN comments.
The comments about being dependent on one's sexuality, or 'making it up,' and thusly being prepared to accept being mocked, are particularly disturbing.
The inability to separate a romantic and sexual nature is more so just surprising.
Are you saying it's possible to be gainfully employed somewhere where the wokeness level isn't cranked to 11 and not be persecuted by cis-gen whitemale Christian bigots? Who knew?
I wish more people realized this. I think many perceive more issues where there are simply usually not, because of increased access to information. Most people don't really care what you are or who you vote for as long as you show up, are pleasant, and do your job well. Capitalism is, in many ways, the great equalizer: money is green no matter who holds it.
no but the way we talk about it is. we typically use vocabulary to describe orientation that is relative to gender identity. that is, a person who is attracted to men is gay if they identify as a man or straight if they identify as a woman.
that said, "transgender lesbian" shouldn't be too hard to parse unless you've been living under a rock for the last fifteen years.
I have a solution for them: they should not express openly their sexuality. I don't care about their sexuality. Nobody cares about my or their sexuality. And if they make up a complicated sexuality and make it their identity, they should prepare to get mocked for it.
If they are such a snowflake that they can’t handle a homosexual relationship then that’s their problem. In today’s society, outside of a few regressive companies, most employees know that they would just have to get over it.
On the other hand, if someone asked me what I did on the weekend, I wouldn’t mention that I took part in (hypothetically) “Black Lives Matter” (highly political) or even was walking down the street proselytizing and trying to convince people to make God the head of their lives (highly religious) or that I was in the woods running around with Confederate flags trying to relive the glory of the Civil War (trust me, won’t ever happen.)
Sexuality has always been an open topic at work. People talk about their kids. Display pictures of their family. Bring their spouse to the Christmas party.
It's only recently that people can talk about their non-heterosexual relationships at work. In 1995, mentioning your lesbian partner would've been overtly political and, in certain workplaces, is STILL called "political" and can get you fired [1].
of course not. I'm just making the point that a lot of folks might go their entire lives without working in such a stuffy environment as the modern office. and yet, life goes on.
The unfortunate reality is that there are no closed systems in nature. Nothing can be completely firewalled off from politics, power, game theory, status, memetics, social dynamics, tribal value-signaling, etc.
The best we can probably hope for is localized, fuzzy consensus on taboos. We might all decide it's inappropriate to criticize sexual behaviors, or bring up religion in polite company; but it's probably fine if someone has strong feelings about adding a stoplight to 3rd & Main, or increasing funding to national parks.
You should look up the history of the introduction of Arabic numerals to Europe (particularly the use of the numeral zero in accounting) or "illegal numbers" and reconsider your point of view.
The article doesn't have a copy of the policy, but it seems to be about political debates that are unrelated to your actual job? (The latest news story, for example.)
But since Google operates internationally and is involved in so many things, I assume any given political issue is probably job-related somewhere at Google.
Guns are political (in the US at least) because the Second Amendment gives them special status as being necessary for the defense of a free state, and thanks to the NRA, that status is firmly entrenched as part of right-wing partisan identity. Sex is political because of Christianity and its influence leading to the criminalization of LGBTQ people and behavior. Neither is a symptom of our current political climate, they've both been deeply political for centuries.
I think it's fine for an employer to dictate this, I certainly never want to debate politics or encounter others doing that at work. But it's not fine if the company wants employees to "bring their whole selves to work", as I understand Google does. I think the very concept is misguided; I don't think people should be expected to bring "their whole selves to work". But if that's what an employer wants, then they should expect to get exactly that.
Maybe a few less politicians would help....ok maybe a dozen or two:
Soros funded child rape ring protected by Trump for $4 billion bribe, Pelosi $3 billion to "ensure safe passage over border". Participants include Obama, Schumer, Cuomo, Buttgieg, DeBlasio, Theil, Dorsey, Bill Murray. Over 60+ deaths from rapes, billions in payoffs. Listen to them do it here:
BE SURE TO Listen! to previously unprocessed footage now available [Soros, 0bama child rapes 15Jan 4-6am], Obama around 524: "Why is there so much blood? Someone get me something to clean the blood off my dick..."
>>> banned in LA, NYC, CHI, SF, BOS, DC...
*note: -> groups of links are multiple ways to get the same file ->
See pgs 18-23,8,11,12,35,45,61,62, and update list at end of doc.. Having trouble getting traction. Getting censored/banned. Billions in bribes paid to Trump, Pelosi, Schumer, Harris to enable a Soros funded child raping ring to operate in the USA. Please listen to the links below. Turn up the volume and put headphones on. You will hear these people, and many other high profile people, incriminate themselves in unbelievable fashion. Full 80 page document [update 20Aug] filled with red handed evidence like this at the bottom.
Go to pages 18 through 23 of this document and you will hear Dorsey and Thiel raping children. You will hear their screams. They both rape and kill three. Also at the "rape party" of note: Bill DeBlasio, Andrew Cuomo, Bill Murray, Peter Buttgieg, George Soros, Barack Obama.
Please copy and paste this post and repost it, or save it for later because it will likely get removed sooner or later. I keep getting censored by these people.
DTrump demands $4 billion to "take a blind eye" at 1015++ (link missing from report, unsure how). Here's pieces of dialogue:
1018 Henry Porter: The child raping.
1018 Donald Trump: What the fuck are you talking about?
1018 Gigi Hadid: Mr. President we are child rapists.
1018 Donald Trump: You cannot be serious.
1018 Donald Trump: You're gonna need $4 billion for me to take a blind eye.
1019 Porter: People are laughing because they think four billion is too much. I think it's not a problem when you have $35 billion.
1022 Donald Trump: You better have that $4 billion or you can kiss this shit goodbye.
Trump wants $138 million to ensure smooth outcome for false judgment, as in no trial or hearing, simlpy entering in a judgement into the system thus bypassing the fifth amendment right of due process:
https://s3.wasabisys.com/conv1/10JanCh3/10JanCh3_951-1033.avi
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iSeGHDToFRoRdIht50Wii0i30mlw9INp/view?usp=sharing
https://mega.nz/#!jSwzFYLY!RFQvL8KIyFZf1WfC6tGoPFgJ4aREeGE_pe3i2fwshy8
Obama explains the Illuminati with Jack Dorsey...At 230 a conversation is occurring on the embedded Porter camera system with Jack Dorsey, Peter Thiel, Barack Obama, Bill Murray, and the Porter's. Jack Dorsey provides a statement defining who their group is: "The Illuminati is an underground organization of child rapists and homosexuals." Matthew Porter: "We have to thin the herd, so Barack is going to explain a few things." At 232 Barack Obama says the following: "You people have to realize we are child rapists. The Illuminati are child rapists. As soon as you figure that out, you can decide what to do. Everybody is freaking out about what just happened [child raping event still going on]. This is who we are.":
https://s3.wasabisys.com/conv1/Overnight_14-17Jan/15JanCh3_200-347.avi
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ok1-9IvANULzKBOwADFgaiYCFi6yszfj/view?usp=sharing
https://mega.nz/#!nbhTwALA!qmf_0Lq0jApSwxRj1KRS_Q7QYbg4aJc4JMU9rDjR_yo
Full 80 page document [updated 20Aug]:
three ways to get it:
https://s3.wasabisys.com/aviewmefirst/FBI_FinalDraft_26Jul2019_BSchlenker.pdf
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Sj9EN_pHmicKS6rFQlmk67knMdJc9cGk/view?usp=sharing
https://mega.nz/#!OKYwES6A!zPGcRSg5de1XALI3FtUH3FCNCuLUzQbZN0l5iNCQqmU
\Please post this anywhere you can! Each google drive link is a backup to the wasabi link just in case one is "down". Getting blocked, censored, "downvoted" etc. These people are extremely wealthy and throw money to anyone who will help them cover up their child rapes & murders, corruption. Ironically, this is usually done through a receivership transfer, where you receive the funds after four or more day, and it can be pulled at the last second, whch is usually the case, after you've done them the "service".
A word about the "f@\&&ot" usage: it was a necessary tool. It showed three things: they were not in control, if they were the usage would have be stopped. Everyone out there needed to see t%his. Two, it made it unpleasant for them to be in the headspace, which has obvious advantages. Three, it pointed out impersonators of BS because they would not call each other f@%%ot, thus helping to mitigate the spread of false information. Apologies for those unintentionally offended.
Of special interest to the LGBT community, I give you Barack Obama in a foursome with Peter Thiel, Jack Dorsey, and Matthew Porter. It is on page 12 of the document where you can download the video containing audio footage of the "event". Link for the doc is just above under "Full 80 page document".
I am under the impression it was never a debate to start with. A debate implies that both sides are allowed to speak their arguments, yet, Google was actively shutting down and firing people that defended one of the sides.
Conservative Americans don't want politics at work, or on the football field, or at family dinners, or...anywhere else that isn't officially sanctioned. Sounds like China to me.
Sounds like the diametric opposite of China to me. China is actively injecting politics into every aspect of life through, for example, Social Credit[1], which is merely a more systematized method of political control than what has been employed since the communist revolution. Millions of "discredited entities" are being denied the ability to travel, for instance.
I fully expect their next product to enable our webcam, take pictures of us naked all the time, threaten us with blackmail that they will post it on the internet, unless we buy YouTube Premium, and somehow all of it will be "agreed to" ahead of time by their privacy policy.
And because politics are non-discussable, no employee will be able to stop this.
Paywall, but I'd bet this is mostly about forums/Slack/email and not about in person conversations.
I think the problem is that mass communication tools being used at biggish companies and up do not foster productive conversations about controversial topics. Trolling scales too well.
I’m not sure why this is getting downvoted. As a Freemason myself I find the ban on discussion of politics and religion while in lodge refreshing. It’s an important facet of the craft that helps us view each other as equals.
it is amazing how one simple thought escapes google execs - country is split in two halfs. google has strongly affiliated itself with one of the halfs to the point of complete alienation by other half. google would rather stick to its questionable political preferences and lose 50% of the market. sounds like a poor business decision.
It's about time Google cracked the whip on this entitled engineers! Maybe they would shut down less products if employees were actually at their posts and kept their noses clean! As an employee of a company, YOU are the one who needs to just show up and do your job without complaints or causing a disruption in the work place!
If Google did get split up, maybe the baby Googles could keep their open culture?
Update: I realize that this comment appears sarcastic and ill-meaning, but the top ranked post on HN is about " Deconstructing Google’s excuses on tracking protection" as of this moment (Friday, August 23, 2019 2:25 PM PDT) [0]. If we take the following together:
1. the open culture at Google as a known good quantity for some of the people who like to work there and keep working there
2. each of the products and services that Google offers today as respective known good quantities
3. The aggregate of Google's influence with respect to how the products and services in 2. sometimes has negative impacts on the marketplace.
4. The size of Google causes the open culture in 1. to start being a hindrance to Google itself.
Then it seems obvious to me that the size and breadth of Google is the problem. I genuinely mean all of this in good-faith. If Google stayed small, then maybe services like Google Reader could still be around because the gap between cost and benefit would not have been as wide.
If they can actually pull this off (which I doubt), I might consider working there again. I had an offer from them last Dec and turned it down, in part, because this shit is borderline unbearable on the inside (I worked at Google in the past when it was less political, and it was barely tolerable even then).
A good number of people do nothing but stir shit up on the internal forums and mailing lists. They also seem to be "untouchable" because stirring shit typically takes the form of grievance peddling or white knighting, so if you just let them go, their (rather extensive) cliques would give you hell for "discrimination" and write petitions, go to the press, etc, etc, as we've seen after a few higher profile departures over the past couple of years. You don't want to be called a misogynist or racist for disagreeing with literally anything they say, do you?
It'd be good for the leadership to grow some gender-appropriate gonads, and refocus the company on the business side of things for a change. Activism is fine, just not on the company's time, and not when it impacts the business or other employees. Just like I don't want to hear what church (if any) you go to, or what gender you prefer in bed, I also don't want to know what your political preferences are. Nor do I like to feel obliged to share your opinion any of those things, even if you think you're "right". I'm trying to work. You're getting in the way.
This should apply equally to all: as a conservative, I don't want to hear about conservative issues at work either. I want to hear about work, and _only_ work.
There were definitely groups meant for discussing politics, and loudmouths like me willingly participated in those - however, it was very uncivil. There was a majority view in the company, and if anyone didn't agree with the majority view, the majority engaged in heckling, ridicule, etc. It was already becoming an echo chamber, and as the majority grew, their tactics grew more petty and vicious. However, this was expected in the politics groups, and you knowingly entered that fray.
What seems to be happening a lot lately is that politics are spilling over into large, global mailing lists which target a whole geographic region, so many people get involved, and when a company has 200k employees and contractors, you will find some outliers in there who will pick nasty fights.
It only makes sense that they're cutting down on something that has turned toxic. It's a bit disappointing to hear, since I personally enjoyed the occasional, honest discussion with smart people of other viewpoints - these good discussions made the much larger number of ridiculous ones, bearable.
On the whole, it felt like it pushed the company in a positive direction --- internal discussions mirroring #metoo led to more visibility of sexual harassment and accountability for leadership. The discourse around the James Damore memo, as divisive as it was, felt like it still led to a broader understanding of the negative perspectives women in tech had to deal with constantly.
Most importantly (IMO), Google's product choices and politics are not inseparable --- Google is far too large and influential to pretend otherwise, and discussing these topics acted as a watchdog of sorts. Internal discussions about a potential censored search engine product in China resulted in pressure on leadership to change course, and pressure on Cloud bidding on the JEDI contract led to Google withdrawing from that bid.
Shutting off that political discourse feels like it'd be a huge blow to "oversight" from concerned Googlers --- particularly the ones who felt it was worth staying and using their influence internally to push Google toward creating a more just world.
Reading this comment just makes me feel baffled. How much arrogance does it take for a bunch of Googlers to assume the belief that they know what is "just" for the rest of the world?
An organization(in this case, a for-profit company) created to deliver products and services to consumers and advertisers playing politics on the world stage is laughable at best, and downright irresponsible at worst. There's no framework established within the confines of a corporation to deal with any of these sorts of social problems, and it shouldn't.
Play the right part, do the right job, and let others with the right skills and tools do the same.
Google is one of the largest technology corporations in existence, controlling the flow of information for huge swaths of the world's population. They have no choice but to "play politics" as many of the decisions they make can have tremendous impact on global policy and society.
> Play the right part, do the right job, and let others with the right skills and tools do the same.
No. More and more, technology firms and the individuals within them are realizing their own responsibility to consider the ethical implications of the systems they are building.
A corporation doesn't have the same mechanisms - public rules (aka laws), processes, appeals, accountability, etc, etc - built in and there's limited recourse when their definition of "right" and others' conflicts.
Frankly, it's begging for regulation.. and that's not even considering the potential monopoly angle.
The last 'people' you want involved in politics are mega-corporations because they are one of the few groups that actually have the power to manipulate elections, corrupt politicians, and generally break democracies. In my opinion it's likely that the world will gradually 'progress' towards worldwide overt corporatocracy, but there's no reason we should embrace this in any way shape or form on the way there. If nothing else your post is a strong argument for why companies such as Google should be broken down. But, getting back to the original point, I think it's possible if not likely that that's already impossible -- thanks to their involvement in politics and the influence it has undoubtedly gained them.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Should people be allowed to speak out against things that other people do, but that disagree with their sense of justice?
I don't see how you can call it "arrogant" for people to act in accordance with their moral and ethical standards. We don't have the power to force the world do line up with our personal sense of justice. But we do have the power to make our lives and the lives of those around us more just, according to our own personal interpretation of that concept. Do you really think that striving for justice isn't OK?
- A non-decision by Google management to not place limits on its internal culture is a decision in itself, and has consequences that we are currently experiencing.
- "Justice" is not something for a profit-seeking company to have influence or power over. This is my personal belief. I believe there are other channels that are better designed to address those issues.
- My belief on this subject is limited to the above.
But since they do in reality, especially if they are profitable and thereby gain power, it seems like something that should be discussed.
It would be great if they actually didn't have influence or power over justice, definitely, but they do.
Civil justice concerns two private parties, typically adjudicated by a Judge and Jury when they cannot reach an agreement.
Criminal justice concerns the State, represented by the Attorney-General or someone who works for him, and someone found to be in criminal violation of the laws of the State. They murdered, raped and/or defrauded someone, or something like that. The State takes a special interest because they have a monopoly on violence to enforce, and no one wants people taking Justice into their own hands. It would violate the social contract.
Political justice is typically subjective, an example of political justice would be Congress impeaching and removing a President or other official from Office.
What form of Justice are corporations specifically found to have disproportionate influence over? Certainly they might influence some laws and regulations around the governing of their business practices, but not all laws are concerned with Justice.
Justice is the domain of legislatures, Attorneys-General, police officers, juries, lawyers, prosecutors, public defenders, and so on. Justice is the domain of people that have the power to detain, arrest, try, pass judgement, imprison and kill you.
You take it as a given that they have this power and influence, but let’s say they do. Why would we formalize that state of affairs implicitly or explicitly? Their job is to be profitable, it is not to act in any meaningful capacity on Justice.
We elected officials to administrate it only, these ideals are done by everyone.
That's mob rule / vigilantism.
Not to give Google corporate Sovereignty to replace it.
You aren't going to get the political concerns of rust-belt America, or the political concerns of black families down in Watts recognized, nor will you get the communitarianism of rural America in there either.
And so that sense of justice gets warped, even regarding national issues of the US today.
What happens when these things go world wide? Someone's sense of justice gets offended by economic orders where procreative/childrearing families hold businesses which are inherited and passed on to kids, and where there are solid gender roles associated (my kids' second culture for example)? I guess we better do what we can to make the world safe for American Capitalism to come in and liberate people from family expectations. But that means opening up such cultures to economic exploitation by foreign business and that harm is waved away as if it doesn't matter.
The arrogance does matter, because the arrogance can easily lead to outright economic colonialism ("for their own good" as much now as a century ago). The way to hold it in check is for other viewpoints to actually be entertained and discussed.
I would argue that these are the only ones allowed.
It would have been a good career move for me to suck up to them. Some of them were serial founders who hired their friends, and others could've given useful referrals.
But that'd come at the cost of being constantly insulted, hearing my family constantly insulted, and so on, and not being able to say anything in defense. I'm not interested in being around people who think everyone who isn't exactly like them is subhuman - even if cutting contact with them is a bad career move.
Then again, that might be why they do that.
I developed a very strong appreciation for how stratified California social class was on issues like public transportation.
Come to think of it I have been wondering why Sweden can have a really nice public transit system covering the entire country and California with less land, more people, and more tax dollars cannot. I bet that stratification is the answer.
I am not saying this is the situation everywhere. Not at all. But it is the situation in some places, and Google seems to be one of such places.
Centrist neoliberals, progressives, libertarians, and “I need active government support because private parties are not actively supporting me” anti-SJW meninists, among other political cliques, all seem to be vocally present in significant numbers among urban California developers.
I'm not sure which “one or two” viewpoints you were referring to.
If we understand Liberalism to be a social philosophy tradition starting with Hobbes, being further developed in various forms through Locke, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, John Rawls, etc. and seeking the liberation of the individual from culture, community, and family then for various the social Liberalism of the democrats (which seeks particularly to liberate people sexually from community judgments and rules) is closely connected to the efforts by the GOP to do the same for people in the business area. They are based on a common view of what it means to be human, a particular view of what freedom is, and so forth.
These assumptions are not really so fundamentally shared outside North America. So in both Sweden and Denmark, society looks a lot more like it did structurally to Aristotle than to Hobbes -- strong family households joining together in local communities to address common issues. Those local communities joining together into larger and larger units to address common needs until you have the overall kingdom. These places are less individualist and more localist.
Growing up in small towns in the US, I can also tell you that this Business Liberalism is most heavily a force politically in the urban centers of the GOP. Rural politicians don't tend to push it in the same way.
2) I think the discourse in the USA has been heavily tilted in favour of libertarianism (maybe what you call "Business Liberalism") by concerted subversive effort sponsored by Koch, Mercer, etc., as outlined eg in the book Dark Money by Jane Mayer.
Your second point is I think correct on part of the problem but I think there is a second deeper issue which goes beyond dark money per se and implicates everyone. That is the fact that family and community are support structures which each of us rely on during hard times. If you come from a wealthy family and you really screw up repeatedly you will still probably do better than if you come from a poor family and do everything perfectly. But the family support structures have been under constant and sustained attacks on a number of means on the idea that if we undermine the family we will, for example, liberate women from inequality (in truth, it only increases gender inequality because motherhood has heavier burdens as single motherhood). Undermining the family, however, creates larger markets for a lot of things. A larger number of smaller households consume more. So business steps in to fill the role, as does the state. Moreover if you liberate business from the state and from community, then the first thing it will attack is the family and the reproductive order because it isn't very efficient for employees to have and raise kids (better to import kids after they grow up).
So I actually see the sexual liberalism of the progressive left and the business liberalism of the Koch brothers as mutually reinforcing, as politically heretical as that might be in the context of US political discussions.
I'm not super familiar with the nuances of their worldview, but it's definitely more business / enterprise-centric than non-Koch libertarianism.
The problem is that one person's justice is another person's genocide. I'm exaggerating, but not by much.
Consider the typical political discussion around Israel and Palestine. Both sides feel they are on the verge of being wiped out, with or without merit. Both sides feel they can do anything and everything to avoid that presumed outcome.
"Striving for justice" means very different things to both sides. To a Palestinian mother who has seen, say, two toddlers shot to death, justice might mean killing the offender, a soldier. To an Israeli mother of the soldier, justice might mean killing the Palestinian mother before she kills the soldier (her son.)
Details will vary, but suffice it to say, no view of this is pretty.
You dont want to talk about that stuff in the office, because there is not going to be any just solution.
There are going to be asshats in the office that can't handle being wrong or the fact that not everyone is sharing their views. Political discussions aren't toxic - immature people who can't handle disagreement are.
It is not great that we are letting those people ruin the workplace for the rest of us. I'm pretty sure that's one of the main drivers behind the alt-right movement. People aren't discussing and sharing views because doing so is taboo and they risk losing their jobs. Instead, people just sit at home and read wildly spun news stories which they soak up because their critical thinking ability has been impaired due to lack of training.
I fear you’re making a grave mistake by thinking the volume level is correlated with actual humans.
Politics at work has long been a no no at most companies and there's no evidence to show this has caused the rise of any extremism.
Work is where you get your work done. There is no room for you opinions on Trump etc, whether positive or negative. Your political views can very easily marginalise others especially when you hold a majority view.
You're asking why people that can't handle politics at work are 'ruining it for the rest of us'. May I turn the question around and why people that want to discuss politics at work are ruining it for the rest of us that don't?
It should be possible to talk (and disagree) about politics without it affecting work cooperation. I'm not sure whether the fact that it's not, is a cause or a symptom of the current political climate.
I very very rarely engage in any politics talk at work unless I'm totally cornered. I couldn't care less what you think about anything beyond the scope of our work. Chances are, your opinions are nauseating. I will be polite but I won't engage.
I rarely see any political type at work that doesn't somehow create drama. Your politics and your religion are of no interest to me. No I won't join your womens march, no I don't believe in equal pay (regardless of gender etc) and yes I'm a liberal / labour voter that favours unions. These are all distractions to what I am here to do though.
Maybe it's a cultural thing, me and my work friends never discussed politics, maybe that's just the apathy of my generation? Don't know, don't care. Politics is not for work. It's divise and the people pushing their political opinions are usally toxic and they don't even know it.
Work is where we spend a major part of our lives 8-9 hours per day five days per week. The idea that freedom of speech should be suspended for the duration is dumb. People aren't automatons and shouldn't be treated as such. It leads to the bizarre situation that you neither care for nor have anything in common with the people you spend the majority of your time with. The most interesting conversations you have is "I see it is raining outside." "Yes, it is raining." because people are so afraid of breaking the workplace decorum.
Being respectful of other people not being interested in your BS opinions is not stopping your freedom of speech. You're at work to get work done, not to espouse your opinions on the middle east.
Politics isn't the only way to keep your critical thining sharp. We're knowledge workers after all.
Yes absolutely; because that is a what a True professional does when their job requires it.
That's incredibly problematic
That of a regular human being with rationalized opinions through the lens available to them? For some reason only because Google has a lot of power to control the dialogue you ask them to bury their head in the sand? Or are we going to pretend that there hasn't been an arms race of sorts to game search results across nearly every topic and as such one might consider removal of what one considers to either be harmful, false, or manipulative to be a part of doing the "right" job?
What's the quote again, " The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing " -- Edmund Burke
And as far as Google goes, I think it would be easy to rationalize that (if I was a Google member) I have access to better tools than most to make a decision (more information).
- A non-decision by Google management to not place limits on its internal culture is a decision in itself, and has consequences that we are currently experiencing.
- "Justice" is not something for a profit-seeking company to have influence or power over. This is my personal belief. I believe there are other channels that are better designed to address those issues.
- My belief on this subject is limited to the above.
Are you asking Google to be a voice of reason in the debate over global labor markets and liberalization of SE Asian economies for example?
Doesn't that give you a wolf-and-lamb problem, to reference Aesop?
That does Not mean that Your Opinion would be a correct one--actually the opposite could just as easily be true.
In the US, we have government to take these things on. We have rule of law. And rights. Both government and individuals are subject to these.
With Google, there is no rule of law or rights. Goggle does not have a constitution. If you have a problem with them, what can you do? Nothing.
There is no right to question your accuser. There is no right to protect agains unreasonable search/seizure. There is no right to free speech. No right to privacy. And so on. There is only what Google arbitrarily decides to do. And if you're not in the majority as Google defines it, then it just sucks to be you.
This is why unregulated monopolies are intolerable. The US is founded on the principle that powers are separated to keep any one entity from getting too much and being able to infringe on the rights of citizens.
Google is way over that line, with monopolies in many areas. Add the partisan activism, and this is a very toxic brew.
I'm often stuck in the elevator with Googlers (our office is on the same floor as one of theirs). Some of the stuff that I end up overhearing is particularly jarring. It's not really the opinions but the self entitlement that makes me wish we had faster elevators.
Ideals aside, I think there’s a clear business reality that the radical left employee base is giving google a lot of headaches. Many might argue this is for the better, but that’s mostly because they have similar political sentiments. It seems like woke culture has made google a very tense place and is gobbling them up.
Most large companies have lobbyists. That's much more "playing politics" than simply deciding not to bid on a military contract.
Not at all because acting according to your morality is a basic part of being a human or member of society.
There's no reason that changes because you take your fun hat off and put your work hat on.
Not very much? Doesn’t everybody think like this in one way or another? I certainly know what is better for the world than the majority of the US.
People who look at someone else and think "you should just.." are normal. We all do that.
People who look at the world and say "everyone should just.." are the height of arrogance and epitomize the phrase "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."
Probably. But lots of people realize they've been wrong before, might be wrong on this occasion, and therefore don't just put their ideas over everybody else's. That's the non-arrogant way to handle that, I guess.
Damore was fired for his contributions to this "conversation". Hardly just.
> particularly the ones who felt it was worth staying and using their influence internally to push Google toward creating a more just world.
How about just returning what I'm actually looking for when I search for something? Or not killing products off when they get traction? Google users don't care at all about the politics of Google employees, they just want the product to actually work which seems to be less important that ever internally at Google.
But I also care a lot about the politics of Google employees insofar as they exercise a tremendous amount of influence over both elections and people's ability to broadcast their messages to the world.
Since Googlers tend to veer decidedly towards one end of the political spectrum, I would like to see their ability to censor speech restricted as much as is technologically possible.
Personally I disagree with that claim, but if you feel that search is a wholly technical problem, I'd expect you to agree.
And that doesn't even deal with the obviously political: laws like the right to be forgotten, or other forms of censorship like removals of content due to copyright. How to engage with those is inherently political.
As a user I want back the documents I’m looking for. If the engine has to adhere to local laws, fine but I want zero editorializing of results.
Of course! But converting from a search query to an ordered list of documents requires choices about ranking and filtering to be made.
If I search for "irs" do you include spam phone numbers attempting to steal my identity? There's distinct value to not returning garbage results, but how you do that is going to be called political by some people. And choosing not to do anything is going to be called political by others. There is no non-political choice, despite what you keep implying. Like, given a search query, you can't tell me the objectively correct set of results to return. If you could, you'd be very, very, very rich.
In the absence of that objective, perfect, "true" result, any choice is political in some way or another. Pick an algorithm and I'll happily explain to you a failure mode that is "political".
Your employer probably has more effect on your day to day life than your government does. Why would you be allowed to debate what the latter should do but not the former?
It's common sense. Anything that revolves around government, elections, laws, etc.
> Your employer probably has more effect on your day to day life than your government does. Why would you be allowed to debate what the latter should do but not the former?
I meant the exact opposite (I forgot that politics could be taken to mean "office politics" or "company politics"). Getting involved in government politics or activism is your role as a private citizen, not as a company employee. Regarding "company politics" (work hours, office arrangement, project management methodology, managerial decisions, coffee machine model, etc.), I guess it's up to your employer to decide what is up for debate.
Go ahead and google 'Taiwan' and then 'Canada' or 'Japan'. Taiwan (in the right sidebar thing) is listed differently compared to the others. They're listed as "Country in $X" - Taiwan is not.
That's political. Or is it not? It's "just search", sort of.
Taiwan being a country or not, and what shows up in a google search about it, isn't political for you, or for me, or for many people around the world. It may be very political for the people who live in Taiwan (or China).
Nearly everything is political to someone. So it's not very easy to draw a hard line between political or not. A "no politics" rule is very difficult to enforce in a meaningful way for that reason.
> Nearly everything is political to someone.
Saying that something is political to only a few people is an oxymoron. For example, there are some people who do not recognize Donald Trump as the US president. Is it political to state that the US president is Donald Trump? Absolutely not.
HN is an example of a community where a large majority of the content is apolitical. Drawing the line is really not that hard.
Search is one example, as is jury selection.
According to what you said in this post, It was completely just as Damore basically wrote a dissertation about things that were completely unrelated to any work done for any Google product. All that work would've been tantamount to a complete waste of company time and could be grounds for a firing.
Google users don't care at all about the politics of Google employees
I care a great deal about how Google employees or any employee at any company are treated. You should too since most people spend their lives at companies and policies and laws surrounding them impact people directly.
It was a completely inconsistent.
Damore was not fired for debating politically-sensitive HR proposals. Many people were involved in the same conversation, with the same degree of relevance to Google's products.
Damore was fired because his proposal was contrary to the majority.
---
It's possible to maintain both that widespread workplace political discussion is a poor idea, and that Damore was unfairly treated relative to his peers.
I think people took notice that saying “women earn less money because their genes make them less good at stuff” is a fireable offense. I actually don’t believe conservatism has anything to do with it.
I guess those few of us who actually read his memo will have to keep repeating this over and over against the wall of lying about it, but one more time - Damore argued women were less interested in computing, and that's why they are "underrepresented". He explained why they might be less interested and showed that this isn't controversial at all, neither with scientists nor anyone who ever tried to interest a pretty girl in the merits of AVX512.
He explicitly didn't argue women were worse at computing though. He said that very clearly.
You ask what liberal opinions get you fired at Google. I'd also like to know that. Here is a petition by nearly 1500 of them which claims border control is comparable to the Holocaust. That's unbelievably extreme, but apparently nobody was fired for it.
https://medium.com/@no.gcp.for.cbp/google-must-stand-against...
In working with CBP, ICE, or ORR, Google would be trading its integrity for a bit of profit, and joining a shameful lineage. We have only to look to IBM’s role working with the Nazis during the Holocaust to understand the role that technology can play in automating mass atrocity.
That's pretty direct. Working with ICE would be a "mass atrocity" and "we have only to look at IBM's role working with the Nazis during the Holocaust to understand".
You say, "It doesn't compare CBP to the Holocaust" but I'm going to have to disagree. Why bring up the Nazis at all if they aren't making that comparison, which a plain reading of their words absolutely seems to do?
They're held enmasse in cages in warehouses which fits the textbook definition of a concentration camp
Huh, and now you seem to be doing it too.
No, it fits the definition of a prison, which is where you'd expect them to be given that they're breaking the law. Are all prisons concentration camps now? No, concentration camps are defined by the fact that they imprison identity-based groups of people who haven't committed any normal crime - e.g. political prisoners, disfavoured ethnic groups and so on.
It's surely not as bad as the Holocaust (which this petition doesn't claim what you claim it does), but it's not any better.
This last part is a puzzle to figure out. It's not as bad, but also not better - those two things are in contradiction.
I don't think comparing immigration laws of any country to the Holocaust is helpful at all, as that would make literally every country basically the same as the Third Reich, which they clearly are not. And not only those Googlers are doing it but now you are too!
A prison is when you're incarcerated in your own cell and not a crowded cell. A prison provides adequate comfort that meets a minimum standard of care for inmates. A prison is not putting 30 people in one room, putting 30 people in a fenced in cage, providing lack of hygiene products and having 30 people to a single toilet. They're not provided space blankets and given no bed.
A concentration camp, by definition is deliberate incarceration of a minority group in inadequate facilities to sometimes perform labor or be exterminated. Going through this one by one:
1) They're being incarcerated even for claiming asylum (which is legal in the US) and crossing a port of entry is not illegal.
2) They're being incarcerated indefinitely which is also illegal.
3) They're an identity group (ie. of latin heritage). There are no detention centers for Canadian immigrants.
4) They're placed in warehouses in cages with little access to hygienic facilities. They're placed in mass groups with no beds or individual cells. This fits the inadequate facilities criteria.
So yes, that fits the definition of a concentration camp pretty clearly.
That's a poor paraphrase.
A more accurate one would be "Women earn less money on average because on average they are less interested in earning due to long-standing innate differences."
Damore was fired because his proposal was contrary to the majority and it became widespread knowledge.
Were Damore's part of the discussion never leaked, then I assume it would have been a slap on the wrist or just a shrug.
If I say "this thing is permitted" and then punish someone for doing that thing, it should be unjust in your eyes whether or not you would have said "this thing is permitted."
"According to what you said in this post, It was completely just as Damore basically wrote a dissertation about things that were completely unrelated to any work done for any Google product."
My comment was explaining why i disagree with the above. It has nothing to do with whether I agree or disagree with Google's policies, past or present.
So it wasn't an assignment, and sharing it with everyone wasn't the way to handle it.
1. Anything he did was optional, it was therefore not a work assignment.
2. If such a report was solicited (which I don't actually agree with in the way you're implying), the way to provide it wasn't to post it on public company mailing lists, but to give the report to the people in charge of the class.
Do you disagree with either of those claims?
I'll now add a third one:
3. A "report" of the form he provided wasn't solicited by Google. They solicited feedback on the class. Your claiming this wasn't feedback on the class. Therefore it wasn't solicited.
* No one was looking for feedback on the class as far as I remember.
* He went to an external session to learn how to improve their own processes, which is the report he wrote. I believe in one interview he said his did do it at some manager's suggestion, and so did use work time for the trip with their (figurative) blessing.
* He sent his report only to one or two internal groups, never a public internal mailing list (one was meant to privately poke holes so submitters could improve their arguments before submitting it to HR or whoever. I've heard conflicting stuff on the order of events, so he may or may not have sent it to HR).
* It was the internal quality group that leaked it to a public internal mailing list instead of maintaining privacy.
If an honest discussion cannot take place that yes women are discriminated against, but that yes men and women DO in fact differ, then affirmative action will inevitably stop being about stopping sexism and start being about forcing equity as time goes on. You would have to apply a LOT of oppressive systemic sexism and force a whole lot of people male and female into jobs they're bad at and unhappy with to fix inequity in tech. Currently the reaction to people pointing out the looming problem is to fire that autistic employee for sexism and for the CEO to make a public apology.
Damore was just ahead of his time. Affirmative action hasn't distorted tech enough to destroy itself yet.
Absolute conviction of righteousness leads to polarazation leads to extremism as nuanced opinions are projected onto the anti-pole. 'You are either with us or against us', 'You are part of the (our) solution or part of the problem', 'the end justifies the means', 'you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs' ...
The art of moderation seems completely lost as people are swept up in a never ending exaggerated and overexposed arena that requires pledges of allegiance and virtue signalling, demonization and sacrificing above and beyond all reason.
I'm not advocating everyone just shut the hell up, but the moment you when asked would not be able to switch sides in a debate and plead the opposite's case because you are so far down the path that you can not imagine anything but 'pure evil' as the motivations behind your opponent, you are no longer a valid contributor to the conversation, you are just part of a lynch mob out for blood.
In the few concrete examples you have, your wording implies a one sided take on various controversial topics.
People who think like that aren’t creating a “just world” by any definition I agree with. It’s more an example of the truism that the most dangerous people are the ones who are convinced they are acting from a place of moral correctness.
These people aren’t the solution, they are the problem.
And they can’t be reasoned with because they can’t see that, which is why they can’t stamp the problem out.
This is precisely why these discussions should be limited and isolated to groups who need to specifically work on them for products.
The above statement terrifies me. We didn't elect anyone at Google to do this for us.
It sounds like the work culture at Google has rediscovered the emergent factors which gave rise to the traditional cultural strictures against talking about money, politics, and religion.
Good science is repeatable. Given that Google is arguably an intellectually friendly environment, where more people than average understand how to talk in ways that get closer to truth, the inadvertent experiment conducted by Google over the past 15 years or so should hold a lot of weight.
It only makes sense that they're cutting down on something that has turned toxic. It's a bit disappointing to hear, since I personally enjoyed the occasional, honest discussion with smart people of other viewpoints - these good discussions made the much larger number of ridiculous ones, bearable.
It sounds like the overall cost-benefit tradeoff supports Google corporate's decision. (There were externalities beyond the discussions themselves.)
The other interesting takeaway for me is how long-term equilibria can leave holes that may be exploited by short-term-focused actors. When Google was young, it's say-anything culture was a big competitive advantage: it let them hire people who were nearly unhireable elsewhere because they were too free with their opinions or too difficult to work with, and it let people be more open about their emotions, which is a prerequisite for creativity. Many of these people were immensely productive, building key systems. But as Google grew, this same culture would've led to the destruction of the company, so eventually management is forced to clamp down on it. Not before making the founders and many employees fabulously wealthy and reshaping the industry, though.
Also I'm willing to be that a startup's lack of bureaucracy and momentum lets it experiment and move faster rather than just a carefree internal attitude. I've been in midsize companies on both sides of the free-culture spectrum and have never noticed any major difference in talent or capabilities.
Well let’s not go this far. Human civilization has existed for a tiny portion of time, modern civilization even less so. There’s PLENTY of time for better structures to be discovered.
Yes, it's certainly possible that thinking different (or being contrarian, or stubborn, or creative, or whatever you want to call it) will lead to something great! It is also extremely unlikely unless you are in a brand new field such as quantum physics 100 years ago that whatever idea you had has already been considered by countless people before you and you are not special.
The reason most startups fail is more than just bad execution. It's because most startups weren't meant to exist because they just don't solve a problem people are willing to pay enough to make the company a profit. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try it if you really think you're onto something - but you should be aware the odds are wildly against you.
Progress is possible. The thing is, that progress doesn't necessarily take the form that people wish it would take in their utopian fantasies. If we use history as a guide, we find that progress almost always takes a form with would have been unimaginable to past generations, if not at times even a little shocking to them. For example: The progress of agricultural technology, and its ability to feed people with unprecedented efficiency would have been considered wonderful and utopian by our forebears, until they started looking into some of the disturbing details.
A realistic, nuanced view of issues involving human factors and group psychology often incorporates elements of both the progressive and conservative mindsets. Both viewpoints are needed for effective, balanced government.
We will need to wait for an evolution in human interaction before any new developments follow in corporate design.
1) large corporations that do exist are quite different,for example there are cooperative member-run organisations like John Lewis that have been very successful. Additionally, different countries, say compare Germany, US and Italy will have different corporate structure and culture.
2) There is a massive body of academically reviewed research that demonstrates that managers and executives are affected by fads that measurably reduce productivity (such as open plan offices) and often unwilling to change even when more efficient methods are presented
3) In corporate governance there is large mount of conflict of interest. Take Skyrocketing executive pay in the past 30 years, frequent bubles, tax evasion, large amount of fraud in financial sector. etc. Does that look like an optimal, balanced system?
"Hey there is a $20 bill."
"No it's not. If it was really $20, someone would have picked it up already."
If it was really ₹2000, someone would already have roughed it up already.
The problem is that you have to have some forms of effort in coordination and there aren't a while lot of models for that in actual practice. There are a few different topologies.
Where I work is becoming more of a traditional company in many ways. But I still look to Gore's insight that the real decisions are made around the water cooler and in the carpool van, and that is helpful.
So it assumes a very in-person culture for one thing.
Which is fine. But it basically excludes models based on people communicating in a more distributed way. And that probably strictly limits size and geographic diversity.
Nothing wrong with that. I can say I'm building a company in X location. I want everyone to come into the office and we're not looking to get big. That's fine. Among other things, you've described every local manufacturing, wtc. business.
I have ideas for how I would organize a company if I had a blank slate. However, usually if you start getting investment, the discussions get more restricted.
I don’t see this as just a play on word, there is a wide variety of existing models that worked, and I’d also totally see a new model emerge and become “traditonal” when adopted widely enough. The world changes, companies should to.
Pretty sure from day 1, they produced something and attempted to sell it for gains. Pretty traditional to me. Kind of the only way to do business.
So the question in my mind is, why did Google need to grow?
I had trouble parsing what you wrote but I think the question you're asking (growth with employees vs growth by contractors?) is answered by Coase's "The Nature of the Firm": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm
EDIT to reply: I don't think it's about "diversity". OP specifically asked ", why did Google need to grow?"
Presumably, the question could be expanded as "why did Google need to grow to 100,000 _employees_?" instead of "only have ~1000 core employees on Google payroll and augment with 99,000 _contractors_". (The reason given by Coase is that activities mediated by too many unnecessary external vendors with contracts is less efficient than hiring people into the firm.)
I left it open for OP to clarify what he was asking but I don't think it's about diversity.
(As for demographic diversity, the SJW population and to a lesser the MAGA population have that, empirically it doesn't inherently cause strife.)
As someone who had grown up in a part of the country, where my parents had to drive almost 50 miles to hang out with people vaguely of the same ethic group, let me posit that the real problem is:
People who don't think certain other people should get to simply exist.
On the other hand, a company full of people who genuinely believe in fundamental human rights, self determination, live and let live, and the equality of people (even of people they don't like or agree with) does just fine. My former company did just fine with that. Democrats interacted with republicans, with people of faith, with atheists, with people of all backgrounds and skin colors.
The problem is with people who go around "seeking" people with the wrong opinion. Frankly, this reminds me of the same kind of "seeking" that some people who turned out to be racist enacted with me as a young adult, questioning me to find out how "American" I was to justify mistreating me. (Even some of them know better than to attribute to genetics what should be attributed to culture.) The similarity with which some people (who claim to be about "love" and "justice") enact the same "seek, then persecute" pattern is eerie to me.
I'd rather have someone who would use a racial slur on me, then accord me some meritocratic respect later, than someone who assumes I should think, vote, and affiliate a certain way based on my skin color, then gets outraged if my compliance to their expectations isn't 100%. True liberals are live and let live. It's false to be "liberal" and then demand ideological compliance -- or else. Doubly so if that reaction is based on identity.
If you are happy just having the job done, and don’t need the ability to control details of execution then contractors are often more efficient. (Depends on the task and the market)
The danger is, you may find your contractors start selling to your competitors. Then you need to compete on your core product.
Most corporate strategies don’t boil down to “have a competitive core product” they boil down to “control as many aspects of your market as you can so the cost of entry is too high for others to follow”.
If we accept that culture influences politics, then cultural diversity means necessarily political diversity does it not?
It's the same way in every endeavor. People get used to doing things a certain way, and forget the reason why. Try a different way, and relearn the reason why :-)
It's a reason why hiring some older people is worthwhile. They can tell you why things are done in way X, so you can avoid costly mistakes.
This. Worked at HP for years. It was a pretty great company for the most part.
Until Carly Fiorina joined. Amazing how one person can so transform a company - in a bad way. It started almost immediately. But buying Compaq really accelerated it. Companies like Compaq that have been in a slow death spiral throw off good employees.
That leaves low performing politically focused who protect their own. When they get purchased and “integrated” and they start filtering throughout the parent - like an infection, spreading their poison and killing it from the inside out.
As the peer comment notes, there are also companies that remain private and mostly small and march to their own drummer. Of course, those can easily end up in family control spats and the like.
Nothing's perfect but I'm not sure the lesson is everything sucks or dies in the end.
W. L. Gore and Associates?
Rocky Mountain Institute?
Renaissance Technologies?
That said, the change in policy (what is cited at least) reads a bit like "Let's create air cover for management actions to separate trouble makers from the company." Where trouble makers has enough vagueness in it to cover a wide swath of things. That allows for 'for cause' termination which is more financially advantageous to the company than simply laying someone off.
So to the extent that Google didn't want to be a 'traditional' company with all its rules and opaque policies and structures, it clearly is learning through experience the motivations that companies have for establishing those sorts of rules.
What I find disappointing is that after reproducing the experiment and getting the same results, they aren't able to come up with any other solution than the centuries old authoritarian one. I feel like they missed an opportunity here.
Humans are more or less the same as a few millennia ago. Our technology is more advanced, we’ve more or less covered every corner of the planet, we have birthed billions of humans and built millions of organizations of every stripe, and dealt with as many management issues as there were and are people.
We haven’t significantly advanced in our cognitive capabilities, we’ve just learned how to outsource more to experts and computers. If there’s one difference between us and us a few millennia ago, it would be that there are so many more humans on the planet that we probably don’t have a role in society for everyone. Under, e.g. a feudal System, every person had a functional role, and those that didn’t could at least point a spear in more or less the correct orientation. Vagrants of course were prosecuted and often pressed into service doing something somewhere for somebody.
In 2018, Google had ~99K full time employees. That’s larger than most cities, and historically, most countries. At that scale, you eventually need to tell most of them sit down, shut up and fall in line. Check their problems at the door, and if they really really need to fight about something, do it off premises on their off time without company resources, just to keep the peace.
IBM had at the time 400,000+ employees, so more than four times the employee base of Google. IBM is over a hundred years old at this point so have been doing this about five times longer than Google has.
In IBM's case they came at it from the opposite direction. Fifty years ago there was practically zero horizontal communication in the ranks and they were interested in increasing that to get better dispersal of thoughts and ideas throughout the company. As a result they were deploying and encouraging a sort of internal social network to improve cross flow and get more things out.
However, I think taking an authoritarian stance on politics, religion and so on in the workplace, so long as it is done in a respectful manner and puts everyone on the same level, is completely appropriate.
When you are a group of ten, and that’s your entire company, you can get away with a lot. Everyone is going to know each other, maybe a little more intimately than some of them would prefer. Your CEO might also be your drinking buddy and a good wingman. That’s the nature of a small organization.
At 2K, things don’t have to be quite so intimate, you don’t have to know everyone by face and name, just get along with them well enough to do your jobs.
I’m not going to try and guess where the tipping point is, but at 99K or 400K, there isn’t a lot of difference between the organization ability you need. Everyone has their own ideas about Life, the Universe and Everything, some teams might get along better than others, but politics and religion and the like have led to actual wars between smaller masses of people. If you have 99K on your payroll, not all of them are going to like and respect each other. Not every team is going to have perfect cohesion with every other team.
You still want civility. Every one of those 99K or 400K people has their own ambitions and dreams and reasons for getting out of bed at whatever time of day they crawl out of bed. But there is a time and a place for it, a whole wide world and life outside that of your employer’s little world, where not everyone is necessarily on the same payroll.
Absolutely if you can build an internal social network for your workers, that’s great! If they want to debate politics outside of work, that’s great too! It is still entirely appropriate to moderate that network, and draw a few hard lines where you think it is appropriate.
Let’s put up Tibet. Some people will have strong opinions on one side and another set will have strong opinions on the other side. (Most people will be indifferent).
How can the company manage that tension among people who work for them when those people believe the company has given them the freedom to pick a side and express that side and perhaps vocalize and ultimately mobilize?
I don’t see an obvious solution to this beside the traditional course. The present alternatives are even more “authoritarian” (i.e. firing the adherents of the wrong opinion, etc.)
The 'hard' solution is to teach people to communicate about topics on which they disagree. An easier solution would be to have employee moderators. A combination of providing communication classes and moderators with a dose of involuntary enrollment might be a middle ground.
For a long time Google generated hundreds of thousands of dollars per employee in revenue which they have been banking for the most part, and occasionally spending on acquisitions. An alternative would be an employee communications support network that promoted good communication skills and facilitated improvements in employee discourse on all topics. Google could have funded an entire research institute and a few thousand employee 'coaches' without meaningfully digging into their cash pile. That would have been "non-traditional."
1) Top-down, it's hard to convince people of the value of this who don't already see the value. It's hard to attach a KPI to it, hard to attribute changes. Or at least, from some POVs.
2) It's hard to be sure there will be participation. It's easy to pop off via text when you're procrastinating or got (self-)baited into a conversation. Scheduling discussion time / debate club or whatever feels like a chore.
3) It takes work. Like, to actually have a good debate about something takes time to think, engage, research, reflect and iterate the conversation. Not to mention the willingness. As above, it's easier to engage in junk food discourse than it is to challenge yourself, patiently tune your message over time or advance a dialectic.
But that said, those all feel like workable problems. I'm not sure if I'm missing something or if this is one of those cases where nobody has mustered enough will and attention to give it a real shot.
Beside, you won’t get the Dalai Lama with all the tools at his avail to accept the mainstream Chinese point of view.
That said I wouldn’t mind if a company tried this approach out of curiosity to see how it works out.
That's the thing, Google banks multiple BILLION dollars in free cash every quarter. Lets say you build a 'company within the company' and give it a budget of $100M a YEAR. That is a pretty sizable enterprise for what is funded out of about 1% of the cash that would otherwise just sit around in 'cash and cash equivalents'.
One might think that an executive management team might say, "Hmm, if we spend 1% of our free cash flow on improving the communications of all of our employees, what effect will that have on their productivity?" Will they be "more productive" or "less productive" ? They already have the null hypothesis results to compare to.
To make a comparison, a more "traditional" company might consider starting up a private bus service to move their employees from their homes to work and back again was too resource intensive. And yet that is exactly what Google did.
The easy solution is to just do what has always been common sense: don’t talk politics at work. Because even the if there is healthy debate, at the end of the day people are petty about people on “the other team.” For example, I’ve gotta imagine being outed as a Trump voter at Google has to put a huge target on your back.
It's a workplace, not your buddy's couch.
I've studiously avoided talking to anybody at work about politics, as it usually only serves to anger people if you don't agree. I've had a successful career of doing that.
In my time at Google, there were tons of people who felt they had the right answer, and had to convince everyone else who was wrong to come around to their views.
Policy is the surface level of a deep tree of rational beliefs. No one will ever be convinced of policy because each sees their favored policy as rational due to the underpinning structure of beliefs.
Discussions that don't begin with the core beliefs are bound to lead nowhere, you're right.
Do a historical survey of people who tried to suffuse politics completely through the lives of their followers. For completeness, look also at the actions of religions in the same way.
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Politics, movements of any kind which demand the entirety of the lives of their followers are often perpetrators of the worst things.
As a counterpoint, look to times and places where people are free to be open, to be themselves, and to choose how they live. There is also a power in the dispersal of power. Many call this freedom.
Like that quote "you may not be interested in war, but ..."
The way Robert Heinlein put it was something like this: "The end product of politics is like the result of peristalsis. It's not very pleasant, but it's no less vital to your health and well being." I think this is a good analogy. Imagine having a cocktail party conversation with someone singularly obsessed with their digestive tract.
- are you eating meat or are you vegetarian?
- do you take a car to work or ride a bike or take public transportation?
- do you drink tap water or bottled water?
- do you send your kids to private or public school?
Now try discussing any of these in depth "without politics".
If you seriously cannot have conversations at this level without them turning into political discussions, you really need to reflect on your conversational habits. It is absolutely not normal or healthy if you can't talk about drinking water without it turning political.
My SO is a vegetarian. It comes up a lot, both with my friends (who are all meat eaters) and newly met people alike, but I seriously cannot think of one single time it has turned into a political issue.
If these topics are frequently turning political for you, it's on you.
In places where there's more political diversity, people aren't so uptight. They know there are others who aren't like them, that's OK, and we all sort of get on with our lives. I grew up in Illinois and it feels this way.
Whereas in northern California, the "muscle" of respectful tolerance doesn't get as much exercise. People are a lot more alike and if you stand out, it seems weird. Which is kind of ironic for a place that's supposedly bought into "diversity" or "tolerance".
I showed my SO this thread and she laughed at the notion that she apparently can't discuss her lifestyle (she takes a car to work and drinks tap water, too) without it being political.
I suspect, as another commenter said, that this is apparently a cultural aspect where I and those around me have always grown up talking to people about such topics without any of them becoming political, while apparently others have not had such 'training'.
Whether one sees a distinction between these two concepts may align with one's position on the spectrum between individualist and authoritarian. Or maybe not, I really don't know...
If so, then we would assume that people who see a distinction there would also see nothing wrong with different countries having different political orders, for example stronger gender roles, procreation being tied to marriage, and marriage being tied to household business? We might assume that authoritarians would want to stamp out such variations and individualists would assume that different cultures can organize things like marriage and business differently?
But that doesn't match our observations I think, so it has to be something different. Either that or everyone is secretly an authoritarian when it comes to disagreements regarding social order and ethics of relationships or when we decide to be because it is "really important."
Even so, I recognize that some authoritarian polities produce better lives for many of their subjects than some less authoritarian polities do. There's always room for improvement. A situation in which husbands don't beat wives because the people are educated in humane fashion is strictly superior, in my estimation, to one in which husbands don't beat wives because that would invite devastating punishment from the state. Even that latter situation is strictly superior to one in which husbands do beat wives and the state reserves its devastating punishments for other purposes.
However, that is not to say that the society blessed by humane education should make war on either of the other two, or on some society like our own in USA that is in some sense an average of all three. Humane culture is best spread by example, not by the sword.
For example how do you weigh the draining of capital by foreign companies agains the purported benefits of liberating people from family and family business expectations (which my wife by the way definitely does not want to be liberated from)?
That said, my SO and I travel frequently (and due to the nature of our work, our friend group is very varied in terms of where they come from, with several of them being ex-SFers/ex-NYCers, etc). I honestly can't think of any increased politicization when talking with non-Texan friends versus Texan friends.
Texas is a far more sane place than these cities.
There, now I know as much as I need to about my coworker's diet. We're here to work and if you're going to be a member of a _diverse_ community with a shared goal you're going to need to accept that other people live their lives differently than yours and that's ok. I don't need to know the reason my coworker is a vegetarian I just need to let them know if my cookies that I brought to work contain animal products.
If you refuse to get along the result will be internal strife and the shared goal, a successful company, a working community, etc. will fail.
Our culture has become a toxic stew caused by everyone forgetting to mind their own business; partially because people think that because politics does have a part of everything people do (hence the etymology of the term), that it gives them the right to control others. Fascism is the end result.
Completely agreed on that point. In fact that's how politics should be discussed.
But if we consider politics to be "what should we do as a society?" then you can't avoid political discussions in those topics still, right? You can only seek to discuss such topics tolerantly and maturely, I think.
The whole point is you don't have to discuss any of those in depth.
I guess we treat the avoiding taboo topics more like not driving on the lines, and less like driving over a minefield. We generally avoid for safety's sake, and don't expect things to blow up immediately if there is a bit of driving over the line.
(Hell, we even talk about guns and gun control!)
1. I was commuting between Sweden and Denmark when the refugee crisis (people fleeing our efforts at proxy civil war in Syria, and our efforts at direct war in Iraq and Afghanistan) caused the Swedes to have to close their borders. This was not controversial. Migrationverket could not house the number of refugees who showed up and so refugees were sleeping on the street in Sweden in November. This lead to hours of lost time every day and eventually the loss of a contract that lead to the commute, and eventually after that, to a stagnation in my work (I left Sweden for Germany in part for that reason). You would see whole families with nothing trying to get somewhere they would have some sort of chance.
2. My kids have been subject to some harassment due to the fact that they are mixed SE Asian/White, and therefore could probably pass for Afghan. This was true in both Sweden and Germany.
3. Now the lines to get things like work permits or blue cards renewed are getting longer and longer (because of capacity shortage in civil servants) which means that when I go to get this renewed, I need to plan six months to a year in advance. A large problem here is the fact that the refugees are impacting the immigration service departments. Its to the point I am considering giving up US citizenship for German citizenship just to get around that problem.
There are of course more. Not getting into the amusing problem Sweden has with hand grenades and plastic explosives (organized crime gangs scaring each other late at night by setting off bombs and grenades, though I suppose that's better than drive-by shootings).
For a long time my oldest hated Germany after that. I actually feel bad because both of being part of the Berlin tech boom that is causing rents to rise really fast (and price many Germans out of the city) and also for the fact that refugees are being used to undercut wages (I know of too many cases of refugees being paid under minimum wage to ignore that dynamic).
But that doesn't excuse ranting at my kids as they are walking down the street.
Oh wait. Nevermind.
I can understand that the company will not tolerate anyone publicly disagreeing with its political stance but it is a natural thing for their employees to discuss the politics of their employer between them.
Though given the little tolerance of large companies for disagreeing their politics (not just in the Silicon Valley), the said employees would be well advised to not do so in writing.
But what conclusion should be drawn from this experiment?
During those years, Google grew into a large and profitable company, with enormous impact on the world and technical community. One could argue that the lack of a traditional corporate culture was important for attracting the employees who made this possible.
Perhaps Google eventually grew to the point where this was no longer a positive factor -- but even knowing that, should they have done things differently in the early days?
One could interpret the overall trajectory of Google here as reaching the limits of disruption-capable organizational design. It's likely they hit that limit some years back, and have just reached the point where they've internalized it enough to drop the pretense.
It's not all bad -- there are many things at which large corporate structures excel. They're just not typically the ones that are sought in Silicon Valley.
That is not a particularly widespread tradition globally or historically. And I personally think everyone should be incredibly skeptical of it.
I've never met anyone with power who followed this tradition, and plenty who are kept powerless by the always-one-sided application of these traditions.
These subjects are difficult to discuss because they are important, I find it far easier to believe that this toxicity comes from default of not talking to your family/friends/community about some of most important aspects of your life.
Consider that other people might not want to talk about these things, and by bringing them up yourself, you're prompting others to share their own opinions, which they may not (for whatever reason) feel comfortable sharing.
There's also the reality that many of these conversations just aren't productive. Best-case scenario, one person talks, the other talks, maybe they learn a little about each other, or their mutual empathy is enhanced. But a lot of times, it seems like two otherwise civil people find out things about each other that actually degrades their relationship. "Too much information" is real and at 34, I've learned there are some questions that just aren't going to lead to a productive conversation, on balance.
"don't speak about these important things, we don't have the EQ to handle this conversation" is a strong pro-status quo political stance to take and couching it in apolitical terms is dishonest.
EDIT: for the sake of the completion of thought, I want to add that the opposite is also true: a young company in a fast growing innovative industry can afford to hire a different kind of talent without harming its growth, and as the industry matures, they simply can't afford to keep doing that.
It's like the old demotivational poster said: "it might be the case that your purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others".
when did money sneak into that list?
Do you mean "internal political" as "Oh man Jimmy is in charge of gmail now!" (just a made up example of internal politics there) or "Can you belive what the POTUS did!?!?!"?
If the latter, I'm a bit surprised ... I can't imagine having that kind of conversation at work. That is absolutely a NO GO zone for me at work.
These are also people who are intelligent, educated, and quite arrogant, so the fireworks were pretty spectacular.
It must be US culture there: everywhere I've worked (in France) arguing about politics was always ok. Even fun when you get people of differing views who can explain how they came to those so you can debate. Things must be boring when you have to limit yourself to safe subjects.
Interesting. When your company is big enough, the intranet becomes a community that mirrors the Internet in general...
But also a bit shocked how many people feel that participating is a good idea.
Otherwise, yeah, that seems crazy.
So I responded.
1. I shouldn't have gotten the survey as I didn't work for the company who sent it, but nobody at either company was very smart or careful because it went to everyone.
2. I misread the email and didn't notice it wasn't my company asking for responses it was the company we did outsource work for.
I made some pretty tepid constructive criticism. So did a couple other people.
The next day we were in a conference room with people we never met before angry that we responded to the survey. They hadn't realized we were actually sent the email just like everyone at the company (like I said these were not smart people) ...
It also raised the question about how anonymous this survey was. Of course it wasn't, you could see in the URL when responding your name, email address, etc ;)
When it's conversation forums with thousands of people...critical mass is achieved, and it runs amok.
I suspect an important factor is that these happen in smaller groups that know each other better, beyond individual views.
I was appalled that one of my foreign born, non-Christian, non-Caucasian co-workers voted for Bush 43 and listened to Rush Limbaugh, but having known him for years, I did not reduce him to that single aspect of his life.
Q: You mention that you were 'appalled'. Did either of you take the time to explore your presumptions behind your reasons for coming to differing conclusions (while realizing the humans are 'rationalizing creatures', not 'rational creatures')?
I apologize upfront for not knowing who Mike Savage is, but it is my understanding that Limbaugh (who I don't listen to, so I could be wrong) is a guy that rudely declares that we should enforce border policies as written into regulations written by Congress?
That may not be true, but if it is, is that wrong-headed?
Edit: I have many loving/giving Muslim friends, and without their help I would not be alive today, but I am somewhat afraid of their "extremists" when I travel to Pakistan, or Qatar. I don't think I'm a hater, but maybe I am?
I'm somewhat conflicted in my thinking on border enforcement, and I do think it should, in general, exist, but that's far from the core and the tone of his argument, I think. He also declares that Mexicans in general are lazy (regardless of the legality of their status): https://www.huffpost.com/entry/rush-limbaugh-attacks-mexican...
and has a long history of racist comments: https://newsone.com/16051/top-10-racist-limbaugh-quotes/
> I am somewhat afraid of [Muslim] "extremists" when I travel to Pakistan, or Qatar.
My colleague did in fact come from a country where Muslim extremism was a thing. For your travels, I would certainly share your concern in Pakistan, but I don't really think there is an objective basis for it in the case of Qatar:
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/terrorism-index https://tradingeconomics.com/pakistan/terrorism-index https://tradingeconomics.com/qatar/terrorism-index
But, one size does not fit all. My anecdotes to that effect are surely not data.
But my friends of Mexican descent (Americans) don't like uncontrolled migration because of the (perceived?) downward pressure on wages for unskilled labor.
EDIT: That last point was also anecdotal. My gut feel (intuition) is largely driven by my experience. I do not claim that this experience is global or globally correct.
I'm not sure what you mean but generally in my life... I actually don't have a lot of "political" conversations every day. More often than not, none at all.
I wonder what the difference is, I mean beyond just painting someone who can't as a jerk.
I think it has to do with learned skills of emotional self-regulation... someone with those skills is better able to hold their perspective while allowing that of another. But how does one learn that?
It might have to do with safety. I suspect that the people that are better able to have those kind of civil discussions have had good behavior modeled to them in the past, that has increased their own sense of safety, like from someone else in a position of power that has demonstrably respected their opinion even when they held different values.
Could that be the krux of it, that most "uncivil behavior" in this realm is from people that are reacting from a sense of danger, like that if they meet a person with differing values they automatically believe they are being threatened? (Recognizing that sometimes that belief is correct.)
I also wonder if there's a universal central reason behind why it is important to understand someone else's argument if their conclusion differs than yours.
I totally agree that what it requires are those types of emotional skills, and getting them takes practice.
This tradition of avoiding ever getting practice seems absurd to me, and it also very much benefits those already in power (and they are not unaware of this fact).
In fact, if you can't argue for their side as well as they can, you haven't really understood it, so you shouldn't argue.
However, the person being toxic is often not criticized at all because they were spreading their hateful views "politely," if such a thing is possible. So while I believe there is nothing to be gained from getting angry in a political discussion, I do think we should give people a bit of a break if they understandably become frustrated when dealing with actual white nationalists/neo-Nazis/incels saying rape should be legal/etc.
I wonder though if there's a conflation here between dealing with the argument itself, and dealing with all the social realities of being subjected to the person making it - how threatening they appear, how connected their beliefs are to impending action, how confrontative the exchange is, etc. Like, it's totally fair to believe that the person making the argument is dangerous, and respond emotionally from that. It doesn't mean that it's the argument itself that is being responded to - the argument might instead be evidence of impending dangerous behavior, which is different. It also doesn't mean that the argument itself is dangerous - the danger might entirely come from the circumstances, like if the argument is being used as a physical threat.
Like, I don't know, imagine it's Joyce Brothers making the hateful argument, from her hospital bed with a cocktail in her hand. It might be easier to engage with the argument in that case - to determine if it's based off of incorrect facts, bad reasoning, or just hateful premises that can't be challenged.
Hell, believe it or not, I've heard people say that it should be illegal to be fascist for example. Of course these people should be ridiculed.
I'm sorry, but I don't think having to listen to co-workers ram their ill-thought-out opinion down my throat is "freedom."
“Food isn’t political” is only “not political” for someone who is well fed and not concerned about where their next meal is coming from.
Everything is political.
In that sense it’s not really about the politics, it’s just seeing the world outside of your own.
In almost every other case we’re okay with this. In a lot of contexts irrelevant discussion is called ‘taking it offline’.
Really good point here. One could argue the same for society as a whole - not just companies with global mailing lists.
That can still happen, maybe just not on a huge mailing list? :p
Interestingly there are people in this very thread claiming "everything is politics."
Limbaugh was just agreeing with the communists. Oops?
The fact that they are starting to crack down on this toxic environment is long overdue. My guess is that they are starting to see tangible attrition of top performers (who happen to be predominantly white & asian males) quoting this as a reason to leave, which threatens their existence. Hence the change.
There is no federal law that prevents employer discrimination based on political beliefs. There are some states, specifically California in this case, that prevent employers from discrimination based on political activities and/or affiliations. However, most states prevent employers from controlling political activities outside of work
The First Amendment does not apply to private institutions, only public ones. Private institutions can outright ban political discussion with no repercussions and cannot be liable for termination on the grounds of political beliefs expressed within the workplace sans some states.
So while it isn't "illegal", it can be restricted within private companies.
However, most private companies don't allow political discussion and it's not illegal to control this unless you live in certain states, California being one of them.
Explanation in detail here: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/can-employers-discri...
At government places, political discussions were generally avoided. The Hatch Act might have something to do with that (it's illegal to campaign for any political candidate at a Federal workplace), but mostly I think people just had good common sense. They did talk a little among themselves in the run-up to the election, but it was in-person, with a buddy, not meant to be a public discussion.
What's really shocking to me here is this revelation that there's actually "global mailing lists" within the company where political talk is happening. This, I cannot imagine ever seeing at any of my prior employers, ever. I honestly can't imagine why any company would tolerate such a use of its equipment this way. It's just a recipe for trouble.
If we know each other at all as people, immigration policy certainly comes up.
Getting a Green Card shouldn't be that easy for H1B holders. An H1B visa is a temporary visa and in that time they should be transferring skill knowledge to American replacements.
Not a full solution of course, but when a proper ID is needed, a passport is the goto. I've seen tourists use them at bars.
Welcome to the US. Things are really wacky here. Another really wacky thing: you can't walk around or be in public with an alcoholic drink (e.g., you can't have a beer in a public park outside, on a picnic, etc.), even though drinking is such a huge, huge, huge part of our culture. Yet in most other developed nations, it's perfectly legal. You can even buy beer in vending machines in Japan.
I agree. My company has a "no politics" rule spelled out in the employee handbook, and that's worked out really well. At most, some of us will have private, in-person, one-on-one conversations about politics, which is fine because it doesn't drag in anyone who doesn't want to be there.
The off-topic channels on our Slack consist of memes, jokes, and chat about movies and video games, plus the occasional bit of tech news. It's a pretty pleasant place because of the no politics rule.
Something tells me that if I could tell someone I fired them because of their support for antifa or the alt-right, that evil nonsense would bleed itself out of our society in a short time.
It's really too bad that we can't just empower indifferent moderates like yourself to sort things out in a totally even-handed and proportionate manner.
I agree with you 100% that you are no moderate.
Evidence point #1: You tried to perpetuate the widely-debunked myth that the Dayton nutbag was some sort of leftist terrorist instead of a troubled spree killer who killed his trans sibling and several bystanders.
(For other readers: that was an unfortunately common false attempt to lump in "a killer who incidentally liked Tweets on Twitter" with "the numerous recent killers who DID leave white supremacist manifestos before going on their rampages.")
Evidence point #2: You said "Antifa is explicitly about violence, racism" in the preceding clause. A moderate would have correctly expanded that clause to "Anti-fascists are explicitly about violence against fascists and the racism that white supremacist fascists espouse."
So I can confirm your assertion that you are not a "moderate." I just think it's a bummer you folks have to call yourselves "anti-anti-fascists" because that's SIX whole syllables.
Talking politics in workplace is not professional - different political opinions can wreck marriages, it can certainly wreck your job too! Just think about what if your boss is having a completely different political opinions than what you belief.
Also any major corporations leaning one side of the political party would immediately alienate the other half the political spectrum and may risk losing businesses who believe in the opposition political parties.
Private conversations about politics thus is entirely outside the scope of what the company is allowed to care about. Public comments, for example on global email lists, would be a different topic.
If I understand Google's stance, that's what it's about.
> Google is also building a tool to let employees flag problematic internal posts and creating a team of moderators to monitor conversations on company chat boards, a spokeswoman said.
Though the article's headline is remarkably unclear, it's apparent that Google is focusing on the written word on company equipment.
They have convictions and these things are either true or false at the end of the day. It's not purely a matter of preference.
Or, to put it another way: if you want to hold a political opinion, and then express it by voting, but otherwise keep it completely secret from your community... that's your right.
But the goal is to hold private political discussions as much as possible above economic retaliation.
In Europe the abuses were different so the protections are different.
It has both fewer signficant dimensions and narrower range on those dimensions; it's much smaller, not bigger.
Also centered further to the right, on the left-right axis that is the most significant axis of variation in the US; the whole range on that axis with any substantive representation in the US is about center-left to the solid right.
Bernie might be center-left depending on country.
I suspect some on this discussion are also conflating political discussion at work with this incident: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/07/business/google-women-eng...
Sure, it's "political", but more importantly it's discriminatory and therefore unacceptable on many other levels.
I read it and saw an attempt at proposing policies to increase female representation based on a collection of science papers about differences in behavior between men and women.
Ummmm....
The entire American political spectrum fits in the center-right of most European countries' political spectrums.
When was the last time you saw a political discussion between a Socialist, a Social Democrat, and an old-school Christian Democrat?
Here's how I describe American politics to Europeans:
In the US we have two political parties. We have the Democrats which you know as the Liberal party.
And then we have the Republicans which you know as the Liberal party.
Yes, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama would be in the same party in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, France, etc.
You're getting downvoted but I'd like to register that I agree with you: they'd both be social-democrats, sitting on the center-right in my opinion :)
Not surprising at all, Romney and Obama were so similar I didn't bother voting in the 2012 election.
https://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2012
But then Americans have these funny "all your intellectual property are belong to us" clauses in work contracts....
I rechecked my contract and under the terms of the contract, if it is specific to my work at my employer, they could claim it, but frankly we prefer to release everything that isn't specific to our industry open source anyway, so.....
So I gotta wonder if this is generally true or if there are cultural factors.
It was NOT Ok in the 50s even in social settings.
This is kind of not funny (or rather, a bit painful), but it does mock what the US used to be like in the 50s about both political opinions and allowing certain people to have them:
The old "strictures" in conventional US polite society were to never discuss, in open, in any group, at work, at church, or a neighborhood barbeque: religion, politics or money.EDIT: BTW - to your point about changes around smoking in the office - I left the United States for about 10 years in the mid-80s, and people were having beers (or martinis) with lunch when I left, and then when I got back in the mid-90s - they were not. These things do change, and I am not trying to invalidate that point of yours.
This seems very straight forward and clear cut - one question though: can you define "politics"?
> [Google] employees discussed at length [on internal message boards] whether Trump’s win meant it’s time for a violent revolution. “How do people cope with this?” one employee wrote. “I’ve never been part of a military or war effort before. … I don’t know how useful I’ll be.”
It's about time Google tells people to take their political revolution talk somewhere else other than company internal discussion boards!
https://thefederalist.com/2018/01/10/19-insane-tidbits-james...
1.https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/06/24/insider-blows-whis...
Is there a citation for this? I see lots of far-left garbage on social media generally (by which I mean posts espousing violent revolution, racism, sexism, blank slatism, anarchism, and/or communism). I'm sure there are niches of far right racism, but it mostly seems like a niche problem (and given that the far right is largely a reaction to the far left, it stands to reason that we have an opportunity and obligation to kill both with the same stone).
https://medium.com/@gennai.jen/this-is-not-how-i-expected-mo...
Of course she's going to claim that the video was "heavily edited." But the validity of the video comes from the fact that there is no context which makes the clips of her speaking any less damning. They clearly indicate a willingness by Google to curate search results.
>The video then goes on to stitch together a series of debunked conspiracy theories about our search results, and our other products.
I'd love to see this debunking.
>Google has repeatedly been clear that it works to be a trustworthy source of information, without regard to political viewpoint. In fact, Google has no notion of political ideology in its rankings. And everything I have seen backs this up. Our CEO has said ”We do not bias our products to favor any political agenda.” He’s somewhat more powerful and authoritative than me.
Oh, well, if the CEO says it, it must be true. This is just a weak attempt at damage control.
I don't see any reason why a propaganda outfit led by a guy convicted of sneaking into government offices on false pretenses should be taken at their word that a random Google employee is a powerful executive when the employee in question says that they are not one. Seems like "they are an executive" would be pretty easy to establish.
If you want to show that Google has "bias against conservatives" or whatever, get it from a reputable source instead of the garbage heap that is Project Veritas.
Ignoring bias, do you believe that every given situation that some group may identify as a problem is guaranteed to have a reputable source reporting on it?
I'd love to find a more reputable source, but one is not currently available, and I'm not in a position to create one. That does not imply that the problem being reported on is illegitimate. You should be able to assess the contents of the video with PV's bias in mind - and most of the content really does stand on its own, especially in the context of relevant quotes from employees in OPs article.
There was also a massive trove[1] of internal Google documents dumped on PV related to, among other things, AI development and arguably politically motivated guidance by internal definitions of "fairness", designed to shape search results. Should these documents also be ignored because they're only being hosted by Project Veritas? You can see them yourself...
Ironically, this is the danger of trusting only select biased organizations with curating the flow of information - as you suggest, to most people, if a "reputable" source hasn't reported about it, it doesn't exist. How many years has 4chan been screaming about epstein, as another example, without major media investigation?
The bottom line is that no entity that acts as the front page to the internet should be curating information flow without a massive, blinking disclaimer.
1.https://www.projectveritas.com/google-document-dump/
If media does have a bias, and let's assume it does since it was de-regulated, then I'd put pro-business Liberalism first. Then on a liberal vs conservative spectrum, I would agree it is more liberal than conservative. But why is that controversial when by raw population there are more socially liberal people than conservative?
Now that's out of the way... I do agree that no one media source should have the power Google, FB, Fox, CNN, etc have. And there is no doubt not every interest is covered by the giants. But you should stick to that argument and not bring in PV to actually win people over.
I think the real problem here is that people are aware of Google's bias and OK with it, but unwilling to admit as much.
There's more context than that single quote, including the other strong evidence of overt bias in other sources, like OPs article. I get the feeling you didn't watch the video.
> I am sure a Project Veritas video doesn't give the whole context
Have you watched any? I would suggest you do before trying to convince others of their content. Again, what you are doing is garbage optics.
Another quote from Jen Gennai: "the same people who voted for the president do not agree with our view of fairness"
Mind you I sat the last election out because I was so thoroughly disgusted with Hillary's anti-immigrant record and Trump's promise to try to be even worse (and while he is trying, I am not sure he is succeeding as bad as it is, and it is very bad). I have no love for either. But it is protected speech.
How do you weigh two options when one has a record of imposing very long-term harms (PRWORA has now been on the books for almost 30 years and if you remember her response to Sanders' accusation she helped round up the votes for PRWORA, it was to defend the law) vs a more acute set of insecurities?
That's the choice between measles (orange, fast-spreading, kill you or you recover) and polio (not orange, slower spreading, you might not ever fully recover). So I am not entirely sure from the perspective of being married to a non-American who was the lesser evil except to say they were both genuinely horrifying.
Theres a second very important point here as well. If the issues that matter to my family (for example, full inclusion in the protections of the working classes -- even we knowledge workers are working class) are not on the table, withholding my vote may be the only way to get them on the table at all, and voting for someone who has actively worked against those interests is a betrayal of that.
I'm not sure what issue you're referring to getting on the table. (I suspect it actually already is on the table.) But how does not voting get that issue on the table? It's too late to change the candidates' positions on election day. Are you hoping that years later a different set of candidates will try to address your concern by examining who didn't vote in the previous election? That seems unlikely. Candidates do what voters want, not non-voters. Opinion polls often throw out non-voters, too.
And most people care about multiple issues, so even if your main issue isn't addressed by anyone, you've lost the opportunity to try to make some progress on all of those "less important" issues.
The winning strategy for improving the world is not hard. Vote for the "lesser of two evils". Every single time. This will cause evil to decline. Maybe slowly, hopefully quickly.
Don't get stuck in analysis paralysis. The main two U.S. parties have a lot of differences. It should be pretty easy to figure out which closer aligns with your views.
What I am doing is trying to help a third party organize so that if not this year, if not next year, if not in four years, we can eventually make an impact.
Basic point is: If my family is not to be fully included with the same rights, then you don't need my vote. This willingness to throw elections made the Democrats come around on gay rights. It ought to be used by those of us in mixed-nationality families to make them come around on immigrant rights.
(In addition to organizational efforts, I am in the running for volunteering for various positions in the American Solidarity Party, primarily because they do include families like mine in their agenda.)
Helping a third party is counterproductive and irresponsible. The only "impact" you will make is in harming the issues you care about most. It's the same as just volunteering to help the major party you like the least. It's basically the worst thing you can do. At best, third parties in the US take advantage of well-meaning people by using magical thinking and cynicism. At worst, they're used as patsies to let foreign dictators influence the election[1].
In our first-past-the-post voting system, you have to get a majority to win, not a plurality. The party with the most votes doesn't win – the party with over half the votes wins. This means it isn't possible to have more that two competitive parties under this voting system.
I don't like that system. I think we should have a different voting system that more fairly represents people and eliminates mathematical loopholes. I also think the major political party that most closely represents my views is also the most likely to offer a chance for electoral reform.
It's a much faster, easier, and more plausible strategy to try to move the best viable party in the direction you prefer. There's effective alternatives to third parties – look at the Democratic Socialists of America or the Tea Party. These groups were able to use the major political parties to launch and implement their platform very quickly (like in one or two election cycles). There's more actual politicians aligned with groups like this than any third party, and they have massive influence over US politics. And they don't have the downside of forcing their members to shoot themselves in the foot every election.
The US absolutely needs people like you who are passionate about important issues and have the time and energy to dedicate to making real change. But please, for everyone's sake, do it in a way that doesn't directly harm the only peaceful strategy for political change that we have.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/russians-...
But new immigrants are barred from access to Medicaid, meaning if we had returned to the US, we would have had a 5 year period where we could be fined for me losing my job just because I am married to a non-citizen.
Now, the first policy (Medicaid exclusion) was a part of Bill Clinton's re-election campaign (and when Hillary responded to the accusation of helping round up votes for it, she defended that law, guaranteeing there was no way I would vote for her). The requirement to purchase without undoing the exclusion was done entirely by Democrats without any GOP help.
When your family has been sold down the river enough times, there's a lack of trust. I maintain that the Democratic Party treats families like mine as cheap bargaining chips because we only get one vote as a household while other families get two, so there is not much harm in throwing my family under the bus or off the boat if it gets some other votes somewhere.
At the end of the day the only two things politicians want is your money and your vote. And it is only in these ways we can hold them accountable.
I'm sad because it seems like your reasoning is based on an extreme corner case – a hypothetical fee if you hypothetically moved and hypothetically lost your job and hypothetically couldn't find insurance. I'm sad because no one should have to worry about that anyway. I'm sad that this loophole exists and hasn't been fixed. I'm sad that you're blaming and not supporting the people trying to fix health care. I'm sad that those people didn't do a better job fixing it. I'm sad because I'm pretty sure you're going to make it harder to fix in the future. And I'm sad because I don't know how to have a constructive conversation on this anymore.
Thank you for engaging with me. I hope I'm wrong – I hope your political effort and strategy is able to help the people you care about without hurting others.
But the first time we moved back, I was unable to find a job and needed that assistance, which was then denied to me.
I don't see how it can be fixed. Both parties throw families like mine under the bus as easy ways to appease others. The only way I see is to try to start a very different approach to our national conversation and that is not going to come from our parties of capital (either one).
To be fair, that's a learning most businesses stumbled upon decades ago, it's the new generation of "re-invent management" companies that are speedrunning HR policy.
I don't recommend reading it unless you can tackle the entire thing though
Wow. Yeah. Being accepting and loving is hard. It's one of the hardest things you can do, but only if that person is part of your out group.
So perhaps that's not too far fetched. I've had jobs that didn't keep me interested or seemed menial, and I will admit to holding a lot of online threads during those work hours. Nowadays, when I'm at work I'm often too busy and interested in what I'm doing to think about other things that are happening.
I mean, wasting 10 minutes is wasting 10 minutes, whether I'm talking about politics or football or TV.
I’m on a group chat with a couple old friends and when someone starts a debate on a topic I’m passionate about we go hard and we go deep. Suddenly it’s two hour later and here I am trying to do some quick demography with raw data from the census bureau to prove a point.
I’ve started blocking the chat until after work because debates do tend to rage sometimes. And we’re old friends with a grounding empathy and shared experiences to fall back on. Doing the same thing with coworkers during work hours? I would’ve banned it too.
Once it was a woman who seriously thought white men needed to be excluded from things to make up for all the time they oppressed everyone else. It was like socially-acceptable maliciousness.
When you talk politics, you risk having people reveal extreme views that really accomplish nothing but put a wedge in an environment what's supposed to be collaborative.
And I'm going to brag that my company was lightyears ahead of Google on this one. We don't allow political debates. Such a time waster. But HN is educational.
I think it is not so much due to size, but due to the extreme ideological polarization of American society during the last decade.
When before it was normal to hear and accept - and god forbid, even stay friends- with people that had different political opinions from yours, as of late, that has become quite difficult.
An example of this working is in investment management. The job is largely about groups of people arguing with each other. Often this comes down to differences in "world view".
Some places get around this by just hiring people with the same "world view". But other places take the more robust approach of hiring different people and encouraging more argument. I am not sure if this works because they just don't hire very dogmatic people (a group that is very over-represented in tech) but it can/does work (and does scale up to thousands of employees).
Definitely, large groups that have members across society ban these discussions (the Masons is one example). If you are hiring/recruiting anyone, then no politics is smart. But this isn't the case here. It is possible...if you are motivated. From what I have seen, the Googler approach is to be actively unmotivated.
It is easier to think everyone else is dumb and you are smart than acknowledge you are wrong or don't know. Investment management is unusual, the feedback loop is clear. You are as smart as your last trade. That promotes a robust self-image. I can see why the average Googler doesn't have these traits. They seem to be in the job description (i.e. a lot of people want to work at Google because that will mean they are smart). You reap what you sow.
When we turn the narrative of everything from "respecting differing world views" into "respecting nazis/dictators/bigots" etc and turn everyone into a world saving moral crusader upon whom humanity's salvation rests on, it's a very invigorating and powerful message that takes intellectualism away from discussions.
That world view included not only dogmatic stances on religion,on politics on progressivism and a rejection of classic liberalism.
This led to a hyper-bifurcation amplified by their own internal social media - a radical left that saw any compromise with liberals or moderates as a betrayal of their core ideologies and a reactionary right that became more polarized as they became more marginalized.
There's a difference between "differing world views" and "I don't think people of your race should be allowed in this country."
A well run company includes people with diverse political views points. A workplace that's hostile to anyone who leans right or leans left ultimately hurts diversity.
I thought that memo was foolish and short-sighted. I don't agree with it.
However, it would have been better solved by a manager first asking him "do you really think it's a good idea to post this at work?" and having him tone it down than trying to publicly shame him and get him fired.
Google picked the wrong side on that. They should have made an example of the leakers.
As someone who vehemently disagree a with damore and is glad he was fired, I'd also prefer it if the leaker was fired, but it seems that I'll never know if that happened.
Are you aware that Google solicited that feedback?
You can furthermore see that naivety in how quickly he ended up accepting offers and olive branches from alt-right personalities. It seemed like he wasn't aware who he ended up 'siding' with.
Even as he knew his opinion was generating controversy he didn't take any steps to admit, control, or deal with it, instead he reveled in it. He knew what he was doing.
This article mentions Damore was diagnosed in his mid-20s with high-functioning autism. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/16/james-dam...
> He does not once, however, use his autism to excuse his actions. He is fiercely resistant to portraying himself as any kind of victim, and says he never informed Google of his autism diagnosis. “I’m not sure you’re expected to,” he says, “or how I would even do that.”
I mentioned it as a point in favor of the "naive" theory. The article also supports it:
> Damore concedes now that he “wasn’t really skilled enough to push back on anything” in some interviews. It’s frustrating, he adds, that he’s now associated with the “alt-right” when he’s “more of a centrist”. He admits he did not look too deeply into Duke’s background when the photos were taken, and asks me not to publish the image of him in a “Goolag” T-shirt with this article. “I can definitely see how it was damaging, but it was a free professional photo shoot and I wasn’t really familiar with politics then,” he says. “I was pretty busy and ignorant.”
> Was his interview with the “alt-right” personality Milo Yiannopoulos an error? “It’s hard to say,” he replies. “I don’t really know what the long-term consequences of any of my actions are.”
"I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership." - James Damore
I don't think the preceding quote is an "opinion they disagree with" as much as it is pseudo-intellectualism covering up outright hate. This is stated as a fact, not cited and not backed up. It asserts that women are not fit to work at Google, and implies that the women he works with are incompetent because of biology. If your coworker asserted that you were biologically inferior at your job, I think you would take drastic measures as well.
>> It asserts that women are not fit to work at Google,
No, it does not. It talks about well-known well-researched differences in distributions of preferences between men and women in general.
>> and implies that the women he works with are incompetent because of biology.
Absolutely does not imply that since it relates to men and women in general, not just Google employees and not even just the tech crowd.
> Men shouldn't have to pick and choose who they feel comfortable working with around the office.
It is just as ridiculous if you make it about race:
> [Black|Asian|White|Latino] people shouldn't have to pick and choose who they feel comfortable working with around the office.
This is the fatal flaw of modern day progressives. They make everything about group identity. To make things worse, they then apply those perspectives asymmetrically.
"ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL, BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS." - George Orwell, Animal Farm
Taking offense does not make one a victim.
Personally, I agree with your statements. I do not see the issue that you see with wanting all people to be comfortable in their workplace. James Damore outright stated that he believes that women are genetically inferior at the job he does. I don't grasp how people miss how destructive that is.
Outright? Certainly not. It requires multiple layers of hostile interpretation to reach 'women are genetically inferior' from what Damore wrote. That's an absolutist, determinist, morally-tinged statement which is nothing like anything he said.
If you think otherwise, please give the quote where Damore outright states women are 'genetically inferior' at anything.
Damore was extremely clear about the difference between "all men have X trait more than women" and "statistically, the prevalence of X trait is higher among men than women (but some women still have a lot of X)". He even included visual aids to help explain these concepts, literally on the first page of the memo.
If your mind integrates the studies Damore cited as stating that women are 'genetically inferior', that's something you need to learn to decouple. We don't have to choose between anti-science denialism and fascistic supremacism, so please don't try to force everyone's opinions into one of those two categories.
> You are personally attacking James Damore, and then just spinning words around to make a point you agree with.
Specifically, this following statement is a gross misrepresentation of the argument he was making, which really was only clear with the bell curve diagrams that most news media companies purposefully omitted:
> he believes that women are genetically inferior at the job he does.
Furthermore, I disagree with the part about either argument being personal. We both attacked the argument, not the person. There was no ad hominem in either my original statement nor your retort.
I vaguely remember a story about someone in HR getting fired because they didn't pull a white male out of the running for a job. (The details are too fuzzy at this point.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16500974
(Even worse, there was no reason to put some of these opinions in the memo.)
But what's more scary is Google's official response to the diversity memo. (For context, Google instituted certain hiring policies to increase diversity, which the "diversity memo" questioned.)
If you have the time, I suggest that you go reread the diversity memo and Google's response. Try to read them without taking sides. (It's hard.)
Note that they did not respond to "we should not assume that it is evidence of discrimination, and that policies designed to engineer an outcome closer to 50/50 are likely creating discrimination"
There are many reasons why women don't go into IT. And whilst you can look at at it holistically it is ultimately a personal decision.
And so if you take that personal decision and instead make it about some gender stereotype e.g. they aren't physically suited then it discourages women from entering IT.
The memo did not claim this. The references to innate differences were only in reference to women's choices. At no point did the author claim they women "aren't physically suited" to IT.
> I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.
He's saying that women lack the ability to work in engineering and leadership because they are biologically different. His argument isn't limited to preference.
And this is ignoring the fact that his supporting data used the Big5 psych method, which has been debunked as not being scientific in identifying biological differences due to it's lexical nature.
Edit: Damore says that women more having extraversion and empathy, which "leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading."
Saying they are having a harder time is saying they lack the ability.
The differences in the distribution suggest that girls are more likely to prefer reading (because they're usually better at it than math) while boys are more like to prefer math (because they're usually better at math than reading). He's talking about how the distribution of ability affects preference. It does not say that girls are worse than boys than math - it actually says the opposite, that girls are slightly better at both math and reading.
You claimed his argument was limited to preference, I am showing you that Damore was talking about preference and ability. Splitting hairs over distribution is a red herring. Nobody here is assuming that Damore is referring to women the individual, but women as a whole.
> Nowhere does he say that women have less ability than men.
Damore does, in several places: [emphasis added]
>Women, on average, have more:
> - Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness. This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading. Note that these are just average differences and there’s overlap between men and women, but this is seen solely as a women’s issue.
> - Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance).This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs.
Note that the data he used here is cherry picked from a 90's study that used the Big5 method, which has since been debunked for use in biological differentiation.
If this was your takeaway, then I did not explain it well enough. Every individual has a distribution of ability. Some are better at math, some are better at sports, some are better at reading, etc. 2/3rds of boys are better at math than they are at reading. 2/3rds of girls are better at reading than they are at math. However, girls are actually better than boys at both reading and math - it's just that they score better at an even bigger margin at reading.
Is it inconceivable to think that the fact that girls are better at reading than math 2/3rds of the time makes girls more likely to prefer reading as compared to math (and vice versa for boys)? That's the point that Damore was making: the distribution in ability affects boys' and girls' preferences. It does not say that the average girl has less ability than the average boy.
If you want to split hairs, you could say that making this argument is sexist because it says girls score better than the boys on average in both reading and in math. But I get the sense that this isn't the angle you're making.
> Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness. This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading. Note that these are just average differences and there’s overlap between men and women, but this is seen solely as a women’s issue.
> - Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance).This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs.
Both of these points have to do with specific parts of the job (salary negotiation, asking for promotion, dealing with stress). These factors exist in all jobs, not just tech. Furthermore he later offers suggestions to try and mitigate this - he brought these things up because he wanted to offer positive changes.
The point remains: Damore did not write that women "aren't physically suited" (~~your words~~) to tech work.
Where exactly did I say that??
> Both of these points have to do with specific parts of the job (salary negotiation, asking for promotion, dealing with stress) not that women are less suited for tech work.
Yes, yes, Damore is saying that women lack the ability to lead due to their extraversion, empathy, and neuroticism (anxiety) inhibiting them, because those are specific parts of the job that require abilities. Also, you're ignoring now that he said both tech and leadership, and you are now focusing on just "tech work". This is more splitting hairs on semantics to apologize for Damore.
>And he later offers suggestions to try and mitigate this.
Of course he does. He cherry picked data to wrongly fit his hypothesis from the start. Naturally he would conclude with his own ideas on how to mitigate a problem that he misused data to create.
But you did make similar statement s: "He's saying that women lack the ability to work in engineering and leadership because they are biologically different." You did claim that damore wrote that women lack ability to work in engineering.
> Yes, yes, Damore is saying that women lack the ability to lead due to their extraversion, empathy, and neuroticism inhibiting them, because those are specific parts of the job that require abilities. This is more splitting hairs on semantics to apologize for Damore.
These are factors that affect all industries. Saying that this is evidence that Damore argued that women are worse at tech than men is not valid. And again, he brought this up in the context of suggesting improvements to try and make tech more welcoming to women.
> Of course he does. He cherry picked data to wrongly fit his hypothesis from the start. Naturally he would conclude with his own ideas on how to mitigate a problem that he misused data to create.
Let me get this straight: somebody does their best to try and investigate why women have a hard time in a certain field, and proposes ways to make this better. And this is a bad thing?
Even more ironic is that Google and other companies actually have used this research to establish practices that are better for women:
> Allow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive. Recent updates to Perf [Google's performance reviews] may be doing this to an extent, but maybe there’s more we can do, especially in our interviews.
So he's saying, "women are more cooperative. We should make policies that help cooperative people thrive." He's not saying that women are worse at tech because they're more cooperative or more neurotic. He's saying that Google should be more welcoming to people with these traits and help them reach their full potential.
- Damore said that underrepresentation of women in tech and leadership is because of their differing preferences and abilities due to biological causation.
- He misrepresents Big5 data to list neuroticism, extraversion, and empathy as biological reasons why women "have a hard time" in leadership. These are not preferences.
- He claims that women have more anxiety, and as such Google should cater to women's anxiety more to help them with tech leadership. That is not "women prefer".
This isn't the memo of someone who says that women just prefer other jobs, this is someone who misused data to try to fit his hypothesis that women's biological differences mean they are not as capable in tech and leadership.
Wrong. Now you're not just putting words in Damore's mouth, you're putting words in mine as well.
What I wrote was, "The memo did not claim this. The references to innate differences were only in reference to women's choices. At no point did the author claim they women "aren't physically suited" to IT."
He offers a variety of explanation as to why women have different preferences such as attraction to things vs. people, and the distribution (but not aggregate difference) in ability. The point remains, though, his claims were limited to women's preferences. He used differences in the distribution of ability to explain why this difference in preference exist, but his claim is exclusively about women's preferences.
If if you do insist on focusing in on the mere use of the word "ability" absent the context, Damore did not write that women are any worse than men.
> - Damore said that underrepresentation of women in tech and leadership is because of their differing preferences and abilities due to biological causation.
No, the distribution of ability affects preference. This comment explains this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20782914
> - He misrepresents Big5 data to list neuroticism, extraversion, and empathy as biological reasons why women "have a hard time" in leadership - i.e. lack some of the ability requisite for the job.
But crucially, he does not say that this make them worse at tech. Quite the opposite, he says that Google should better recognize extroversion expressed as cooperation in performance reviews. This only hampers them insofar as Google is not creating a good environment, and he's asking google to change that environment.
> - He claims that women have more anxiety, and as such Google should cater to women's anxiety more to help them with tech leadership.
Aagain this is not saying that women are worse at tech. Anxiety can be detrimental if the company does not accommodate it, but it is not a barrier to success if tech if the company does. And he is asking Google to be accommodating.
> This isn't the memo of someone who says that women just prefer other jobs, this is someone who misused data to try to fit his hypothesis that women's biological differences mean they are not as capable in tech and leadership.
False. At no point did Damore write that "women's biological differences mean they are not as capable in tech", and it only hampers them in leadership insofar as Google does not appropriately recognize the way women display extroversion (and he subsequently offers suggestions to address this). You're trying to portray calls for Google to make its environment more friendly to women as saying that women are biologically worse at tech. This is absurd. It also makes people adverse to offering any suggestions to improve the experience of women in tech. Have an idea that you think will make things better for women in tech? Well, you better keep it to yourself otherwise you'll be branded a sexist.
The incorrect statements you are making about the memo are characteristic of someone that read the misleading (and at times outright false) media coverage of the memo. People who read the memo without being primed to see it as sexist do not make these errors. Make no mistake. Damore was not fired for the words he actually wrote. Remember his memo was circulated for about a month without causing a storm. It was only after the media's misrepresentation coverage that he was fired.
Can you expand on this please, cite some references or something?
Wikipedia echoes exactly what you claim Damore wrote:
> For example, women consistently report higher Neuroticism, Agreeableness, warmth (an extraversion facet) and openness to feelings, and men often report higher assertiveness (a facet of extraversion) and openness to ideas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Ge...
(And the study cited is from 2001.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Cr...
This peer-reviewed journal article elaborates on it more:
>In other words, the Big Five was developed based on research that used subjective selection of lexical descriptors, and self- and peer assessment of correspondence between (only these) descriptors and observable behavior. And that is what the Big Five represents: a consistent model of how humans reflect individuality using language, no more. There were no considerations of findings in neuroanatomy, neurochemistry, experimental psychology, observations of behavior of people or animals in real situations – none of this was used at the research stage leading to the development of the Big Five. In this sense we can say that the Big Five does not represent the structure of temperament or the structure of biologically based traits, even though lexical perception reflects some elements of it.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3903487/
Basically Damore cherry picked a Big5 study to support his hypothesis that it is biological cause, not bias, being the differentiating factor in gender underrepresentation, but the data doesn't scientifically support that.
There is no mention of "lacking" anything.
Someone can be fantastic at something in particular ways and still be unmotivated to pursue it for various reasons having absolutely nothing to do with particularly a "lack" of ability - and that premise aligns superbly with that sentence and the entire memo.
>This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading.
This is a few steps above "boys and girls have different sex organs" on wikipedia.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/breaking/ct-john-mcenr...
This is the world we live in.
EDIT: added link
Like, it's probably no biggy if people say totally false and indefensible things going the other way. I don't think that's a good sign.
Yeah but why have a discussion group about politics if you can only defend the mainstream points of view?
Because people typically don't discuss politics to be persuaded or to have their mind opened. They do it to circlejerk, flame, and re-inforce their own existing beliefs. Whether they are on the left, or the right.
This led an exec to publicly state that our diversity policies "isn't code for favoring women over men" and that "being an equal opportunity employer is a commitment to following anti- discrimination laws and maintaining a workplace where everyone matters, everyone has a sense of belonging, and everyone is held to the same standards."
This was in stark contrast to our diversity hiring policies which include giving larger bonuses for hiring diverse (women and URM), giving diverse candidates two chances at passing the phone screen instead of one, setting "outcome-based goals" for hitting specific % of diverse tech employees, and even setting up a system of reservations for diverse tech workers (though this last one wasn't established until after the memo).
I guess the exec might not be lying if he is speaking from the point of view that anything less than 50/50 is discrimination and that balancing this out with discrimination in the other direction is how to create an equal hiring process.
Quote from the recent WIRED article on Google culture, easily verifiable but I'm too lazy right now. But that's hardly 'most of the memo was citations of studies'.
Even the Wikipedia links are either to a general definition, or a well-referenced section that cites research papers, not to baseless claims.
Are you referring to James Damore's memo?
ie, the people who can't handle politics and think the worlds constantly on fire so they think they're justified in ignoring social grace and time/place taboos. The internet news machines have generated many thousands of these people.
I feel like they are becoming more popular and giving even less of a shit that other people don't want to be forced to listen to their politics at work or in other forced proximity environments. And then there's the people who judge you for not talking or 'resisting', as if not being politically engaged is equivalent to supporting the 'other side'. Then there's the overly-excited drunken political rants at parties, that's when they really let loose! /rant
"It suffices for an intransigent minority – a certain type of intransigent minorities – to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences. Further, an optical illusion comes with the dominance of the minority: a naive observer would be under the impression that the choices and preferences are those of the majority." [1]
That effect and illusion has really been amplified with Twitter and how the news media uses a handful of those loud voices as though they're the dominant or established opinion.
Combine that with the fact that the most intolerant don't budge, while the majority is flexible.
1) https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
That is likely correct but it doesn't change the fact that as an organization grows the chance to have such people in their midst grows and it's enough to have a few of these that culture shift will be required to deal with it.
That is, you can't really fire someone for "starting threads about politics at work"[1] until you come up with a rule that bars such discussions.
[1] Which of course will be portrayed by those fired as "silencing <social issue they care about>" but having published rules enforced equally usually should provide sufficient protection in court against such claims.
I don't mean that seriously, but it does serve a point. How can you tell if people are just ranting "because of the internet" and not because they are suffering and think your political inaction is contributing to their pains?
Because of your comment I will try to be more cautious about people complaining as they might just be attention grabbers but it's also dangerous to fully ignore them because it makes us uncomfortable.
We should be grateful people rant to one another, because it means we still believe we can help ourselves. If this was a dictatorship we were living in there would be no point in complaining to the neighbours.
From nasa.gov:
> As of August 16, 2019, an analysis of NASA satellite data indicated that total fire activity across the Amazon basin this year has been close to the average in comparison to the past 15 years.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/145464/fires-in-bra...
Things are not as bad as you think they are, or as bad as crappy internet news sites want you to think they are.
And the internet has helped spread information, some of these issues may have been captured by Nat Geo in the 40s but others will have been missed. A status quo progression may be championed as an issue not because everyone previously accepted it but because no one was previously aware of it.
"As of August 16, 2019, an analysis of NASA satellite data indicated that total fire activity across the Amazon basin this year has been close to the average in comparison to the past 15 years. (The Amazon spreads across Brazil, Peru, Colombia, and parts of other countries.) Though activity appears to be above average in the states of Amazonas and Rondônia, it has so far appeared below average in Mato Grosso and Pará, according to estimates"
A status quo isn't inherently bad, and this one looks like it's been consistent for many years.
I'm not in a position to evaluate how dire this specific instance is with any sort of confidence in my findings.
Also, there is a difference between specific calls to action and gripes that someone ought to do something. Some complaints are more useful than others. It seems possible to tell the difference?
Political discussions are an important component of Internet addiction and we shouldn't be naive about the bad effects of large amounts of low quality conversation in distracting us from more important stuff.
In many cases, it's not the group which is allegedly suffering that is doing the alledging, but rather elites who are far removed from that group, and the "alledging" takes the form of straw men, motte/bailey fallacies, and definitions that are ultimately circular. Often, we _are_ in the groups that are allegedly suffering or surrounded by those group, and there are no clear signs that we/they are suffering as described (and indeed, the descriptions are often incoherent).
So yeah, bonafide suffering is pretty easy to spot, as is opportunistic "compassion".
The former can be eye opening and it can provide the necessary emotional push to get something rolling. The latter is meant to shut others down and suppress opinions - it's a playground for sociopaths thriving on ad hominem aggression.
If I'm working on a team that is rolling out a new Google drive feature, I really don't need to hear you talk about why drinking straws are a phallic symbol and used by the patriarchy to keep woman down.
We have work to do.
If you think any discussion of politics is that infantile, I don't think there's anything I can do or say to convince you otherwise, but for everyone else, just recognize that this example is ridiculous. And real, actual, conversations about political topics aren't anywhere near as asenine. They're about important things, that often are relevant to work: privacy, discrimination (inentional and non-, by both people and machines), and literal actual government policy that affects google and googlers: immigration, taxes, etc.
I'm not sure how you could avoid those topics and still be an effective employee, or in some cases still be an employee at all.
Yes, the workplace _should_ be serene and work _should_ proceed in harmony.
But there are other things that aren't proceeding the way people think _should_ be happening, which they deem to be far more important.
Which is why you're seeing more people willing to disrupt the workplace, which they consider a minor obligation relative to the bigger picture.
People wouldn't take their fight to these environments if democracy was working, because they'd have faith in the due processes of government. But once they start thinking things aren't working, they'll go to their next seats of power. In this case it's the workplace where they can influence their coworkers and the policy of a big tech corporation.
These people are not a majority so democracy isn't fully broken yet, but the cracks are showing.
This is just a perfect example of how polarised politics is today. Society just needs to calm down and evaluate itself instead of bickering over nonsense.
Time and a place.
Politics has no nuance or filter anymore. It's all the time on full blast, forever. I hate it.
Work isn't one of them, unless, it's directly related to the work being done.
>Plus it hurts the value of the equity portion of your compensation, so it a way, it's theft too.
I doubt it. The culture has probably done more positive than negative for company value. And even if it hasn't, short-term shareholder value definitely isn't the best measure of long-term success. Calling it "theft" is a big stretch.
To give a fairly tame example. Lets say someone googles "Can crystal healing cure cancer". Do you put a box saying no? Do you put put a box saying "according to authority it does not". If you defer to authority to do you defer to different one in different countries? What if they disagree? Maybe we need a list of FUBAR countries?
In fact, many people do not want to try and have others convince them of their political leanings.
Trying to convince other people of MY political leaning goes against one of the central political leaning that I have: Everyone should have freedom to believe in whatever they want to believe in. I also find it annoying when other people try to shove their believe down my throat.
What? Says who?
They do not collect anything even remotely close to "all the worlds information".
> who says their goal is to impose their opinion on it
Their goal is to make money. Whether they impose their opinion on the index is a business decision.
> Isn't neutrality in indexing the assumption?
Why would it be? What if the people that run google have a fundamental disagreement with certain political ideas and have a desire not to index those things?
Yes and no. Ranking by definition means not being neutral, it's just that society has decided that it's acceptable to rank spam lower than other content. Neutrality looks a lot like bias from the perspective of spammers.
When you're dealing with more complex signals at scale there are so many second and third order effects that are hard or impossible to predict.
For example, the conservative bias everyone's talking about doesn't seem to me to be literal bias against the right, but bias in favour of mainstream news sources which are overwhelmingly left-wing.
I'm sure there are many issues in Search like the one I just described, and being able to have these conversations is what makes it possible for Googlers to spot these issues, decide if it's even an issue and fix it. If you ban a certain type of conversation, you'll change how people think about a potential issue.
While it is possible for a contract specifying 8 hours of work without a single thought other than work (and any legally mandated breaks) in exchange for the given salary and benefits, I've never seen any organization that actually operated using such contracts.
Until the innoculative meme of having an intuitive understanding of sampling (both of individual incidents and individual aspects of a thing) spreads throughout a decent portion of the populatiob, this awful situation will continue.
So yes, you really should taboo political arguments if you don't want to drive away people with independent views.
Politics, religion etc. divides people.
It doesn't matter what the philosophically correct definition of politics is--what matters is reducing HR complaints, lawsuits, and negative headlines.
In reality, political debating at workplace quickly becomes just ugly.
And for companies like Google it's also costly, because media adore leaked scandals in big corporations.
I don't think it really has to. I debate politics with people at work enough. I won't get into specifics too much but it's not uncommon to meet someone who has a controversial opinion. You talk with someone, find out why they believe what they believe, and then question a few things (mostly asking why they believe they believe - what lead them to their beliefs). It doesn't have to get heated - it can be a boring lecture to one another about why you believe what you believe. It only gets ugly when you do things that won't lead to change like: "No - you're dumb! You should think what I think!" Which I don't think people who are emotionally and socially competent would do that often...
That said - I don't think of people at Google (or other big companies) as being particularly emotionally or socially competent because they don't hire and train for that.
However, a lot of the commentary here has been around in-person interactions and not on an online forum.
For example the issue of who controls the three different areas of “Kashmir” should not be settled by the opinions of college graduates who have little exposure to international politics and policy and or history.
Curating information in such a manner is, ironically, marginalizing the groups who's views are being suppressed. Information should flow freely for people to make their own decisions. This is a dangerous amount of power for an increasingly biased private entity, particularly given certain choice quotes in this article and others regarding googlers' views on the current presidency.
Or, to reverse the situation: consider how you'd feel about things if you came into a workplace where everyone was telling jokes that only make sense if you know Chinese culture, and then if you mentioned that you felt left out, told you to stop complaining because you were only trying to 'sow discord'.
No, you defaulted to responding to the very idea of a possible cultural clash as something "absurd" and "trying to sow discord". Again, more politics: that kind of response is regularly witnessed in status-quo-reinforcing political actions.
Math is not political.
Problem #1: All models are invalid, some are useful. You need to stop ignorant actors who don’t understand that 3 is not a valid approximation of Pi, while simultaneously stopping pedants who want to everything to be accurate in ways that are not compatible with the IEEE standard for float.
Problem #2: There are lies, damned lies and statistics. People who want to push $NOT_YOUR_VIEWPOINT will cite more studies than you have time to evaluate to prove you wrong.
With math in particular, the way statistics are used to represent and draw conclusions from data can be highly political, especially when dealing with a very unpopular study and the level of criticism it receives compared to a popular study.
If you can concede that some things are less political than others, then how difficult is it to assume that "No political conversations" is a shorthand for "conversations about things which are not highly political"?
I recommend reading "Descartes Dream."
That's likely true.
> that also means that Math cannot be political.
That doesn't follow from the first assumption.
The context here is that someone is claiming math is a counterexample to "everything being political" unfortunately I don't think there is a counterexample.
> which is what the book is about
Many of the chapters are about this. There is a chapter about mathematical rhetoric and how math is used to persuade people.
I would add that mathematical abstractions represent a particular philosophy of viewing the world. For example greek geometry is heavily biased by Platonism.
Just look at the phrase you used: "law of nature". Is nature governed by "laws"? This is certainly a position in an argument about how the world works.
In other words, math doesn't exist in a vacuum.
https://pbfcomics.com/comics/skub/
http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3947
It's not that we don't care. It's just that it's not the reason we spend 8+ hours/day together.
I would hate for dissenting voices within google to be silenced and everyone to simply follow orders from the top regarding how they make search ranking decisions. Especially considering the recent whistle-blowers from within google alleging political bias in google search results. Surprisingly, none of which seemed to make any waves here on HN.
> creating a team of moderators to monitor conversations on company chat boards
And even externally the only thing that was verboten was the uk.telecom hierarchy - this was more to not encourage some of the internet kooks.
Bringing anything else into the workplace is an unnecessary distraction from both the employee’s and employer’s standpoint. I go to work to have money deposited into my account twice a month and go home to spend time with my family and friends. The more time I spend at work spending energy not doing work either I will be less effective or spend more time away from family/friends/hobbies to be effective at work.
Seems completely reasonable for an employer to moderate internal message boards, of all entities.
i'm paid to be professional and do my job. there's nothing to do with being male or white.
What are you complaining about? Clearly you don't mind racism and sexism.
If one agrees with Aristotle in that: "Man is by nature a political animal," the cultural acceptance of no politics at work seems almost nefarious. Most of us spend more time at work than perhaps any other activity, barring sleep.
One could perhaps even hypothesize that without some political discussion at work, people exclusively talk with friends who share their political opinions, causing larger lateralization of political thought.
>organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law
Maybe this is the inevitable outcome of trying to make work a social hub. It's great to say that we should be able to discuss anything with anyone, but the reality is that we're not all perfectly mature people and we can't handle it.
I think they'll have a really hard time totally stopping it though. Internally it's really like a college atmosphere, at least in terms of exchanging ideas via their intranet. I was amazed that it was so open in that way, and I hope they find a way to keep that culture alive.
On the other hand, it was hard to work with people that help views that I considered racist or nearly so. No easy solution here.
Was it a minority of people who had views that were hard to read or the majority? I was under the impression that most people at Google were not supportive of his acquittal.
If discussions are leading to credible allegations that a company was promoting candidates using their marketing resources in violation of campaign finance laws, it would be easy to understand why they might want to get those discussions offline.
I presume your talking about one of the two leaks via veritas. Those don't say what you claim they do. I also expect your assumptions about legal threats are wrong. But such claims are easy to make sans evidence, and they do feel good.
That's my thought. It sounds that the discussions were always inflamed and lively. But why the change now, right after all that stuff came out? I suspect they are afraid of more leakers, and are afraid of lawsuits which would trigger discovery and then all the internal politics will get dump out.
Fixed that for you. No one is the sole arbiter of what is "important", so I've usually found just not discussing to be the best solution at work.
I never had the need to discuss politics at work. Just don't do it, why open that can of worms. Absolutely no need to do so. One time a coworker asked me and I said "I don't discuss politics at work". Be professional, people.
Now you've gone and run the risk of creating a hostile working environment. Why people feel this is a sane mode of being is beyond me.
These days, even that is seen as taking a side. People get suspicious when you don't join in with the group political affirmations, and start suspecting you to be a secret "other." That's how toxic it's become.
I'm having a hard time finding politics in: "Hey $COWORKER, how's that REST endpoint coming along?"
I think most Americans underestimate the extent to which most Chinese are apolitical and pragmatic. Chinese culture doesn't have the tradition of civic engagement and vigorous debate that Anglo-American culture does, and skews more towards Exit than Voice. A typical Chinese response to a looming civil war is more akin to "Well shit. Better emigrate (if I can) or pay off the right soldiers and officials (if I can't) so this doesn't harm my family" than to demonstrate in the streets and call for the ouster of the leaders in question. This is a double-edged sword: it's how the CCP maintains social controls that would be unacceptable violations of civil liberties in Western democracies, it's also behind the "model minority" image of Asian-Americans, but it also means that you don't get a lot of disruptive political talk in groups with Asian immigrants.
American-Born Confused Desi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American-Born_Confused_Desi
https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/australasia/article/3020639/c...
How many people live in mainland China? 1.3B. How many people live in Hong Kong? 7.4M. How many overseas Chinese are there? 50M. How many overseas Hongkongers? About 1.5M.
You can bet that if there is any one such incident happening in the globe, the press will seize on it, because it fits the current media narrative and gets clicks. By the numbers, though, you're looking at 1 in a million.
> Chinese nationals inside Google have at times clashed with its techno-libertarian culture. One infamous example, detailed in a book by the former head of Google’s “people operations,” comes from 2008, when the company cafeteria offered employees a “Free Tibet Goji-Chocolate Creme Pie.” This offended a Chinese national at the company, who sent an email to Chief Executive Larry Page. The chef was immediately suspended — then, after a companywide email thread that at the time was the longest in Google history, reinstated. An engineer who was at Google at the time told me the whole controversy was “ridiculous.”
But Hyper-patriotic Chinese employees dealing with US ideology towards China certainly would change things.
Its not so different than vocally disagreeing with Israel’s “foreign” policy and expecting to still remain employed anywhere. Not gonna happen!
You have to recognize who the masters are or who they are beholden to.
But I expect the China offices are pretty well firewalled off for security reasons.
[1] https://careers.google.com/locations/
I could be wrong but this is my understanding.
The thing is though, professional work environments (where there are typically norms around never discussing politics) are the way they are for a reason. Just like Bitcoiners are rediscovering why finance regulations exist, Google is rediscovering why the cool, relaxed workplace ends up causing more problems than it solves.
The reason is the same as for not talking about salary at work: To prevent workers from developing class consciousness.
We don't talk about politics or religion at work for the same reason that we use money instead of barter.
If we only used barter we could only trade when we could find matching goods/services between trading partners, by using money instead we avoid the matching.
If you discuss politics at work you risk a situation where some people cannot work together because of incompatible views which are essentially irrelevant to the work being performed.
The work being performed is generally completely irrelevant compared to politics so it has to take a backseat. The capitalist will just have to deal with the fact that their workers are not mindless unpolitical drones.
And if someone has a weaker position in the workforce it may not be good for their financial welfare: No one has to just deal with someone they can fire. How much is political discourse improved by communication in the context of that kind of asymmetry?
Edit: very high, it seems https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Apinboard%20PAC
https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1120320958382755840
@Pinboard has collected a bunch of these.
https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Apinboard%20PAC
The amounts are not as important as the fact that Google's name is attached to them. But I agree with you that the overall figure is tiny, which makes it more mysterious why Google continues to make these donations, which amount to legalized bribery.
IBM and Apple do fine without a corporate PAC. Microsoft suspended its own PAC after strong internal pressure from employees over donations to some of the same terrible people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_in_the_United...
Google is usually maxing the donations it's allowed.
My first reaction (to the general topic) was, "Well, of course they had to put a stop to that. And international message forums with many participants? What a recipe for disaster."
But then I had to be honest with myself: I'm at work at least 45 hours a week (not at Google, but in tech). My commute time is 45 minutes each way. So out of 11-12 hours of not-me-time, you want me to completely keep my trap shut? That's a hard ask.
Here's an example. Earlier this week, I'm on my way to the subway and I see a fight, and I also see piss on two sets of seats on both sides of the subway car. Then I'm at work and my colleague, unprompted and as I come in, remarks how many more heroin-addled people there are in Midtown, Manhattan than he's ever seen. I then blurt out a rant about the Mayor, criminal justice policies I consider wrong (such as the push to lower incarceration without consequence), and a few other things that were aggressively opinionated and political, in an open office environment. Shortly thereafter I somewhat regretted it (but I never expected any consequences).
We're only human.
It just needs to be channeled. Keep it to your local work friends, or at the bar, or whatever that ISN'T on a message board.
For example, at Google, your manager is one person whose opinions are important, but things like promotions also depend heavily on peer review and your general reputation.
It must be suffocating being surrounded with political talks at work when one is trying to do their job well.
Sort of like reading Hacker News.
I wonder if memegen is shut down yet?
It can lead to this:
https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/27/18114285/google-employee...
or this:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-google-pentagon/...
How is a company expected to make a buck if they have to suffer ethical considerations? The salaried workthings should just do what they're told...
I can't be the only one who sees this as a significant crackdown on employee freedoms and an attempt to silence dissent.
What's it do, first time Ive heard of that
To those of you who disagree; if you want to "make a difference" take a cue from Gandhi, Mandela, Martin Luther king Jr. etc. Mahama Gandhi didn't work for the East India company while simultaneously fighting for freedom.
If you are serious about it put your money where your mouth is and stop being empty vessels.
LOL!
I worked at Google for about two years as a "TVC" (a programmer in a cubical, not a "real" Googler) and it was like being kidnapped by aliens, after I left that's how it felt: Like I was one of those people who had just been returned to Earth.
One thing that doesn't get talked about in re: Google and values: there's an entire "underclass" of employees that are of definite inferior status. The janitors, re-stockers of cafes, and maintenance people, etc. They wear special uniforms, and are trained not to fraternize with the "real" Googlers. They don't get to ride the fancy buses to and from work.
They are also of a different racial mix. Googlers are generally white or Asian but the staff are generally Hispanic. So there's politics, and then there's politics...
Since these companies are required to be race-blind when hiring, they are going to be a reflection of their local job markets.
To elaborate the examples/options:
1) Become a lawyer -- Real change can be enacted through legislation and litigation. Knowing how the law works is power in this context.
2) Be involved in politics -- Again, real change can be enacted through legislation. This doesn't just mean running for office. One of my ex-girlfriends' step-fathers worked at a juvenile halfway house, and he regularly acted as an unpaid lobbyist. I have another friend who has also acted as an unpaid lobbyist for environmental causes. Anyone can do it. It's just a matter of being articulate, preparing, and having the time. (Also, everyone knows that lots of paid lobbyists are basically like mercenaries, so if your sincerity comes through and you know your stuff, there will be people open to your alternative take.)
3) Public speaking and writing -- All of the above did that.
Also, with regards to 2 and 3, do this in the larger community, outside of your workplace. This makes your activism a pull for people, instead of a push. Just imagine if people of _political_party_you_dont_like_ started to get involved in committees at your job and started to foist their particular beliefs on you there in the form of policies. It's not a big stretch to see how that could be interpreted as a subtle form of political attack, through the sensitive area of one's livelihood. It's easy to see how that can close minds, where otherwise there might have been a chance to convince, instead of coerce.
This brings me to number 4:
4) Convince. Don't coerce. -- In particular, in the startup community, we should know that getting people to pull can work much better than a push, which can even elicit a backlash.
But I'm pretty certain most, if not all, African Americans who worked for racists were fired if they found out that they were part of the civil rights movement.
As Jordan Peterson says, clean up your room before you go fixing the world. Go up from Shoreline towards 101 and see the number of homeless people; what exactly are these enlightened Googlers doing for them other than ignoring them and driving away with their expensive Maserati's, Tesla's etc. and complaining about how expensive it is to live in the bay area. How about NIMBY laws? The list goes on and on..
Considering the Google social-justice crowd is playing the moral purity game, I would assume they would strive for purity.
Given that the East India Company was dissolved when he was 5, this would've been difficult.[1][2]
He did however work in the ambulance corps for the British Army in the Boer War. And advocated for cooperation with the British government in WW1 right up until the Jalianwala Bagh massacre.[3]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi#Champaran_and_K...
Oh. So they don't care about bullying or alienating people with unpopular political views, they're upset that employees are questioning their material support of antidemocratic governments. For a second I thought they were actually making something close to a good ethical choice here, I see I was mistaken.
- religion
- politics
- sex
still holds true, regardless of how progressive the workplace.
Google's culture was predicated on hiring intelligent, emotionally-continent adults. Free discussion of politics wasn't banned during my time there because everyone was capable of understanding precisely the opposite of what you're describing: that differing views on the world exist and are attributable to more than just whether someone is a good or bad person.
When you scale to a hundred thousand employees, you can't keep your bar that high, and you have to start letting in people who more closely resemble the average narrow-minded, maximalizing dumbass. For a little while that meant the company needed to bow to the more culturally-powerful regressive left (esp when things leaked, for PR reasons), but as the culture war heats up, the only winning move for a company with a (classical) liberal founding culture is to discourage political engagement at all.
I would never ever share any views that are non-liberal because when I've seen anyone else do it it didn't go well for them at all. And I'm not at work to change people's political views so there's no reason to take the risk.
I don't think this is a new shift at all. I think it's typical when you have smart but insecure people which is most software engineers.
This sounds an awful lot like nostalgic pining for the good old days, but there was a time not too long ago that daring to hold an opinion that others around you disagreed with wasn't an existential threat to your career. Things shifted really hard, really fast.
Reminds me of https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/resource/the-power-of-th...
> I think it's typical when you have smart but insecure people which is most software engineers.
The distribution of "techies" has changed dramatically as everyone else in the world discovered how much money was in it, but this couldn't be further from the truth as far as classic tech culture goes. Perhaps they were "smart but insecure", but it manifested as a hyperindividualist, chaotic marketplace of ideas culture, precisely because you could be fairly confident that the people you were talking with were intelligent enough to handle disagreement without thinking of everyone as heretics, infidels, or faithful to the dogma.
It's the mainstreaming of tech, and the influx of people more in thrall to social conformity over independent thought that's tempered tech culture's famously anarchic tendencies. (I know this is a little reductive but I don't want to write an essay in a single comment. If you have a particular complaint about the way I phrased this, I'd be happy to clarify).
I should note that, to the extent that I'm focusing on the left's abandonment of liberalism, it's because I am and always have been a left-liberal, and most of my milieu has been as well. I hope it's not controversial that the right is abandoning liberalism too: I just don't have exposure to spaces where they're culturally powerful enough to illiberally enforce their dominance.
The actual interview was much less whiteboarding and more explaining your code to make sure you actually wrote it. It felt like a more classical interview where they aren't trying to see if you are full of BS because they already had an actual work sample that was representative of an actual type of problem likely to be experienced on the job.
Additionally, emotionality being cast in a disparaging light is another tactic used by the right to paint people left of themselves as "hysterical" and therefore wrong, which is logically fallacious. You can both be emotional and correct.
Google's culture always was, and always has been to hire people to generate profit, as all for profit businesses (and I'm not assigning a moral judgement on profit, profit is fine). Having a collegiate and ostensibly intelligent atmosphere was for hiring PR.
More people have more access to more information and unfortunately a lot of that information is cherry picked and provides confirmation bias. Kids these days haven't gotten dumber at Google, technology has changed, and the political discourse has changed.
The person who commented has demonstrated himself to be logically fallacious, ill tempered and steeped in culturally right talking points, and this is the same person saying that Googlers these days are less intelligent and hysterical.
Google is a company that provides gyms, cooking classes, non-work discussion forums, extensive cafeteria service, massages and so on and so on to make sure employees are living within the company as much as possible.
But discussions on such random forums don't reflect company practice just as the gyms don't exist to make every employee a professional marathon runner in Team Google.
Since the forums became quite the distraction, there are more rules about them now. I'd fully expect gyms to be limited or shut down if they had adverse effects on the workplace, too.
(Disclosure: I work at Google, but the above is my very own, personal, slightly cynical take on the company)
I would argue these perks exist because they are what top tech workers can command in the market, not because of some nefarious purpose of wanting people to work longer hours.
Sort of like how MLB players have all kinds of nice perks written into their bargaining agreement like always flying first class, etc.
1) The people who "just want to do their work". While they might care about the ramifications of what they're doing they don't think about it actively while working on it
2) The people who care A LOT about their ethics and try to respect them in whatever they do
I guess both sides are important and the way Google phrased these new rules doesn't seem to exclude either side but "banning politics at work" surely isn't good for type #2 and, by extension, the company at large.
If it's relevant to the work you're doing, then politics is fine. If's not, keep it to yourself.
One recalls the transcript from the all-hands meeting after the 2016 election where Sergey Brin said “Most people here are pretty upset and pretty sad, “I find this election deeply offensive, and I know many of you do too. It’s a stressful time, and it conflicts with many of our values. I think it’s a good time to reflect on that. ... So many people apparently don’t share the values that we have.” and in doing so put a target on the back of every centrist and conservative at Google.
(He said, posting from work.)
And the difference is my employer doesn't host Hacker News. I'm posting on my own recognizance.
Why do googlers engage in this at work? They don't feel their political conversations deserve a wider audience? Or do they feel the wider audience does not deserve their political conversations ?
Political discussion quickly turn toxic. Nobody is convinced of anything, and career harm is a definite possibility.
This is a great, common-sense move. Kudos to Google.
Does this mean you and I cannot work together towards shared goals? I don't believe it does! We can each hold very strong and opposing views on some things, but if we both agree that e.g. we want our rivers to be cleaner, why shouldn't we work together on a river cleanup?
Forcing divisive discussions in every context makes collaboration on those goals you do share difficult or impossible. There are very good reasons to compartmentalize political/religious feelings (and the two don't seem that different these days).
In one of the companies I have worked, I participated in exactly the discussion you mentioned, on many occasions, and no discord was created. All involved remained friendly and effective co-workers.
To my knowledge, this freedom of discussion was widespread.
However when a person's point of view is objectively fallacious (Evangelical Christians, national socialists) and advocates doing harm or passing fallacious moral judgement of a class of people (Heathens, hedonists, homosexuals, jews) and that class of people includes you I do not believe you should ever be expected to tolerate or abstain from challenging that point of view.
If an individual is advocating harm to others and can't withstand scrutiny of their agenda then that's their problem. I don't see this any differently than suggesting you should avoid challenging sexual harassment or physical abuse in the place of work in order to minimize friction. Certain "points of view" should encounter friction at all times and from all sides, because they are reprehensible.
I feel like part of the partisan leak into the workplace might be due to the lack of responsible governance that most Americans are feeling right now - since the entities responsible for fixing the big problems are out to lunch everyone is feeling a need to try and help solve those problems themselves.
I fully agree that the American consumerist lifestyle has run its course, and has done tremendous damage to the planet. However, those who yell the most loudly about it should also be the ones to quit it first. Go live on a self-sustaining farm in Montana and show the rest of us how it's done. Until then, stop disrupting the office: people are trying to work in order to make ends meet.
I disagree, that's of the same vein of reductive arguments that try to shame rich people who want higher taxes into paying higher taxes voluntarily - for these big problems we actually need to act together or there will always be a more efficient way to pursue wealth by over-exploiting the resources other people are leaving on the table to preserve.
Personal lifestyle choices, on the other hand, are called that for a good reason: each person can make that choice for themselves. There's a liberal echo chamber in which the choice of one person, along with the right amount of advocacy and education, can be greatly amplified leading to a critical mass of people making a similar choice. Imagine an emergent group that is just like hipsters, but focused on environmentalism and sustainable living instead of rushing to tightly pack themselves into increasingly sparse and really expensive apartments in Brooklyn. Imagine communes springing up in agriculturally productive regions, helped along by technology and innovative thinking, operating fully on renewable energy, and doing brisk business selling food. Make this model repeatable by someone without extensive education, and you have yourself real change.
Google employs plenty of people who have the right ideology, drive, and technical skills to make this happen. Instead all they do is work for a giant advertising and surveillance firm.
The Internet gave everyone a voice. If "everyone" includes only those who are forcibly compacted into big cities, I think this should be made clear to the rest of us.
Lastly, living on a farm does not remove a person's ability to vote.
There are plenty of examples of people doing this. It hasn't made a lick of difference. No one listens to a lonely voice out in the middle of nowhere.
Maybe people work at "cushy" jobs so they can make money and donate it. Or influence their company to do the right thing, rather than the profitable thing. These things really do make a difference. For example, Google has been carbon-neutral since 2007.[1] Surely that has been influential for other companies.
1. https://www.wired.com/story/how-google-keeps-power-hungry-op...
Maybe it is. I know know. That said, what I haven't heard is any good coming out of it.
Food is like CS Lewis said about smoking a pipe: It gives a wise man time to think and a fool something to put in his mouth.
What that means is that people get to spend time thinking before they respond and that makes a big difference. When I did a contract in Denmark we used to discuss all kinds of politics -- immigration, cultural differences, which parties were insane, etc but always over food. And it meant we could discuss and disagree without feelings getting hurt.
it isn't that tea time is the place for political battles. it's that when bombs are falling, there is little else which feels worth discussing.
People get into arguments and fights over football, for heaven's sake. Should we ban that, too?
I and my friends regularly discuss politics (on Discord, of all places) and we all have different viewpoints- everything from classical liberal to Bernie Sanders-socialist to conservative to libertarian and we all manage to get along- it's hard sometimes, and there are heated discussions, but we all leave having a good time, and, more importantly, we've learned something.
The way I see it, the problem here is that as political polarization increases, the need for frank discussion without hating people afterwards only increases, and the tolerance for it only goes down. If we want to recover even a little bit from the edge, stuff like Google's "no discussing politics" policy needs to be stopped, and replaced with "discuss politics politely or not at all" instead.
Where the limit goes varies. Personally I hate children and don't have them, so concentration camps for children are not the breaking point for me. For many others it may be.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Suppose China gets really ballsy and invades Taiwan, or even Australia. What then? You still going to virtue signal about leftist bullshit or will you help defend the free world?
An important question, I think. It would seem some think they should, and some probably think they should do both.
Brings to mind the attitude of "shutup and play ball" when sports athletes try to use their platforms for some aspect of social change or another.
An attitude I find personally disheartening, but I'll stop there because these discussions never end well.
But even then there's a difference; NFL players aren't protesting the actions of the NFL. If Google employees were using their position to push some agenda the company did not agree with and had nothing to do with then I'd agree.
It's certainly within Google's rights to take a "shut up and work" position, but I don't imagine it will work out well for them in the long run.
Oh yes, they absolutely are.
Miami Dolphin's player Kenny Stills directly protested his team owner's involvement and affiliation with a charity donating funds to the Trump administration.
This seems to have had some result: https://www.miamiherald.com/sports/spt-columns-blogs/barry-j...
Oakland Raider's player Antonio Brown is directly protesting recent changes to the NFL's helmet guideline policies.
https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/antonio-brown-reacts-afte...
Seattle Seahawks player Earl Thomas, in addition to protesting criminal justice inequalities, directly protested his team and how the league was, at the time, addressing and handling player safety, right before he himself got injured and gave his coach the finger while being carted off the field. He has since been traded.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/oct/01/earl-thomas-mi...
Players are absolutely protesting the actions of the NFL in some degree or another. To say otherwise is, I'm sorry, to be ignorant of the issues.
Well, yeah... of course there are instances of that. None of those are examples represent "social change". When you talk about protests in the NFL in the context of this thread, anyone who doesn't live under a rock is going to think of taking a knee during the anthem.
C'mon, helmet disputes? In what way is that relevant to your quote here?
>Brings to mind the attitude of "shutup and play ball" when sports athletes try to use their platforms for some aspect of social change or another.
Are you arguing just to argue?
I don't know what to tell you, then, if you really don't think two players putting their careers on the line, 1 by directly challenging and publicly calling out the organization that pays his salary for their relationship to the sitting President isn't political.
You claimed players weren't protesting the actions of the NFL.
I gave you three examples of it. Two of them squarely political, one over connections to the president, the other over criminal justice reform.
Please stop moving the goalposts.
None of those are examples represent "social change".
I'd argue the recent attention the league has been placing on player safety and the conversations emerging about brain injuries in sports represents a pretty important social change.
Are you arguing just to argue?
No and I'd appreciate a better characterization of my viewpoints on the topic, than a reductionist accusation of arguing for sport simply in the presence of your apparent disagreement. We can disagree how valuable these topics are to a larger political dynamic, but I'm not going to engage if this is how you choose to label my opposing viewpoint.
We're talking about speaking out on political/social issues at work.
My position is that I'm fine with it (and I think Google should support it to some extent) assuming that it is relevant to the actions of the employer or working conditions.
You bring up the NFL. The exact quote is
>Brings to mind the attitude of "shutup and play ball" when sports athletes try to use their platforms for some aspect of social change or another.
Obviously people are going to assume you're talking about what began with Colin Kaepernick taking a knee during the anthem.
I point out how that is different because it does not directly relate to the NFL.
You then bring up three examples of 'protests' (because they're not even protests, they're internal disputes):
>Kenny Stills and Trump donations
Agreed, this is relevant.
>Antonio Brown and helmet guideline policies.
We're talking about helmets now and this is somehow a "social issue" (It's not. Really, it's not.)
>Seattle Seahawks player Michael Bennett, in addition to protesting criminal justice inequalities, directly protested his team and how the league was, at the time, addressing and handling player safety
Those two things have nothing to do with each other. One is relevant, one is not.
Honestly at this point I think you're either confused or a troll.
Good day.
I didn't take anything out of context. The entire reply was
>So Google employees are supposed to just shut up or leave?
>An important question, I think. It would seem some think they should, and some probably think they should do both.
>Brings to mind the attitude of "shutup and play ball" when sports athletes try to use their platforms for some aspect of social change or another.
>An attitude I find personally disheartening, but I'll stop there because these discussions never end well.
That changes exactly... nothing. You're impossible to talk to. The funny thing is, I don't even think we fundamentally disagree on anything material here.
The bit you had about your prediction of how "this wouldn't end well" is a "prophecy" as you put it, but one of the self fulfilling types. Have a good one.
1. use designated/official channels to report such issues (ex. talk to their manager or their HR representative or even bring it up at TGIF)
2. if #1 fails they have a choice: continue working or walk away. Nobody is forcing them to work for a company that doesn't listen to them for issues they deeply care about (presumably)
A company is not a democracy. There should of course be plenty of channels to get feedback up the chain but the decision is ultimately that of those hired to make such decisions, not of software engineers hired to do something else entirely.
The problem is that discussing politics at any time in your workplace to people that have opposite views and/or don't want to discuss politics at that time is counterproductive.
Whether or not people enter those conversations with the intent on solving problems and actually discussing in earnest is where things get weird, admittedly.
But seriously, I know a few roles have immense influence over peoples lives, but most of us just try to efficiently plumb data we don't see between black boxes we don't understand.
I work on one of the edges of those engineering efforts. On one side I see first hand how detached engineers at Google are from the things they build and on the other I see people's lives being defined by using those products / services. That impact is real and I think it's at a level that very few googlers respect because they're not lucky enough to be on an outside edge like me.
They may have had to make the restrictions overly broad to avoid tripping over some labor organization laws.
Those are indeed important. Fundamentally so. This is also why sociopaths and scoundrels will try to wrap themselves in those flags to further their own ends.
https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
Also, many of the taboo topics are very efficient in calling forth human group instincts and group-think behaviors. This makes the aggregate less intelligent and more prone to being led to concerted action. That is also precisely why scoundrels and sociopaths seek to be the ones out in front, waving the banners.
This is not to say that all such leaders are sociopaths. Just that everyone should be aware that there are incentives which attract them. This is also why, in traditional culture, leaders can be held to high standards.
the simple matter is those subjects are not likely the issue at hand but instead of politically sensitive issues. worse when one side is more than willing to declare opposition to any position as racist or bigoted because their own presumptuous moral superiority there is no room for intelligent discourse
What's more important to life than family and friends? Do you talk about them at length at work?
Just because something is of monumental importance to the society/world, doesn't mean you need to talk about it all the time, especially at work.
Work is not meant as a substitution of life, it can be incredibly fulfilling but it's still work.
You mean I could get my work done and not have to feign interest when people blather on about their family and friends? One soul, coming up.
Talk, when you have no ability to act, is just arguing and helps no one.
What's more worth talk about? Things you can actually act upon.
This is not a new tension.
I think this can be quite difficult to do just because of the political views involved. For example, how should a gay man respect a colleague who honestly thinks that homosexuality should be punished with death. In such a case, I would say that even asking the first individual to tolerate, much less respect, the second is itself a form of disrespect.
Now, that is a pretty extreme view for today's society but good for making an example with. It is also not too far off from many views that I have personally seen, especially when you begin to imagine the legal changes involved to implement those views.
It's easy to come up with an example and find yourself thinking "It's unreasonable to tolerate that!". Instead, consider asking yourself why people a century ago might tolerate views you think of as perfectly reasonable today.
Tolerance of someone who says such things in a work environment--knowing that the subject of the speech might be a coworker, boss, or direct report--is another thing entirely. Employees should not have to tolerate that, and employers should not expect them to.
To be super clear about this, making bigoted statements is a behavior in the workplace, and it is smart of businesses to set and enforce expectations for acceptable workplace behavior.
I would say difficulty is a neccessary, but as you so right point out, woefully insufficient condition.
We've largely forgotten what war was like - it's become something that we send disenfranchised young soldiers from poorer economic backgrounds to so corporations can make more money. I suspect that if people were actually faced with a direct choice between tolerance and war and could make the choice rationally, they'd choose tolerance every time. But of course, usually once wars happen it's because people are no longer acting rationally. And right now few people really believe that the alternative to tolerance is war, they just believe that the people they can't tolerate will willingly give up the beliefs they find repugnant.
I know this is an article of faith in some political circles. Promising poor kids money for killing Those Other People is the only way military service makes sense.
Just FYI, this isn't actually true. US military recruits are more likely to be from the three middle quintiles than the first or fifth. Data here: https://www.cfr.org/article/demographics-us-military
Yes, there are some people who fall into the latter category. But there are others somewhere in between, and it might be useful to exchange world views and increase mutual understanding, and maybe even change some minds.
I think it's ridiculous so many political discussions these days jumps to an existential fear of your side's complete eradication, and a mindset that any action is justified to avoid that outcome.
That’s what I mean when I say denying one’s existence. There is clear intent behind those words. I didn’t pick them arbitrarily. That’s a necessary condition for tolerance to become abhorrent.
You are either attacking some weird fantasy or you honestly believe that being gay† is a life choice.
—
† This obviously includes everything heterosexual people are able to do with no one blinking an eye, like mentioning their partner in casual conversations, bringing their partner to work events when partners are allowed to attend, etc. That just logically follows. Obviously how openly you talk about your romantic partner to someone else is definitely a life choice – I’m just saying that it logically follows from being gay not being a life choice that gay people have to be tolerated to talk about their romantic partners as openly as heterosexual people. Or else there wouldn’t be equality at all.
No, that would not be "denying your existence". That is hyperbole.
For my own part, I exist in a political context where I know that lots of people want to deny my whole existence. And so long as society is willing to keep them to nothing worse than the occasional unkind word, I'm willing to live with that. I prefer it to the endless mission creep that all too easily comes when the ostracism and purges start.
Yeah, deciding when it is ok is then a hard problem but I’m willing to accept that.
It may also be worth inquiring about what a person means when they refer to their own lives before going on to describe genocide. There's potentially some awkward outcomes there.
This is sort of the lesson of Europe from the 30 years war to doay.
The example given was a gay person who encounters someone (a Muslim, say) who thinks they should be sentenced to death. But if the gay person decides in response that Islam should be eradicated, that's (at a minimum) cultural genocide.
Note well: I am not an apologist for Islam. I consider their theology to be wrong. But in opposing them, don't become them.
I don’t get why people shy away from making these hard calls. I mean, I don’t even think this one is a hard one to make.
Of course all of this does not exist in an ideology free completely politically neutral space. You have to make some assumptions and some value judgements. That’s ok. There is nothing wrong with that.
I’m also so weirded out when people try to construct working societies from this maximalist non-interference maximalist neutrality point of view. I don’t think societies have to be neutral.
You are also constructing one very weird case that just doesn’t work at all and makes no sense.
Eliminating the former is not genocide, eliminating the latter is.
Why—whenever the question of hate comes up—is HN so quick to rise to the defense of the hateful?
I suspect that many Muslims consider that to be their identity, not just their ideology.
> Why—whenever the question of hate comes up—is HN so quick to rise to the defense of the hateful?
Because I'm hateful (to at least somebody). And so are you. We don't defend the hateful because the hateful are so wonderful. We don't defend them because we agree with them. We defend them because we're defending us some time down the road.
> I suspect that many Muslims consider that to be their identity, not just their ideology.
I can't believe I have to explain that the difference is between what's a choice and what's not: You can't change your identity. Ideology is arbitrary.
So be careful of justifying intolerance of the terrible. That rationale can be used against you, perhaps by people a whole lot less well-meaning than you are.
Hateful is willfully terrible.
If there's anyone out there that thinks I'm hateful, then they're factually incorrect.
You don't, you just need to understand that the idea that identity is always centered on immutable characteristics is wrong.
And you know what? I work alongside these people just fine! We talk about computer engineering at work, not religion. And everything moves along.
The problem with Google is they have a bunch of immature children who are not interested in "peace."
Tolerance breaks down because morality kicks in: a good moral person tries to wipe out evil when they see evil. The problem is that we can't agree on what is, and isn't evil.
Which is a problem when people increasingly believe the "other side" to be evil. (Abortion is murder vs Anti-choice are womanizers). Both sides want to wipe each other out, not necessarily kill them, but they want to politically negate the opponent's argument.
In many cases, ideas, ideals, and philosophy are incompatible. That's just how the world works.
His views are his own. He should be free to express them.
What we wouldn’t have to tolerate was his actions, because they clearly harmed others.
> I've always found it difficult to dissociate views vs actions when it comes to espoousing a hateful view.
Views: giving a speech arguing abortion should be illegal
Actions: blowing up an abortion clinic
I find it very troubling so many participants in this discussion having difficulty distinguishing between speech and action, and why they should not be treated as the same thing.
For your company, though, they could fire you for violating their internal policies.
To categorize the speech, I would say it's just being an asshole. Even if you believe biological sex is assigned at birth and is immutable, going out of your way to not address someone the way they wish to be addressed is just being intentionally rude.
But even then, it's still speech.
Generally it's worth dividing hateful words from hateful actions. Saying something racist in hateful, and might have political or social consequences, but wise societies are aware that getting into the game of policing speech is a mess. Attacking someone for being the wrong race is much more clear-cut, and society generally has an interest in discouraging violence to begin with.
How does ME accepting tolerance cause the OTHER guy to be tolerant as well?
I don't swing the first punch during fights, but I'll absolutely punch back. That doesn't change the fact that fights happen to break out. One day, you will find yourself up against an intolerant person, and your only defense is to also be intolerant against them.
That's just the facts.
No, being a tolerant person means tolerating people even when you find their views wrong, immoral, or heinous. There's nothing impressive about tolerating the views you like and not tolerating the views you don't.
When you find an intolerant person, the right thing to do is to tolerate them. Let them see that you are willing to accept them, even if they are not willing to accept you. That is how views are changed.
This notion that the defense against intolerance is to be intolerant yourself is how society sinks into tit for tat tribalism.
https://i.imgur.com/wmA0ZeV.png
If the opponent is more charismatic than you, you will lose this fight. There are some very intolerant people out there who are more charismatic than you, and are better able to recruit supporters to their cause.
> This notion that the defense against intolerance is to be intolerant yourself is how society sinks into tit for tat tribalism.
This notion that YOU are more charming than the "intolerant" people is naive. What if the other guy is more charming, and manages to rile up crowds better than you can?
There's a reason why Obama signed papers to just kill Anwar Al-Awlaki with a drone strike. At some point, you just stop playing the "tolerance" game and gotta get your hands dirty. The idea that we can teach tolerance to everyone else is naive and counterproductive at this age.
Under this logic if I think abortion is murder, and I consider everyone who supports abortion is intolerant then I am justified in suppressing pro-abortion speech even if the majority of society is pro-choice.
The end result of your line of thinking is civil war. Coexistence with people who have values and morals different from each others becomes impossible when people's response to views they find wrong is to be intolerant toward those views.
If my opponent thinks I'm intolerant, then ME increasing my level of tolerance does NOTHING to fix the problem.
> The end result of your line of thinking is civil war.
Not if the other side down backs down first. Which is usually what happens. Why should the onus be on ME to back down?
------
Yeah, its complicated. But play with the game-theory of the model. That's the current direction we're marching towards politically. My point is that your philosophy of "tolerate the opponent" does NOTHING to stop this game-theory matrix. My optimal move is to be intolerant, especially if my opponent is intolerant.
Yeah, its a prisoner's dilemma. But that's the reality of politics.
Yes, it does. Responding to intolerance with tolerance provides the change (however slim) to engage with these people and change their views. Responding with intolerance of your own deprives you of this chance. The former offers some chance of change, however slim. The latter offers none.
> Not if the other side down backs down first. Which is usually what happens.
The problem is, the "other side" is thinking the exact same thing. Also, the way you frame tolerance as one "side" against another highlights the way people use "intolerance" just justification for the exclusion of the out-group.
> Why should the onus be on ME to back down?
The onus isn't on anyone to "back down" the onus is on society to foster a culture where the response to encountering someone with view they find heinous is to engage and try to bring them in alignment with society.
> Yeah, its complicated. But play with the game-theory of the model. That's the current direction we're marching towards politically. My point is that your philosophy of "tolerate the opponent" does NOTHING to stop this game-theory matrix. My optimal move is to be intolerant, especially if my opponent is intolerant.
No, it is not because we're all on the same team. By selecting the option that causes a net loss but a personal gain for yourself, you're leaving all of society worse off. The "other side" is still part of the society to which you belong, like it or not.
I am seriously disturbed by this line of reasoning, the thought that it's better to leave all of society worse off as long as the "other side" is harmed more than "our side". The end result is that the two "sides' cannot coexist, and one either destroys or expels the other.
Go hangout at Stormfront. Talk to white-nationalists. They're all gathering there, and you can go try to convince them to stop being racist if you so desire.
This isn't some hypothetical la-la land. You literally can go to white-nationalist websites and talk with them and try to convince them to be otherwise more tolerant of others.
----------
In any case: I've got slanty eyes since my parents were from an East Asian country. I can't change how my eyes look like, I'm distinctively Asian (although I'm unable to speak or write in any language aside from English. I've lived here my whole life).
I can change my viewpoints because I'm a rational person. But if white-nationalists make an enemy out of me, there's nothing I can do about it. I cant change my eyes or skin color.
Fortunately for me, white-nationalists are more scared of other races than my race. But they're still not exactly welcoming of me either.
---------
As I said before: how can My life (or society in general) get better if I become more tolerant of the white-nationalists who want to make America whiter and with less immigrants? They want to kick me out of the country (well, starting with Hispanics first. But I know I'm on their list). How am I supposed to "tolerate" that viewpoint?
> I am seriously disturbed by this line of reasoning, the thought that it's better to leave all of society worse off as long as the "other side" is harmed more than "our side". The end result is that the two "sides' cannot coexist, and one either destroys or expels the other.
Do you wish to "tolerate" white nationalism, and their philosophy to kick immigrants out of the country? To the point where some of them are going out to El Paso and literally shooting people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_El_Paso_shooting
This is what we are dealing with:
> "In general, I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto. This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion."
There is no room for "tolerance" here. I'm sorry.
Because if you do engage with them you can figure out why they think those things and try to change their views.
By comparison if you behave intolerantly towards them, then they will become even more entrenched in their belief that immigrants do not tolerate whites, thus reinforcing their xenophobia.
> Do you wish to "tolerate" white nationalism, and their philosophy to kick immigrants out of the country? To the point where some of them are going out to El Paso and literally shooting people:
Speech and actions are two different things. People can talk about hanging wall Street bankers all they want, but that becomes illegal the moment that this becomes violence. Same with white nationalism or any other belief.
Have you tried to do this? Because I've tried. It doesn't seem to work.
> Speech and actions are two different things.
Speech inspires actions. If you're smart about something, you'll want to stop bad behavior while its still "speech", and not yet an "action".
> People can talk about hanging wall Street bankers all they want, but that becomes illegal the moment that this becomes violence.
Maybe it should be illegal before the violence breaks out. You know, to prevent violence, instead of reacting to it.
Yes, I have talked to many people that hold views that are labeled as "white nationalist" and engaging with them can change their views. Case in point, I managed to convince people to support immigration tied to employment. I sought to understand why this person opposed immigration, and learned that they feared that immigrants would become dependent on social services. So I made the point that immigration policy can be structure in a way to avoid state dependence.
You often won't be able to make them pull a total 180, but you can usually make them more nuanced in their opinions.
> Because I want to live here, a location I've lived my entire life, they believe that I "don't tolerate whites"? This is ridiculous on the face of it.
You're right, it is ridiculous. But that's what they believe. And if you treat them with intolerance (which is what you've been trying to justify throughout this thread) you're only reinforcing that belief.
> No, seriously. Go try arguing against a white nationalist for a while. Its utterly hopeless to get them to change their opinions.
Not with this kind of attitude, it isn't. But actually try and engage meaningfully, understand why they believe the things they do, and show them that you are willing to tolerate them even though they don't want to tolerate you and the chances of changing their minds improves considerably.
> Maybe it should be illegal before the violence breaks out. You know, to prevent violence, instead of reacting to it.
You'll have to start by repealing the first amendment. And after you do, there will be people that will seek to label your views as violent and ban them.
I appreciate your honesty, but that's not what I'm talking about. Immigration or anti-immigration is a solid political subject but its "safe". That's the stuff normal people talk about.
The white-nationalist stuff I literally cannot beat is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Replacement and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_genocide_conspiracy_theo...
Have you ever met someone who believed in The Great Replacement or White Genocide? Its basically a conspiracy theory: these people are not rational anymore. No amount of arguing can convince them otherwise. I'm Asian. Just talking with a white-nationalist reminds them of the Great Replacement. Just seeing me enforces their viewpoint.
Yeah, being tolerant of other viewpoints works... when the other person is also a good person at heart. But when you meet truly despicable nutjobs on the white-national spectrum, you lose hope in that "tolerance" viewpoint rather quickly. The only option I've concluded from my experience in that matter, is to censor them and prevent them from recruiting more people.
I dunno, maybe you can figure out a better plan. But I'm perfectly willing to use the censorship button to mitigate this problem. And unfortunately, I don't think I have any better option.
What is your plan for these people then? Kill them? Put them in reeducation camps? Deport them?
Like it or not, these people exist and they're not going anywhere. We can either:
1) be intolerant towards them, thus making them form their own communities and grow more and more extreme because they're surrounded by like minded people.
2) be tolerant towards them, and try to change their beliefs.
Do you think that thes people are more likely to change their views if the rest of society is intolerant towards them and the only people they talk to are other white nationalist? Or if society does act treat them with tolerance, and they interact with more non-white-nationalists.
If we treat them with intolerance, then the only community they will find is with other white nationalists. If we do this, the problem is going to get worse and there are going to be more attacks.
And white nationalists talk to non-white nationalists all the time. That's how they recruit new white nationalists. They're not ignorant of the arguments made against their beliefs - they're well aware, and yet they reject those arguments and persist, because irrational beliefs can't be rationalized out of. Most conspiracy theories would vanish in a puff of logic if that's how people worked.
Simply letting them organize where they will to spread their hatred unabated on any and every available platform, and then only politely and respectfully trying to convince them that their plans to throw the perfidious Jews into the ovens is a bad idea isn't going to do anything but push the Overton window of tolerance for their intolerance in their direction.
Censor them, and prevent them from recruiting more. Wipe them off of Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter. Ban hate-speech.
> 1) be intolerant towards them, thus making them form their own communities and grow more and more extreme because they're surrounded by like minded people.
And take down these communities as they pop up. Its like weeding, you gotta keep knocking it down. I don't expect perfection. But make it a hassle for them to organize.
Again, not possible unless you repeal the first amendment. Not really possible even if you do, since TOR exists.
> And take down these communities as they pop up. Its like weeding, you gotta keep knocking it down. I don't expect perfection. But make it a hassle for them to organize
Do you realize that part of the reason why these people hate immigrants is because they think immigrants hate them and want to get rid of them? Referring to them as "weeds" that need to be purged is playing straight into their narrative.
Knock down their communities and they will see it as proof of their persecution, and use this censorship to appeal to more peole. Deprive them of the ability to use words, and they will use violence.
White nationalism has been around for over a century. The attacks only started to accelerate when they started getting deplatformed. Make no mistake, this approach has been making them more violent and it will make them even more violent if it continues.
You cannot knock down these communities. It is not possible without drastically reducing civil liberties. Freedom of speech and association are not going away. The only viable option to engage and attempt to change their views.
I know. But that website is hosted somewhere, and maybe we can convince those hosts to take it down.
> The only viable option to engage and attempt to change their views.
And you're free to attempt to do that at Daily Stormer / Stormfront / any other website where they pop up. But I'm telling you that trying to convince them doesn't seem to work.
And then they will set up their own servers. Or move to Gab. Or go to TOR. You can't keep people from communicating on the internet. It's not possible. Countries like mainland China have spent a lot more time and money trying to do it, and it doesn't work.
And even if you do somehow manage to kick them off the internet, they'll organize through regular mail. The daily stormer was (and I think still is) a print publication. The post office legally cannot stop them from using the postal service.
> And you're free to attempt to do that at Daily Stormer / Stormfront / any other website where they pop up. But I'm telling you that trying to convince them doesn't seem to work.
I'll take something that "doesn't seem to work" over something that is actively making things worse. Again, these communities have only become more extreme and more violent the more that society has tried to shut them down.
"Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that."
And lots of those people didn’t use to hang out there before we banned them from mainstream forums for having simple disagreements about what good policies and governance is.
We threw them out to the loonies, and wonder why they come back crazy. How about we take some responsibility for that?
Leave them on mainstream forums where their words can lead to greater amounts of recruitment from the population? Reducing their recruiting arm to smaller-and-smaller portions of the internet is the goal.
The white-nationalist idea of White Genocide and "The Great Replacement" holds a great deal of power. As they discuss this nonsense in the mainstream, it only makes more and more believers come to their side.
For me, that day was a long time ago. And that was not - and is not - my defense.
That's just the facts.
Please share your experience. Did you run away? Did you actually change their opinion?
Here's my story: for a month, a man with an anti-Asian sign would be marching around and pointing his "Go back to China" sign at me. (My parents are Filipino and I'm born in America) What do you expect me to do, walk out and have a reasonable discussion with the guy?
No. You call the police and get that man out of my life. No one has to tolerate this kind of hate. And no amount of reasonable discussion can convince a crazy man to tolerate others.
Deal with the problem. Get them out, kick them out. I'm not going to wax-philosophical and think "oh, he's demonstrating his freedom of speech / 1st amendment rights". Nah, he's trespassing on private property and I want him out of my workplace.
True story. This is how you deal with problems. "Tolerating" the hate only makes it fester and get worse. Hoping for the man to stop marching (after he's been marching for literally weeks) is the height of insanity.
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Look, we've got Christchurch mosque shootings and El Paso shootings. There's a hateful philosophy which is GROWING. Its pretty clear to me that "tolerance" has lost the fight. There's literal blood in the streets now, as the hate is beginning to fester and spread even further.
We can work to slow down the hate today, or we can sit still and "tolerate" it for the years to come, hoping it goes away by itself.
I still think racists deserve emergency medical care and effective fire departments, though.
If they want to run their racist mouth at work, they might be fired for it.
That's all we want. For people to be fired when they mouth-off racist views in the workplace.
Aka: being intolerant of intolerance. We can't be thought-police, no one has a mind-reading device. The best we can hope for is to kick people out when they demonstrate themselves to be an intolerant person.
I don't believe we are "at war" with white-nationalism. We are certainly not at the point where we should be imprisoning or killing people, yet. But I do believe we are at the point where we should seriously be considering to take down their websites and fire them from our workplaces.
The general hope is to clamp down on the philosophy and hamper them, so that this issue doesn't grow into an "open war" situation. One side has already demonstrated a willingness to spill blood on the matter, so we are marching closer and closer to violence on this issue.
There was a time when we could hope for better tolerance. But unfortunately, we're at the point where we need to be seriously considering our "strong soft-options": censorship, website bans, propaganda, infiltration / counter-intelligence, and spy-games, and other such tools.
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Ex: I HOPE we have tasked the FBI to infiltrate white-nationalist websites, not only to keep tabs on them but also maybe try to grow into leadership positions within white-nationalist groups. Full on infiltration / spy-games need to be going on (if they haven't happened already).
This is the least we can do in the wake of the El Paso shooter, especially since other political options (ex: background checks) seem out of reach.
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Note: Martin Luther King Jr. was subject to this kind of infiltration. This is literally the FBI's job: to infiltrate groups within the USA, keep tabs on influential figures who might be dangerous. Its unsavory, but only through infiltration can you figure out who is dangerous, and who is safe.
Hitler didn't do anything but talk and lead others. Hitler just inspired an entire country to attempt genocide, through inspiration ALONE.
Hitler wasn't a man like Stalin (Stalin would personally execute people). Stalin "swung the axe", made sure his hands were as bloody as the people he led. Hitler in contrast, was a coward who ended up killing himself in a secure bunker as soon as the world turned against him.
Words alone have huge effect on people. The words of a powerful man can alone be enough to cause issues.
Womanizer: a man who often has temporary sexual relationships with women or tries to get women to have sex with him.
We absolutely cannot let evil stand when we identify evil. Otherwise, it marches in and kills many. On the other hand, if we misidentify evil, then innocent people die.
I'm not saying I have a solution. But the idea that "tolerance will save us all" is hopelessly naive. The sad fact is, a large number of people are systematically intolerant.
No, you let evil speech stand. And you call it out as evil, and make clear reasoned arguments why it is evil. That is the solution.
Only when that evil speech turns into action does the society step in.
Resorting to censorship only demonstrates weakness and an inability or unwillingness to argue against evil. This leads to people questioning whether the target of censorship really is evil at all.
That doesn't work.
If you really think you can "convince" people to tolerate others, feel free to go to Stormfront and convince the white-nationalists to stop being racist.
Go and try it. Its not like these hateful locations are unknown, its a free and open internet. Go an talk with them for a week. You might learn how easy it is to rationalize bigotry and racism.
At some point, you gotta just shut it down, like what the world did to 8chan. And these situations aren't hypothetical at all. You literally can go test your theory at Stormfront.
> Only when that evil speech turns into action does the society step in.
We're too late for that. Christchurch shooter, and then El Paso shooter. We've got a strain of intolerant speech that are inspiring lone-wolves to go into literal suicide missions to shoot people they don't like right now.
Gun control debate is locked. Its been like 2 weeks and everyone's already forgotten about the El Paso shooter. Nothing will come about with that.
But at least we shut down 8chan, one of the hangout spots for this hateful branch of people. We should probably shutdown other hangout spots too, like Stormfront.
No, if anything we have seen an increase. You can't change people's minds by ostracizing them. Shutting down speech, especially the speech you think is immoral, makes the problem worse.
And to your point, yes people have changed the minds of white nationalists by engaging with them. It's hard but it can happen. By comparison, how many white nationalists do you think had their minds changed by having their speech censored? Usually this only reinforces the belief in a {Jewish | Globalist | immigrant | etc. } conspiracy against whites. If people think big tech is run by George Soros and is censoring conservatives and is working to the detriment of whites, then getting kicked off th internet is pretty much directly reinforcing their conspiracy.
Shutting things down works. The (modern) US just doesn't want to go that way. In fact, shutting things down and erasing history is perhaps one of the most effective methodologies from a historical point of view. But historically, the US had an office of censorship for a reason during WW2, so that public opinion could be unified against Nazi-ism.
People often ask why WW2 was so effective at unifying the country. Well... yeah. Office of Censorship and clamping down on speech, and systemic advertisements + propaganda funded by US Government and pushed by Walt Disney.
It just needs to be done from the top down. You can't expect the free market to do it on its own.
> By comparison, how many white nationalists do you think had their minds changed by having their speech censored? Usually this only reinforces the belief in a {Jewish | Globalist | immigrant | etc. } conspiracy against whites.
The idea is not to change their minds. The idea is to prevent them from talking, and changing the minds of others.
The Allies may have reinforced aversion to Nazism after it was defeated. But political suppression did not successfully stop Nazism in Germany.
> The idea is not to change their minds. The idea is to prevent them from talking, and changing the minds of others.
They'll still be talking to others, you fundamentally cannot stop that. The only difference is that we are depriving ourselves of the chance to challenge them on their bigoted and hateful beliefs.
And lastly, you're making the dangerous assumption that the people deciding which views are getting suppressed agree with you. There's a good chance many of the views you hold dear are ones that a significant portion of the population want to get rid of.
In the most extreme cases: killing works too. Bin Laden / Anwar Al-Awlaki. Both were more "inspirational" figures than actual day-to-day management, but their ability to spread and inspire others was still better than the typical ISIS / Al Qaeda member.
Destroying the mouthpiece works. Full on killing / murder is only condoned in war-like situations, but there are "softer powers" like knocking websites offline. Sure, they are tenacious and spring up again (and will continue to do so unless we actually kill them), but every hour those websites are down is another hour where they fail to recruit members into their philosophy.
Considering that we refuse to utilize the ultimate solution (assassination / killing) vs these people, the best we can hope for is to just inconvenience them over-and-over again. Its just like banning troll accounts at a highly-moderated forum. The trolls inevitably pickup a new VPN and get to post again for a few hours. The idea isn't to stop the troll from talking, its to hamper the troll from talking.
> They'll still be talking to others, you fundamentally cannot stop that. The only difference is that we are depriving ourselves of the chance to challenge them on their bigoted and hateful beliefs.
Nah, we can totally do that. You and I can talk about white-nationalism right now. Do you believe that white people are "being replaced" by immigrants? And if so, do you think its a long-term negative for this country?
Bam. Now we can talk about the subject. And I trust you (and most random strangers) to have decent opinions on the subject. The issue is that a large group of white-nationalists are working to recruit young people into their hateful philosophy, and to grow their base. And this growth includes violent action (with them cheering the actions of El Paso shooter + New Zealand's shooter).
I'm not against intelligent discussion of these subjects. I'm against the recruitment and growth of power of hate-groups.
Not only can I not see how this supports your assumption that suppression works, it actually demonstrates a positive relationship between suppression and these sorts of movements.
Especially when these groups allege a conspiracy to suppress them, the the last thing we should be doing is the exact thing that hate groups allege. When we start banning white nationalists sites, it makes lots of people think "oh shit, there really is a {Jewish | Globalist | Muslim} conspiracy out to get us."
You've got cause-and-effect backwards. More and more people are deplatforming as they realize that white-nationalism is a bigger problem than they once thought.
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Deplatforming works. Lets not look at white-nationalism, but lets look at "Elsa-gate" instead. Children were watching creepy "Elsa" videos (from Disney's "Frozen"). How do you stop this? You ban them from the site.
Bam. Children don't watch them anymore, cause those videos are banned.
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How do you solve the problem of white-nationalists recruiting on this webpage? Well, you ban hate-speech.
The problem is that White-Nationalists can simply... go to Facebook... or Youtube... as recruitment grounds. The big websites aren't cooperating yet. This needs to be a systemic top-down effort, unified across the major websites.
And yet, despite (or perhaps because of) increased deplatforming, these groups are stronger than ever and are committing more attacks.
If what you say is true, we should have been seeing a decrease in white nationalism since 2014 when deplatforming started to accelerate. We've seen the opposite.
> Deplatforming works. Lets not look at white-nationalism, but lets look at "Elsa-gate" instead. Children were watching creepy "Elsa" videos (from Disney's "Frozen"). How do you stop this? You ban them from the site
Elsagate wasn't a political movement, it was a group of trolls gaming the YouTube algorithm for views and lulz.
> The problem is that White-Nationalists can simply... go to Facebook... or Youtube... as recruitment grounds. The big websites aren't cooperating yet. This needs to be a systemic top-down effort, unified across the major websites.
Both of those websites ban white nationalism. Facebook even bans praise and any forms of "representation" of white nationalism explicitly: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/03/standing-against-hate/
We keep cutting off the heads of the Hydra of white nationalism and it keeps getting stronger. Bans and suppression is useless at best, counterproductive at worst.
Nonetheless, deplatforming them worked quite well.
> Both of those websites ban white nationalism.
Not well enough. Moderation on Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, and other sites is extremely subpar and plenty of people can get their recruitment efforts in.
Especially with the "black-hole" of algorithmic "recommendations", these systems automatically pull white-nationalists (and child-pornographers, etc. etc.) together.
We have given these groups the tools they need to automatically find each other (through recommendation listings) and coordinate with each other. Of course their connections and organization are going to get stronger.
Find me three examples of actual white nationalists or child pornographers on YouTube. Every time someone makes this claim, I challenge them to substantiate it. Most of the time, people don't respond and the rest of the time people provide links to generic conservative channels that are anti-immigration, do not believe in the mutability of gender, etc. but are nowhere even remotely in the realm of believing in the supremacy of the white race or supporting the expulsion of non-whites from the country.
They gather around conspiracy-related videos. The "discussion" is mostly in the comments / private messages, not actually in the videos themselves.
Its been a long time since I've actually hunted down white supremacist groups on Youtube, maybe things have changed. Follow enough conspiracy theorists, and you eventually get to comment-sections which are almost entirely composed of white-supremacists talking about nonsense.
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With regards to child-porn, its less actual porn and more compromising positions (links to child gymnastics, children playing in pools with wet shirts, etc. etc.). Not actual porn, but its clearly sexual in nature (even if not originally intended). I'm sure you're well aware of the problem however, its been discussed to death. I'd rather not revisit that subject personally.
In any case, the COMMENTs are the goldmine for child-pornographers. Its clear that they are sharing child-porn off Youtube. They just use Youtube as a methodology to find each other and communicate.
Youtube comments are practically unmoderated. Youtube practically has no moderation on comments what-so-ever.
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That's the thing about Youtube's recommendation engine: its really good at preventing people from seeing some groups. But if your Youtube history matches a profile (ex: child porn or white-supremacy), you actually find those groups rather quickly.
It takes some effort to actually pull yourself into those groups however, and you taint your Youtube account history while doing so. So its not really something I like to do on a whim.
Details here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O13G5A5w5P0
I know Youtube changed some stuff this year (fewer comments on gymnastic videos, high-school wrestling competitions, etc. etc), but its all automatic. Without actual moderation, the problem will only arise once again.
As usual, when challenged to back up the claim that YouTube hosts white nationalism and child pornographers the commenter fails to do so.
At best you managed to show that some videos of kids had creepy comments, which YouTube promptly banned after it was brought to light. I recall this phenomenon, and YouTube's response was swift and decisive. So much so that many creators actually complained that YouTube was being too aggressive.
I said their moderation is subpar. Specifically, that white-nationalism COMMENTS are a problem.
> The problem is that White-Nationalists can simply... go to Facebook... or Youtube... as recruitment grounds. The big websites aren't cooperating yet. This needs to be a systemic top-down effort, unified across the major websites.
Sure sounds like you're saying YouTube and Facebook host white nationalist content to me. Saying that YouTube and Facebook are lax in kicking off white nationalists is still saying that they let white nationalists on their site.
It's only after I challenged you to back up this claim that you pivoted to talking about comments.
That's not my intent. You can take at my word, or leave it. Your choice. There's plenty of other issues we can talk about without getting wrapped up about this particular point.
Youtube _comments_ are poorly moderated. Do you agree or disagree?
But about 5 minutes of search gave me this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e811xgRlZYE
Iranian propaganda against "Zionists" (keyword: anti-semite language) who made 9/11 an inside job.
RT Today still has a prominient mouthpiece on Youtube, not white-nationalist, but conspiracy driven nuts in any case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyA-sCE18hY
Play around on that side of Youtube long enough, and the white-nationalists eventually show up. Last time I went down hunting for white-nationalists, they were somewhere around that area.
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EDIT: Here's a doozy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVE12id-X4Y
Plenty of pro-Great Replacement ideas here.
Yeah, I'm finding more and more stuff the more I look. As I stated before: the more you fill you search history with this stuff, the easier it gets to find.
"Normal" people aren't able to enter the black hole, because after seeing one video, they click on something else. Conspiracy-nuts continue to click into the hole, filling up their history and getting drawn in more and more. Its just how Youtube's algorithms work. The more you click on these things, the more Youtube serves you this kind of content.
That's enough conspiracy / white national hunting for me though. I think I've proven my point now and don't feel like dirtying my history anymore.
> It's funny how these basic nationalist thoughts are now "far right-wing" In the past these were beliefs that most of the population understood. You dont let your own nation be ethnically and culturally replaced by outsiders.
> I love how Jewtube welds the Wikipedia article to the Great Replacement and tries to dismiss it as a "nationalist right wing conspiracy theory".
> Europe taxes it’s citizens to import Africa Whilst Africa kicks out europeans
Found em. Took about 10 minutes but I'm pretty sure I found what you were looking for. Do you believe me now?
So now I've shown you what's out there. Now I ask you again: what should we do about this? Should we just... let these people continue to collaborate on their mission of hate on Youtube? Or should we like, do something about it before they decide to shoot someone else (El Paso / Christchurch)
Ban them and they will likely become even more extreme, and more violent. Again, you keep assuming that more censorship will make these people less extreme... which is pretty foolish when being subject to censorship is a big reason why they ended up in white nationalist circles in the first place. Do you think that if that commenter talking about "Jewtube" will become less extreme if her or she gets banned? Heck no, they're going to think "oh shit, the conspiracy to silence us is real!"
Ultimately, that is YouTube's decision. Personally I'd ban the comments despite knowing that it will make the situation even worse, because I would want to make as much money as possible and these comments make it harder to sell ads.
So the answer is yes, I'd ban them for my own greed. Not because I think banning them reduces white nationalism - quite the opposite I think it strengthens it - but because it's financially optimal.
After... what is this, 60 posts in this sub-thread? Neither you nor I are anywhere close to budging on the issue. Discussion is useful for discovering the point-of-views of other people, but it doesn't actually change opinions.
Proof of the pudding: I couldn't convince YOU of anything. And you have similarly failed to convince me of anything.
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And after this full discussion, I think I can firmly conclude that you and I are both rational people. You just don't necessarily see things from my perspective. That's fine.
But it really just goes to show how hard it is to do things "your" way, to convince people one-at-a-time to hold a different point of view. After all, if you've failed to convince me to change my opinion, I don't believe you'd be able to convince the "Great Replacement" nuts to change their opinion.
It's not so extreme... I've actually experience this!
I'm gay and worked with an orthodox jew in New York for many years. We got close enough to have honest conversations about how scripture literally says gay men should be put to death.
For a long time he would talk his way around it. Eventually all he could say was, "it doesn't apply to you, you're not jewish" (ok, only murder gay jews, as if that makes it ok?) or "those laws won't apply until the third temple" (still, not ok!)
But you know what? We still liked and respected each other and worked very well together. So, I suppose it's possible.
I think I moderated his opinions a bit over time. That wouldn't have been possible if I would have berated him constantly and/or refused to work with him.
However I'm very nervous at some of the Orwellian redefinitions of words like hatred, racism, sexism, white supremacy and so forth.
Sometimes when you scratch under the surface of an accusation, you get a string. If you tug the string, it turns into a complex worldview, and it turns out the thing is a straw man used against political opponents. One red flag for this is when someone starts by saying, "So, you're really saying..." or, "The logical conclusion of your argument is..."
I was told recently that Louis CK's joke (recent underground taping that ended up on YouTube) was transphobic. I then listened to the joke and didn't come to that conclusion. Who's correct?
I read on HN someone coming out supporting law enforcement in the US. Someone responded that that made them racist, due to the history and the logic of institutional racism.
Be careful when you hear accusations.
I usually see “hate” used very loosely here, when the reality is much more nuanced, and mischaracterizing it as trans hate (or hate in general, for whatever the issue might be) is contributing to the problem.
I understand the former (calling a cis woman a man and insisting on referring to her as he pronouns) to be incredibly rude. But the idea of calling a trans woman a woman is a political move?
It’s possible for someone to disagree that a man is a woman without hating them for thinking they are a woman. It’s also possible for them to be sensitive about how they express that without unnecessarily harassing or harming the other person. And it goes both ways. The degree to which others, particularly those with incompatible views, are willing to modify their own life in order to accommodate yours, is going to vary greatly. Figuring out where to compromise is the difficult part.
Do you think it’s disrespectful for someone to eat a big juicy steak at work while sitting right next to a vegan animal rights activist who sincerely feels anguish at the thought of us factory farming and slaughtering animals for food?
I think that issue is a lot simpler than some of these other issues, and yet I doubt that polite society can even agree on that.
Similarly, what happens if you believe espousing homosexuality as normal is hateful? What is the sensitive, non-harmful manner to ask your co worker to never bring up his husband, ever, in the workplace?
I'm not asking meanly, I genuinely don't understand.
Can trans women fight biological women in MMA? Can they compete in tennis? If you think they shouldn’t, is that hate and misgendering? Who is allowed to apply for scholarships reserved for women? Do trans women get lower insurance rates? Should we even be discriminating on scholarships and insurance rates to begin with? Is it reasonable to expect someone to use other pronouns that didn’t previously exist in English simply because someone requests it? Is a man allowed in womens change rooms because he puts on high heels but otherwise has taken no steps to transition his/her/their identity, or is there some arbitrary level of transitioning that counts? Who decides that? Everybody seems to have strong opinions on a lot of these issues and nobody is going to agree anytime soon. Yes, sometimes it’s hate, but it doesn’t take an ounce of hate for two individuals to be radically opposed on how this is supposed to work.
Not any more political than them requiring you to address them and treat them as a gender they are not.
You are arguing that we should accept a man who’s feeling “womany” as a real woman, and that he should legally be treated as a woman.
Personally I think that’s absurd. I think we should let everyone be who they are, but I disagree about having legalities determined by what someone claims to feel.
Feelings are feelings, and very much soft and fluid. The law should be hard.
Clearly though, you think that the base argument makes sense, so my question is: do you accept it universally? The full way out?
Should a person who feels like or identifies as an animal (a furry), be considered a “real” animal? Should he legally be governed by the laws which governs real animals?
If not, why so? How is that different?
Or how about the famous attack chopper? Again it’s the exact same argument: someone claims to feel something, and demands you to respect the consequences of it, no matter how ridiculous.
Being opposed to such is a rationalist view, and has nothing to do with so “hate” no matter how much someone want to frame it as such.
Clearly that’s not the case, unless you make it your mission to make it so.
> How does one avoid politics when calling someone 'he' or 'she' (either way) is a political act?
If you allow this to be a treated as a political act which can only 1. be applied by someone who wants to exercise power over others, and 2. Can be used by former group to claim discrimination universally...
> what does one do when a workplace bans politics
Clearly politics is not banned, only certain kinds of politics is. The other kind is being enforced hard.
Don’t accept the double-speak.
I don't know if it is so clear, since the poster I'm responding to is explicitly claiming that trans women are not women, they are men. As far as I understand this is something referred to as politically charged subject matter.
> Clearly politics is not banned, only certain kinds of politics is. The other kind is being enforced hard.
Can you clarify? What is the other kind?
> If you allow this to be a treated as a political act
Is referring to a trans woman as a man or as a woman inherently apolitical, as it does not reflect on one's belief on if trans people are the gender they identify as?
My personal view is that people should be free to be who they are, and as long as it doesn't negatively impact others, it should be their own bloody business, and should have no legal implications.
So you're gay? You're a queer? Good for you! And no legal implications, please.
So you're legally man, with XY chromesomes, and you somehow feel like a woman, and maybe even like to dress as one? Good for you! Have fun, be proud, defy conventions! I do not hate you, but you are still a man, so no legal implications please.
To me, that's a statement of facts, and there's nothing awfully political about it.
The people who oppose that simple rationalist approach, are the ones who are rallying for a political platform, while at the same time claiming that opposing viewpoints must absolutely be denied a voice.
Despite the popular notion that these people are "liberals", there's nothing liberal or moderate about such a view, quite the contrary.
As long as you don’t define what you mean with “trans hate”, there’s no way for an outsider to judge if your “conservative” colleague held a reasonable position or not.
Constantly defining opposing views as “hate” is IMO one of the most effective ways you can kill reasonable discourse and increase polarisation.
And if “everything” is “hate”, clearly “hate” is no big deal, so why should we care?
Maybe what you encountered were not actually “hate”, but something we back in the days used to call “disagreement”?
It’s a pretty normal thing.
If you say "taxes are theft" I may disagree with your viewpoint, but I'm not personally attacked by it. If your viewpoint is a challenge to their personal identity, you should probably keep that to yourself.
Edit: just as a final thought, I've been on both sides of this, I've been silenced and I've silenced other people and honestly they both suck. I hold this view with the believe that some middle ground of things not being okay is the only one that works. If someone thinks that a free for all of ideas works well they are welcome to try it on their social media and at their company and I could be convinced if I could see it work at scale. It's really a practical view more than a philosophical one
Others believe this is hatred.
Google provides onsite gyms at many locations, which have change rooms. In this case, that discussion will likely have to take place at work.
“Don’t ask don’t tell” is a tempting policy, but that’s how you end up surrounded by TERFs when something inadvertently outs you.
That’s clearly a straw man. Nobody is having that discussion at work.
And death threats are not politics, they are matters which should be reported to the police.
However, even if the work has a strict "no politics" policy, if Bob does have significant prejudice against transgender people, then having Bob in the workplace with Alice at all potentially puts her at risk. There doesn't need to be a conversation about trans rights for him to know that she is trans, and for that to translate into harassment and even violence.
I don't have a solution for that problem. But that doesn't mean it's not a problem. And it's not a problem that's solved by prohibiting employees from talking about controversial topics in the workplace -- which is the argument that was made by the poster I was actually responding to.
*Dammit, I did it again! Sorry.
You were trying to use an outlier, an extremist situation (badly representing the opposing part) to frame a discussion about general principles for politics.
Of course you will get downvoted. It’s not a constructive contribution.
That sounds like a rather discriminating and polarising policy.
And are we allowed to discuss that (clearly leftist) policy?
Things didnt change, the church is just called diffrent, the dogma of social contracts and the heresy to break them is still the same.
Explain to me the social construct difference between a catholic procession and a gay pride parade.
This is because, what you may be describing as "trans hate" may simply be someone that simply doesn't accept the non scientifically proven theory of gender fluidity. And may be people that simply are stating that transgenderism should be approached and supported like other cases of body dysphoria.
Being offended and upset is a personal problem, not a public one. Requiring colleagues to bend over backwards to accommodate your needs should be a matter of politeness, not company policy.
Good thing, then that the debate is about third person pronouns, which are used to talk about someone, not with them.
I have literally never seen anybody use customized second person pronouns (although of course honorifics are traditional — try refusing to address a judge in court as "your honor" because you don't want to remember their honorific).
compassion needs to go both ways, and someone has to offer their hand first. it's not fair to the lgbt person, but it's highly unlikely that the homophobe will make that first move.
But if politics are not allowed at work then you wouldn't KNOW what your coworker's opinion is on the subject. That's one of the main points of not discussing politics at work, it's hard enough to get many people in one place to agree on technical things, it's impossible to get them to agree on everything and as every one of us feels strongly about one issue or another sooner or later we'll find things about our coworkers that we strongly oppose and that would make working with them hard.
Looking at world politics right now, I don't think that approach is being very successful. It just fosters a narrative of oppression and persecution of those who want to rebel against the prevailing norms of discourse.
> It is also not too far off from many views that I have personally seen, especially when you begin to imagine the legal changes involved to implement those views.
I think it's also important to be careful to avoid hyperbole.
It's easy to from "I don't support government run healthcare" to "WHY ARE YOU MURDERING ALL THE PEOPLE WHO CAN'T AFFORD HEALTH INSURANCE?" with no nuance.
How should a Muslim man respect a gay colleague who honestly thinks that homosexuality doesn't deserve a punishment?
Probably neither will respect the other, but they'll have to live with that.
This is the exact kind of polarization that googles own internal media has amplified which has led to a radical left that refuses any compromises with liberals and moderates and for conservatives who were marginalized becoming increasingly radicalized as a response.
Putting the entire argument into the most extreme case is just another reflection of take no prisoners arguments that have ranged on both sides of the ideological debate.
This is exactly why attacks on tolerance cannot have special exceptions. It becomes too easy to define the most extreme cases as being representative of the mainstream. Recent research has shown that both left and right constantly miss characterize the other. Unfortunately with the left that mischaracterization becomes more prevalent the more “educated” one becomes.
Do you think that's a good example of the kind of things Google staff debate about?
Personally I would have gone with. Someone suggesting a person in group X should subsidized by group Y. When the person speaking in in group X and the listener is in group Y.
Actually listing the groups as say income level, farmers, parents, elderly, ev drivers, or whatever is not actually helpful. That said you might have a reasonable debate on taxes, but that’s much harder when someone wants to send some group to prison etc.
It is very easy to dismiss a "death to homosexuals" discussion among Google employees as unrealistic.
> so as to not sidetrack the point.
Hrm, I understand that logic, but it seems like an attempt to frame disagreement with the current popular political view in the most extreme way.
Maybe that's not what you intended, but since that is a commonly employed technique ("everyone who doesn't disagree with me is a nazi") it does seem that way.
I feel like the gun control debate is particularly relevant - whenever a shooting happens one side calmly says "This is unfortunate but unavoidable given the cost to freedom we'd need to pay to remove firearms - please stop trying to use a tragedy politically" while the other side says "How many times does this need to happen before you realize 12,000 Americans died from this last year and I don't want my kid to be one of them."
Here's an issue where I think half the side thinks the world is on fire and the other is content - without getting into the merits of either side I do think it's unreasonable for the anti-gun control side to continue to argue against having a discussion for the sake of decorum. This is a divide we need to resolve.
This is exactly why a lot of people don't discuss politics at work. You first sentence also kind of assumes that the side that believes the world is on fire is correct. It would probably be beneficial to allow the discussion of politics at work if the side that believed the world was on fire was indeed always correct, but sometimes they aren't, and what then?
I personally would prefer, for example, if someone didn't try to convince me to do something to save my immortal soul, regardless of how ardently they believe that my immortal soul needs saving.
I was trying to avoid wording the above with any bias one way or the other - presenting both sides in their self-promoted light... The problem is that I think it's unclear when the world is on-fire or not and when you feel that a discussion isn't world ending it might just be that your thoughts are trapped in a bubble and you're having difficulty empathizing with the reason why the other side thinks the world is on fire. Certainly the world isn't on fire in every conceivable way, but evaluating whether a problem warrants a discussion or not is already a potentially opinionated decision.
The question is how much of that needs to be hammered out at work.
Part of the problem may be that we've tied the workplace so intimately into our lives that it's cramming out activities vital to the civilization's health, like participation in local civic, religious, or charitable organizations, where such topics are generally not only welcome but often the rasion d'etre.
Employees have a very understandable impulse to do something to influence social health for good, and if work becomes the only place where such an impulse can feel effectively fulfilled, it's no surprise that political discussion spills over irrespective of management dicta.
Rather than decreeing political discussion off-limits, maybe Google could consider something like reorienting and/or resurrecting 20% time to focus on allowing employees to effectively practice good citizenship, rather than using that time to generate new IP for Google to hoard.
The problem is that mass shootings are effective terrorism — people freak out about them. But they're not a significant cause of death by any means.
Just a random comparison:
200 per year for mass shootings.
3,536 per year for drowning not related to boats.
332 additional per year for drowning related to boats.
70,000+ per year from drugs (largely opioids).
https://www.cdc.gov/homeandrecreationalsafety/water-safety/w...
A lot of people have real trouble contextualizing statistics and videos because they can't really conceive of how many people there are. This makes it really easy for motivated media activists to manipulate opinion by heavy reporting of particular incidents, while ignoring trends that are killing literally hundreds of times more people.
Gun control? THAT's your example of the world being on fire?
If nothing is done about it 12k Americans a year will die, that isnt really going to have much of an effect in the long run for the vast majority of us. There are plenty of actual "world on fire" debates you could have used, including:
* Climate change
* Nuclear proliferation
* Antibiotic resistance
* Aquifer sustainability
* AGI
* Dystopian trends
* Dysgenic trends
Things that are on the actual "this has potential to kill or drastically reduce quality of life for billions of people" level (even if some are pretty far fetched in my view).
"World on fire" topics do exist, and for some reason they aren't the ones that result in toxicity.
What's at question is the way people treat each other and approach these topics, not their actual positions (half of people think there's a huge problem while the other half don't believe there's a problem)--which is what you're discussing.
As you’ve done here.
“I’m emotional about something that might happen to my child, look at these dead kids!” while refusing to address their point — guns used for self defense and civil freedom — isn’t having a discussion, and isn’t a way to reason about a complex trade off in society. It’s using dead children as a grotesque banner for your emotional manipulation.
Maybe if you want a discussion, try having one?
..and no debating? Most people at Google are shades of left. It sounds like they are just trying to drown out dissenting views once again.
Identity isn't political, until you have one that isn't an accepted norm. Sexual orientation isn't political, until people want to deny you insurance over yours. Race isn't political, until people refuse to sell you houses because of it. And so on.
"Keep politics out of $thing" is the purest expression of privilege. Doesn't make you a bad person or anything, but it's worth keeping in mind.
Shifting back to topic some: this idea that Google has had for years about platforms and now about it's internal one, that you can somehow keep the ugly elements of our society out and just have a nice, clean, advertiser and marketer-freindly area (ala YouTube) has permeated everything they've made. The problem is any place that people gather and collaborate will, eventually, get political. It can't not. As a species we have dragged politics into everything since long before we tricked silicon chips into thinking. I don't know why people keep thinking the Internet can be different, but it can't.
* edit: changed "competition" to "opposition"
In my experience, most people who complain that curbing political discussion in the workplace amounts to silencing them have views that are well in line with the status quo at the company.
In the context of work "silencing" could mean preventing workers from raising (valuable) concerns about the ethics of their work.
And again, the only people I've seen making this argument have ethics and hold values that are in line with the company's values. I've never seen a liberal at a conservative company call for more political discussion, or vice versa. It's always been conservatives in conservative companies or liberal in liberal companies making this argument. People who hold views contrary to the company mostly stay quiet, because making their views known results in ostracism and other negative consequences.
I think the primary motivation is that people whose views are in line with the company enjoy the situation of voicing their positions while being immune to challenge because people who disagree with them are pressured into silence. It produces a gratifying sense for the people in th majority, but comes at the expense of people in the minority. For that reason, there's good cause to not allow political discussion in the workplace.
It's better to just not let anyone use the company as a soapbox at all. If they have disagreements about the culture of the company, there are plenty of reporters looking for a scoop.
I’m not commenting on Google allowing or disallowing. I don’t really care and to be honest, if my workplace has a discussion board internally I’d probably not talk politics on it anyway. What I will say though is I think it’s interesting that google found it appropriate to allow it when google itself was disrupting the status quo, and it now disallows it when it more or less has become the status quo.
The attempt to guilt people into rolling around in the mud, or perhaps 'resistance' as you call it, is exactly the mentality that's ruining political conversation for everyone else.
I'm not trying to guilt anyone into anything. If anything, I'm putting forth the call to action to recognize that being apolitical hurts almost everyone, yourself included. You may be apolitical, but your boss probably isn't. Your landlord probably isn't. Your local politicians definitely aren't. The owner of your workplace almost certainly isn't, either. And all of those people have the capacity to make their lives better, by politicking in a way that will make your life worse.
I don't care what side people want to get on. I just want them to know that whether they've chosen one or not, they are on one.
Assuming it's the power of influence you're after... What do you truly hope to influence, the Board? Shareholders? Good luck.
If you believe diversity is not a worthy topic of discussion or debate at the workplace, well, therein lies the political divide. Silencing political discussion is then its own form of getting a leg up in that debate.
What if the opposite happened, and political discussion resulted in people arguing for less diversity?
The status quo might seem pretty appealing at that point.
I suspect people want to discuss politics at work if they feel their politics matches the politics around them. What they really want is a bit of a circlejerk or (at worst) a mild debate within narrow confines of what they consider acceptable.
If they thought most people disagreed with them, or that they were a political minority, they'd want politics off the table.
In a post above you said
"Keep politics out of $thing" is the purest expression of privilege.
You could not be more wrong. "Let me discuss politics in $thing" is the privilege of someone who wants to ruin apolitical situations for the people that disagree with them - who they suspect are in a minority.
By definition there are two camps of opposition to the current status quo - one to the left of it, and one to the right of it.
Would you accept both sides of it being allowed to speak freely in tech companies, or just the side you are on?
That is not true “by definition”. It would be true invariably (but still not by definition unless the conditions were also) if political variation were unidimensional, linear, and unbounded in actual (not merely potential) range.
My key point is that if you open up the floor to politics so people can try and change the status quo, you open up the possibilities that people will want to change the status quo in a way that makes it even further away from where you think it should be.
When people advocate political discussion at work because they are against the status quo, I don't think that's a scenario they consider.
Political aka controversial topics should be avoided, unless they are relevant to work.
For example, unless you work at a real estate agency, it would be a poor idea to discuss federal or state law for racial guarantees around the sale of houses.
(Not that you can't discuss them; certainty do. But your workplace will make a poor forum.)
"lesbian" is not a "sexual attraction" description, it is an "attraction description" for which one possible dimension of attraction can be sexual. Same-sex attraction is no more exclusively about a desire for intercourse than opposite sex attraction. It's entirely possible to have a romantic attraction of any kind without also feeling a desire to engage in intercourse.
I shudder to think about your love life, if you solely define your relationships on sexuality alone. Sexuality is a step from an emotional state to a physical expression of that, of course outside of prostitution and casual hook-ups. And I don't mean that in a negative way, I just...feel sorry for you.
All of these are regular everyday things for me, but I've had people tell me that even asking for basic respect is "disagreeing with their political opinion". The real problem is where the line is drawn, or whether a line can even be drawn.
The comments about being dependent on one's sexuality, or 'making it up,' and thusly being prepared to accept being mocked, are particularly disturbing.
The inability to separate a romantic and sexual nature is more so just surprising.
Very eye-opening responses for me.
Wait what
that said, "transgender lesbian" shouldn't be too hard to parse unless you've been living under a rock for the last fifteen years.
A transgender lesbian, therefore, is a transgender woman ("male-to-female") who is attracted to women.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgcLfohtFbE
For normal adults, that's just someone sharing their pleasant weekend... but others are triggered by implied gay sex and gun possession.
On the other hand, if someone asked me what I did on the weekend, I wouldn’t mention that I took part in (hypothetically) “Black Lives Matter” (highly political) or even was walking down the street proselytizing and trying to convince people to make God the head of their lives (highly religious) or that I was in the woods running around with Confederate flags trying to relive the glory of the Civil War (trust me, won’t ever happen.)
If they tried to do all that without mentioning guns..... well, actually that would explain a lot :)
It's only recently that people can talk about their non-heterosexual relationships at work. In 1995, mentioning your lesbian partner would've been overtly political and, in certain workplaces, is STILL called "political" and can get you fired [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/10/us/gay-teachers-wife-texa...
Guns are power, power is political.
Freedom is power, power is political.
The unfortunate reality is that there are no closed systems in nature. Nothing can be completely firewalled off from politics, power, game theory, status, memetics, social dynamics, tribal value-signaling, etc.
The best we can probably hope for is localized, fuzzy consensus on taboos. We might all decide it's inappropriate to criticize sexual behaviors, or bring up religion in polite company; but it's probably fine if someone has strong feelings about adding a stoplight to 3rd & Main, or increasing funding to national parks.
Math is not political.
Sexuality has been a political issue (covered by legal or religious restrictions) in almost every society that has ever existed.
But since Google operates internationally and is involved in so many things, I assume any given political issue is probably job-related somewhere at Google.
Soros funded child rape ring protected by Trump for $4 billion bribe, Pelosi $3 billion to "ensure safe passage over border". Participants include Obama, Schumer, Cuomo, Buttgieg, DeBlasio, Theil, Dorsey, Bill Murray. Over 60+ deaths from rapes, billions in payoffs. Listen to them do it here: BE SURE TO Listen! to previously unprocessed footage now available [Soros, 0bama child rapes 15Jan 4-6am], Obama around 524: "Why is there so much blood? Someone get me something to clean the blood off my dick..."
>>> banned in LA, NYC, CHI, SF, BOS, DC...
*note: -> groups of links are multiple ways to get the same file ->
15JanCh3_347-528.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Q8YeDzghf95FQrxBaMpXK4b-SfJ... https://mega.nz/#!bTQwDQDA!jolSOqGR2Zomhtn7zIG0lGmqXSqe3KG1m...
15JanCh3_528-545.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DavyRFWTRv4_teHYewpQMwMCq6L... https://mega.nz/#!DfBywKKR!llMUzB8DLM2Rcvm0QkOKdiE3PpCY5YeR3...
15JanCh4_400-600.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DavnBCyhq_JRmST2QH5qlojUE6d... https://mega.nz/#!faZggSja!yF_QOcodvYXwk7qEO1N8eSaV90ZWUUaS1...
See pgs 18-23,8,11,12,35,45,61,62, and update list at end of doc.. Having trouble getting traction. Getting censored/banned. Billions in bribes paid to Trump, Pelosi, Schumer, Harris to enable a Soros funded child raping ring to operate in the USA. Please listen to the links below. Turn up the volume and put headphones on. You will hear these people, and many other high profile people, incriminate themselves in unbelievable fashion. Full 80 page document [update 20Aug] filled with red handed evidence like this at the bottom.
Go to pages 18 through 23 of this document and you will hear Dorsey and Thiel raping children. You will hear their screams. They both rape and kill three. Also at the "rape party" of note: Bill DeBlasio, Andrew Cuomo, Bill Murray, Peter Buttgieg, George Soros, Barack Obama.
Please copy and paste this post and repost it, or save it for later because it will likely get removed sooner or later. I keep getting censored by these people.
Bill DeBlasio's turn starts at 2100: https://mega.nz/#!OCJwQSBC!AlER6vRRTKS8yvSxnVwAl3ha3kGDLqoou...
Andrew Cuomo's starts at 2200: https://mega.nz/#!qKZChABY!zy-2jIHqEg4gWHNbiEym-YBdSs5Y9qzT2...
Both files in one here: 14JanCh3_2100-2300.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yolCgVtY5b8d8YDcshwb-Yd3kS0...
Peter Thiel starts at 100, Jack Dorsey at 130 each raping and killing three boys. Turn the volume all the way up and put head phones on.
\0bama admits to raping and killing boys here at about 547, with commentary from Peter Thiel, George Soros, Matt Porter: DTrump demands $4 billion to "take a blind eye" at 1015++ (link missing from report, unsure how). Here's pieces of dialogue:1018 Henry Porter: The child raping. 1018 Donald Trump: What the fuck are you talking about? 1018 Gigi Hadid: Mr. President we are child rapists. 1018 Donald Trump: You cannot be serious. 1018 Donald Trump: You're gonna need $4 billion for me to take a blind eye. 1019 Porter: People are laughing because they think four billion is too much. I think it's not a problem when you have $35 billion. 1022 Donald Trump: You better have that $4 billion or you can kiss this shit goodbye.
Trump wants $138 million to ensure smooth outcome for false judgment, as in no trial or hearing, simlpy entering in a judgement into the system thus bypassing the fifth amendment right of due process: Full 80 page document [updated 20Aug]: \Please post this anywhere you can! Each google drive link is a backup to the wasabi link just in case one is "down". Getting blocked, censored, "downvoted" etc. These people are extremely wealthy and throw money to anyone who will help them cover up their child rapes & murders, corruption. Ironically, this is usually done through a receivership transfer, where you receive the funds after four or more day, and it can be pulled at the last second, whch is usually the case, after you've done them the "service".A word about the "f@\&&ot" usage: it was a necessary tool. It showed three things: they were not in control, if they were the usage would have be stopped. Everyone out there needed to see t%his. Two, it made it unpleasant for them to be in the headspace, which has obvious advantages. Three, it pointed out impersonators of BS because they would not call each other f@%%ot, thus helping to mitigate the spread of false information. Apologies for those unintentionally offended.
Of special interest to the LGBT community, I give you Barack Obama in a foursome with Peter Thiel, Jack Dorsey, and Matthew Porter. It is on page 12 of the document where you can download the video containing audio footage of the "event". Link for the doc is just above under "Full 80 page document".
Sounds like the diametric opposite of China to me. China is actively injecting politics into every aspect of life through, for example, Social Credit[1], which is merely a more systematized method of political control than what has been employed since the communist revolution. Millions of "discredited entities" are being denied the ability to travel, for instance.
[1] https://twitter.com/globaltimesnews/status/11622125157087313...
And because politics are non-discussable, no employee will be able to stop this.
That'll never work.
I think the problem is that mass communication tools being used at biggish companies and up do not foster productive conversations about controversial topics. Trolling scales too well.
Because honestly, all you need to do, in order to form a perfect political opinion, is google for it. No further effort required.
Update: I realize that this comment appears sarcastic and ill-meaning, but the top ranked post on HN is about " Deconstructing Google’s excuses on tracking protection" as of this moment (Friday, August 23, 2019 2:25 PM PDT) [0]. If we take the following together:
1. the open culture at Google as a known good quantity for some of the people who like to work there and keep working there
2. each of the products and services that Google offers today as respective known good quantities
3. The aggregate of Google's influence with respect to how the products and services in 2. sometimes has negative impacts on the marketplace.
4. The size of Google causes the open culture in 1. to start being a hindrance to Google itself.
Then it seems obvious to me that the size and breadth of Google is the problem. I genuinely mean all of this in good-faith. If Google stayed small, then maybe services like Google Reader could still be around because the gap between cost and benefit would not have been as wide.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20779964
A good number of people do nothing but stir shit up on the internal forums and mailing lists. They also seem to be "untouchable" because stirring shit typically takes the form of grievance peddling or white knighting, so if you just let them go, their (rather extensive) cliques would give you hell for "discrimination" and write petitions, go to the press, etc, etc, as we've seen after a few higher profile departures over the past couple of years. You don't want to be called a misogynist or racist for disagreeing with literally anything they say, do you?
It'd be good for the leadership to grow some gender-appropriate gonads, and refocus the company on the business side of things for a change. Activism is fine, just not on the company's time, and not when it impacts the business or other employees. Just like I don't want to hear what church (if any) you go to, or what gender you prefer in bed, I also don't want to know what your political preferences are. Nor do I like to feel obliged to share your opinion any of those things, even if you think you're "right". I'm trying to work. You're getting in the way.
This should apply equally to all: as a conservative, I don't want to hear about conservative issues at work either. I want to hear about work, and _only_ work.