> "Working at Facebook, even as a contractor, was supposed to be the opportunity of a lifetime."
Does anyone really say that working at a tech giant as a non-engineer is an opportunity of a lifetime?
I have had multiple friends who worked at Google on AdSense sales, and it certainly didn't do anything for their careers. I can't imagine it did much for their savings, either.
It certainly seems so to those of us who work in tech, but is that true for "real" newspapers? I'd imagine (and perhaps even hope) that when interviewing for a newspaper job at, say, the New York Times, "Reporter for [unknown local newspaper]" would carry more weight than "Curator of social media at [third party] contracting for Facebook".
Perhaps if they are switching fields to one where people aren't knowledgeable about the actual role. To those of us who have encountered the people in the example, the AdSense sales reps, on an ongoing basis...yeah, I'm not sure that would win them any bonus points.
I think it depends what you do there. If you're a quant developer, or actually working in the investment bank (rather than retail) it's a really good thing to have on your CV. Especially if you actually want to work in fintech.
It really depends on the perspective you bring and what you're comparing it to. If the equivalent alternative to working at Google on AdSense sales is working as a consultant at McKinsey or at Goldman Sachs as an investment banker, then no it may not necessarily be the "opportunity of a lifetime".
To someone in the Silicon Valley bubble comparing a PMM role at Google to a PMM role at Uber or Airbnb, it may be difficult to see the real value of Google on a resume.
However, to most people in the world those roles are all opportunities of a lifetime. If you look at my peers in every job I've held since working at Google and treated Google as a neutral company (i.e. not having any real career boosting value), I would have been by far the least qualified individual in many of those roles. Having Google on my resume landed me interviews and job offers I would not otherwise have gotten.
It also suggests a credibility to employers in the non-engineering world because many believe that an employee at Google must be super intelligent and highly competent. Believe it or not, I'd venture to say that this is more so true outside of Silicon Valley (where Google isn't as common of a former employee among job applicants) than inside. But I think it boosts your career prospects either way.
The key, like most things in life, is how the individual chooses to leverage the name recognition on their resume and supplement that experience with other experiences.
The tech industry is full of stories of meritocratic success, sophisticated technology and abundance of wealth. For the average person working at, or with, one of the big tech companies is going to sound like a good idea. Maybe not the opportunity of a lifetime, but few people can afford to search for those, just a decent job in an industry on the rise. They can't really know that the janitor isn't getting rich anymore, heck he probably can't even afford to live anywhere near the offices.
Getting paid $60k a year probably sounds fantastic if you are a journalist working freelance and grinding out a bunch of free "exposure" on sites that refuse to pay for content.
When people at large start to notice that a given publication or platform -- reddit for instance -- has been compromised by certain left-wing ideologies, you will inevitably see a narrative about its behind-the-scenes/"subtle" sexism/discrimination in very short order.
It's becoming a very predictable trick. I can't imagine I'm the only one who sees this.
> There is no political bias that I know of and we were never told to suppress conservative news. There is an extraordinary amount of talent on the team...
I don't use Facebook, but over the last several years I kept hearing from a number of non-PC type news outlets (that I subscribe to) that even as their media platform grew and doubled and tripled, at the same time their Facebook engagement became a small fraction of what it used to be.
I've also heard that one of the quickest ways to get your Facebook account terminated in Germany is to say anything negative about the current migration situation that becomes popular or starts to get views.
This article IMO is a way to hide the real story with another story.
Can you elaborate on the redefinition of "hate-speech"? How was it previously defined and how has that definition changed? Who changed it?
As an American this is especially interesting to me because we place such value on our freedom of speech but also pay a high price in the hate speech that is viewed as a necessary evil. It seems that the EU has made an attempt to manage this hateful speech but I'm not familiar with the specifics.
AFAIK there has been no "redefinition of hate speech" throughout the EU. It's just that in Germany, Facebook started removing posts that are illegal under German law (libel, incitement of violence...) after they were reminded that they were legally required to do so.
> I've also heard that one of the quickest ways to get your Facebook account terminated in Germany is to say anything negative about the current migration situation that becomes popular or starts to get views.
This is just not true. There a lot of pages and groups that basically do hate speech and most of them are still there. E.g. there is a page called Anonymous that is not connected to the movement that spreads often false conspiracy prone right wring talking points and quack. It's still there (all through posting was disabled? by facebook).
If you post or comment something illegal under german law you can be fined by the police.
I don't know of any immigration critical pages that are civil that got permanently disabled. I reported a page for holocaust denial (illegal in Germany) that got removed after a short period of time but as long as you are civil you are fine. Right wing publication and parties still have their pages.
"Most, if not all, of what you’ve read about Facebook’s Trending team in Gizmodo over the past few weeks has been mischaracterized or taken out of context. There is no political bias that I know of and we were never told to suppress conservative news." That sounds like an insight to me.
> There is no political bias that I know of and we were never told to suppress conservative news.
But then later goes on to say:
> “Facebook relies heavily on just 10 news sources to determine whether a trending news story has editorial authority.” The problem is, even after repeated questions and requests for guidance, no one ever explained what that meant. Much of it was left to interpretation for curators and copy editors. Topics are treated differently depending on who you are working with.
Which leads to a fairly obvious observation: providing insufficient editorial guidelines leaves room for unconscious bias to take over.
Of course, qualified journalists should be aware of their own biases and be able to compensate for them. Unfortunately, journalism in the US is becoming increasingly less valued and more partisan.
I wouldn't be surprised if this whole bias fiasco was an unexpected side-effect of Facebook hiring largely left-leaning editorial staff.
> I wouldn't be surprised if this whole bias fiasco was an unexpected side-effect of Facebook hiring largely left-leaning editorial staff.
I always assumed that this was exactly what's going on. You don't need a handbook that says "stifle conversative stuff", you just need vague rules, managers playing the world's worst game of corporate telephone, and a bunch of disorganization.
>Which leads to a fairly obvious observation: providing insufficient editorial guidelines leaves room for unconscious bias to take over.
Fully agree. Things like this tend to be better explained, as a rule, as side effects, without resorting to agency or conspiracies. That specific information, however is not new as of this article ("As the Guardian reported in leaked documents...." precedes the bit you quoted in TFA).
So should FB admit there may be accidental bias, or double-down on the "everything's fine"? Seems one way they admit to lying and manipulating, and the other way continues to look dishonest.
Probably should have immediately said they'd review it, then found that, uninstructed, some editors may have shown a "slight bias".
And coincidentally it comes out coinciding with a US "conservative" candidate that's talking about rigged processes and unfair treatment.
Because there isn't, unless you believe the mainstream media has a political bias, but then even prominent GOP apparatchiks, like former GOP chair Rich Bond, Jim Baker, and Pat Buchanan would disagree with you.[0]
The most disturbing to me is not even favoritism and sexism conditions at work (which is ironic given Sheryl Sandberg's book and official line), but the fact that Facebook: 1. uses humans to pick the trending topics, which are inherently biased in one way or another; 2. the trending sources are very limited and curated (e.g. no Twitter), which is clearly anti-competitive practices.
None, but it's important that people know that the trending topics are not what's popular on facebook, but rather what facebook employees have decided to promote on facebook.
Other than that, it's their platform and their company. They can run it however they want.
Interesting question. I think that Facebook/Twitter and such are becoming utilities for a sizable chunk of the audience lately. So don't be surprised if they get to their Standard Oil moment in the future.
How would you design an unbiased news recommendation algorithm? You can't - the definition of 'trending' has to include decisions and values.
Is the most-shared story always relevant to a wide audience? An organised brigade (think a grassroots political campaign) could use coordinated sharing to bootstrap their way onto the trending list. That would devalue the trending list.
More broadly, you have to teach code to autonomously infer relevance from ambiguous signals. And once you do that, you're still not unbiased; you've simply delegated bias to your audience.
Humans are not perfect, but I would still privilege human editorial judgement above algorithms for the time being. But I agree the question of what issues and perspectives people are exposed to, and who controls what they see, is incredibly important. Just too important to abstract away to a machine.
Any definition of "trending" will be a function of a set of humans something is trending with.
So, Facebook makes an error of using one set of people to decide what is trending for another set of people. And to be honest, I don't think that typical US journalist has the same taste (and the same political preference, for that matter) as general US population.
The majority of this sounds like low grade managerial issues. Not much here sounds like a big deal IMO. The type of stuff you hear people complain about often when they work at big corporate machines. Even more so when they're stuck in non-core business units, staffed with contractors.
I have a feeling the curators were seen as a necessary evil until the machines were good enough to replace them. So they were treated as such and their work wasn't well planned/prioritized from the top.
The lack of direct guidelines and hand-holding from management indicates that there wasn't much interest in establishing long-term processes. Which high-turnover contractor worker bees usually require, compared to leaving them alone where they are required to make their own decisions (with potential consequences).
Well, maybe so, but it's hardly surprising that people feel a little resentful about this when they're working at one of the world's premiere workplaces and can see people right in front of them doing much better.
I have tons of friends at Facebook and have gone to the Holiday parties for the last 7 years. I have heard a few similar stories, but the vast majority seem to love it. I think if someone is willing to publicly shame a company so big because of their bad experience, it really shows their lack of intelligence. Certainly experiences vary and if it was really a toxic environment for women, why do so any women love it?
Contractors are second-class citizens at best, at any places so what was she expecting exactly? I don't mean to deride the writer but I'm honestly not sure if the janitors would think that working at FB is the opportunity of a lifetime, and I place more values at keeping places clean and tidy than curating news with an obvious bias (hint - I don't read them). There is nothing world-changing about picking out articles as a stepping stone for being replaced by algorithms. If you can't speak up, it means you are weak, the environment is toxic or both. So do something about it, or walk away like what the men do.
When you have the unique skill, you're better off being labelled as 'consultant'. The terms might be used interchangeably yet I've seen the power dynamics being consultant > full-timer > part-timer > contractor.
Sadly that seems to be a trend. Sites started to assume that your screen is taller than it is wide a while back.
It might be a combination of designers and writers working on large monitors, having multiple tall narrow windows open, and people using iPads in portrait mode.
Users of 11" and 13" laptops seems to have been forgotten in this new design trend.
Not sure. It's impossible to know all of the site drama, but I only casually browse and still I have seen quite a few posts at the top of reddit appearing from the_donald that cover those or similar stories.
The broader conversation is very interesting on a number of levels, but I have a specific question for this audience... do you actually pay attention to the trending topics on Facebook? They're not prominently displayed and if FB really wanted to influence the conversation on X, they could be doing so much more IMO. I feel like they're still trying to test their way into this experience.
> "I still carry the fear of speaking up with me. I find myself holding back when I see a problem or afraid to speak up when I have an idea."
This sounds a bit drama-queeny. She manages to seamlessly blend workplace sexism with product failures and other complaints all in a few sentences. To me that sounds like a broad swipe at her employer, the details and truth of which are far from conclusive based on her words alone.
It's not an easy topic to sum up neatly, but sexist allegations often have an unjustified momentum. Joining dots and drawing conclusions about co-worker and manager intent, when often the explanation is quite different.
For example, the first time someone complains about a discrepancy, it may be ignored not because the complainer was a woman, but that it was the first complaint. When others start to complain about the same thing, action is more likely to happen. A woman seeking evidence of sexism in the workplace will ignore the sensible explanation, and hurry to point the finger: "you ignored my complaint because I'm a woman".
Cognitive bias in the workplace is unfortunately the more likely story, less interesting as it may be. I enjoy a good "what did FB do wrong now" article, but I can't swallow this one.
FB in my view can pretty much dictate what it wants news wise which doesn't affect me because I don't get my news from once source but I wonder whom the people that sort of the stories are after they are spit out by the algorithm ?
Reading her comments it made me wonder if women might be disposed to scar more easily (or men are more defiant) from this kind of treatment, creating a negative feedback loop in subsequent jobs and roles which negatively affects their careers. This is not intended to be a criticism of women, but rather it's question which may have important implications. Men may externalize this kind of sandbagging and stonewalling while women may tend to internalize it. If so it may be a much bigger deal than it may appear to a man because we're damaging our talent pool.
That's a whole lot of hypothetical generalizing about women and men, based on absolutely no evidence. Try swapping "men" for "women" (and vice versa) in your comment to see how obnoxious it sounds.
It doesn't seem particularly obnoxious either way, as far as I can tell. Do people really have to be scolded for hypothesizing about correlations between sex and other characteristics?
What kind of argument is this? You seem to believe that if the reverse hypothesis "sounds obnoxious" then the direct hypothesis must surely be false. The fact is that if what the parent is saying happens to be true, then the reverse is bond to sound obnoxious.
"Reading his comments it made me wonder if men might be disposed to scar more easily (or women are more defiant) from this kind of treatment, creating a negative feedback loop in subsequent jobs and roles which negatively affects their careers. This is not intended to be a criticism of men, but rather it's question which may have important implications. Women may externalize this kind of sandbagging and stonewalling while men may tend to internalize it. If so it may be a much bigger deal than it may appear to a woman because we're damaging our talent pool."
Could have maybe used a couple more "tend to" statements, but doesn't seem horribly unreasonable to me.
(And looks, in many ways, equally valid as a hypothesis. Not in all elements, but there is a culture of the "strong man" who simply internalises stress and conflict in a lot of places.)
I'd suggest that a more accurate line would be "our culture dictates that if it's a man's problem, it gets fixed, if it's a woman's problem then nothing gets fixed unless enough noise is made about it, which leads to people like you listening to the noise and thinking women's problems are the ones the world cares about". Not that it's at all that black and white of course. But for you to somehow paint our world as sexist against men is... hmm.
If women's problems are ignored, then who's making the noise? And who is broadcasting it across the news networks? Why is "Not enough women in tech jobs" a national story for months on end, and even the presidential candidates make it an issue, if our culture doesn't consider it everyone's problem.
Why isn't that level of intensity of noise given to issues like men not going to university as much as women? Where are the men-only scholarships? Where are the university quotas for men?
Why are only men drafted? Why are they almost always sent to the front lines to fight and die and women, if they decide to join the military, are given much safer support roles?
Why are there more male suicides then women?
Why are men almost exclusively put in jail for failing to pay child support even though there is a greater percentage of deadbeat moms than deadbeat dads.
Who is supposedly "fixing men's problems"? The candidates don't care. The news doesn't care. The only one who can seem to do it is the man himself.
You are a brave soul to bring such facts into this conversation my friend. Many, many users on HN have been hellbanned for stating facts without any political bias.
For example, it is very likely that I will get banned for this statement:
"The Y chromosome in primates results in sexual dimorphism, which leads to differences in physiology and behavior between the sexes."
A research team in Sweden wanted to test if there existed bias in who get declared criminal insane. They took a larger number of current working criminal psychiatrist and gave them a fake profile of a criminal. For half the participants, the otherwise identical profile had the name of the criminal be that of a typical male, and the other half got the profile with a typical female name. Everything else being equal, both group should have rated the profile as equally in/sane.
The result was that the female version was 4 times more likely to be deemed criminal insane and thus not responsible for their action. This has real effect on justice, and its not getting fixed in any time soon. The culture just is that men who do bad things are evil, and women who do bad things are insane, and justice reflect the people who live in that culture.
Or to bring an other example. In the duration of a single week there were two stories on Swedish national news. In the first one, a young women was put against her will in a mental institute, and had her arms and leg put into a cast in order to "prevent her from harming herself". The cause of this was a meeting with a psychiatrist where she had said "I don't know what I might do to myself", and the whole story was presented as an strong example of current overreaction by the psychiatric system towards women.
The second story had a man go to the hospital telling the staff that he was hearing gods voice and it was telling him to kill his daughter in order to grant her eternal life. The staff sad that it sounded serious, but the psychiatry ward were full so he should return next week. He then went home and murdered his daughter with a knife. The hospital said in the article that maybe they should taken the situation a bit more serious.
The problems that get fixed are only those that fit the current gender culture and gender identity. Men are all strong, has perfect health, and are wealthy, so biases from those assumptions are not getting fixed any time soon. Same is true for biases for women, in that the biases that people do care about is those that fit current gender culture and gender identity. Neither women or men is benefiting from this.
>"Every day, I sifted through hundreds of topics (or “keywords”) that Facebook told me were trending on the platform. Then I’d choose a story about the keyword(...)"
>“Facebook relies heavily on just 10 news sources to determine whether a trending news story has editorial authority.”
>"Several times curators were penalized for using Twitter in descriptions."
It seems that Facebook is likely to manipulate the news by selecting the "right" sources. If there's bias it most likely come from the selection, I wonder what are the source titles. Also, penalizing for mentioning Twitter shows that they put their own intrest over their users. It is understandable to some degree from the economic point of view, but it also shows the danger of having one company dominating the market. Facebook is not that benign, even now.
Even if you have the score and sources, I still think you'd need good guidelines. The problem is, nobody seems to know what these guidelines are in Facebook, and nobody outside of Facebook can review them!
The Trending Team seem to be treated as if they are a tool of the engineers. A very good piece of software that the engineering can make use of and integrate into their systems. They mustn't forget that they are actually people!
>"A former contractor says that while the social media company did not impose political bias upon news ‘curators’, she and other employees were subject to poor management, intimidation and sexism that left them feeling voiceless"
93 comments
[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadDoes anyone really say that working at a tech giant as a non-engineer is an opportunity of a lifetime?
I have had multiple friends who worked at Google on AdSense sales, and it certainly didn't do anything for their careers. I can't imagine it did much for their savings, either.
Most editorial jobs nowadays want exactly "social media curator at <Big Internet Co>", because that's where the market is going.
Unlike SWE, journalism (and many other careers) isn't really a career where recruiters just jump at you from the bushes if you're distracted.
A lot of people actually go on unpaid internships to try and get a job.
> Does anyone really say that working at a tech giant as a non-engineer is an opportunity of a lifetime?
The author is a journalist, practicing in a field which has been decimated, writing about working @ the most popular platform on the planet.
Working as a contractor.
To someone in the Silicon Valley bubble comparing a PMM role at Google to a PMM role at Uber or Airbnb, it may be difficult to see the real value of Google on a resume.
However, to most people in the world those roles are all opportunities of a lifetime. If you look at my peers in every job I've held since working at Google and treated Google as a neutral company (i.e. not having any real career boosting value), I would have been by far the least qualified individual in many of those roles. Having Google on my resume landed me interviews and job offers I would not otherwise have gotten.
It also suggests a credibility to employers in the non-engineering world because many believe that an employee at Google must be super intelligent and highly competent. Believe it or not, I'd venture to say that this is more so true outside of Silicon Valley (where Google isn't as common of a former employee among job applicants) than inside. But I think it boosts your career prospects either way.
The key, like most things in life, is how the individual chooses to leverage the name recognition on their resume and supplement that experience with other experiences.
There are no journalism/writing jobs that have the kinds of perks that big tech firms have. Free lunch every day?!
Sentiment like that probably played a part at such toxic environment at places like these..
It's becoming a very predictable trick. I can't imagine I'm the only one who sees this.
Which ones?
I don't use Facebook, but over the last several years I kept hearing from a number of non-PC type news outlets (that I subscribe to) that even as their media platform grew and doubled and tripled, at the same time their Facebook engagement became a small fraction of what it used to be.
I've also heard that one of the quickest ways to get your Facebook account terminated in Germany is to say anything negative about the current migration situation that becomes popular or starts to get views.
This article IMO is a way to hide the real story with another story.
I'm not defending Facebook but I have yet to see any substance to the argument that they are manipulating the conversation on their platform.
But here is one about Germany - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/26/mark-zuck...
Though to understand what it is really talking about, you have to understand the redefinition of "hate speech" that has happened through-out the EU.
As an American this is especially interesting to me because we place such value on our freedom of speech but also pay a high price in the hate speech that is viewed as a necessary evil. It seems that the EU has made an attempt to manage this hateful speech but I'm not familiar with the specifics.
German blog post about it: http://www.internet-law.de/2015/09/muss-facebook-staerker-ge...
This is just not true. There a lot of pages and groups that basically do hate speech and most of them are still there. E.g. there is a page called Anonymous that is not connected to the movement that spreads often false conspiracy prone right wring talking points and quack. It's still there (all through posting was disabled? by facebook).
If you post or comment something illegal under german law you can be fined by the police.
I don't know of any immigration critical pages that are civil that got permanently disabled. I reported a page for holocaust denial (illegal in Germany) that got removed after a short period of time but as long as you are civil you are fine. Right wing publication and parties still have their pages.
> There is no political bias that I know of and we were never told to suppress conservative news.
But then later goes on to say:
> “Facebook relies heavily on just 10 news sources to determine whether a trending news story has editorial authority.” The problem is, even after repeated questions and requests for guidance, no one ever explained what that meant. Much of it was left to interpretation for curators and copy editors. Topics are treated differently depending on who you are working with.
Which leads to a fairly obvious observation: providing insufficient editorial guidelines leaves room for unconscious bias to take over.
Of course, qualified journalists should be aware of their own biases and be able to compensate for them. Unfortunately, journalism in the US is becoming increasingly less valued and more partisan.
I wouldn't be surprised if this whole bias fiasco was an unexpected side-effect of Facebook hiring largely left-leaning editorial staff.
I always assumed that this was exactly what's going on. You don't need a handbook that says "stifle conversative stuff", you just need vague rules, managers playing the world's worst game of corporate telephone, and a bunch of disorganization.
Life at large companies...
If you are unable to see through the looking glass, then why would you ever come to the conclusion that you're biased?
Why do people seem to think all journalists are left-leaning?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/05/06/ju...
Without logical points to debate, your comment is just noise.
Unfortunately, so is my reply.
So, average bay area residents...
Fully agree. Things like this tend to be better explained, as a rule, as side effects, without resorting to agency or conspiracies. That specific information, however is not new as of this article ("As the Guardian reported in leaked documents...." precedes the bit you quoted in TFA).
Probably should have immediately said they'd review it, then found that, uninstructed, some editors may have shown a "slight bias".
And coincidentally it comes out coinciding with a US "conservative" candidate that's talking about rigged processes and unfair treatment.
[0]https://fbnewsroomus.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/full-trendi...
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/16/books/chapters/0316-1st-al...
Also this isn't just about censoring Twitter as a source, but rather twitter as a topic in an trending topic.
Tangentially related: should facebook hide posts made by Twitter employees?
Other than that, it's their platform and their company. They can run it however they want.
Is the most-shared story always relevant to a wide audience? An organised brigade (think a grassroots political campaign) could use coordinated sharing to bootstrap their way onto the trending list. That would devalue the trending list.
More broadly, you have to teach code to autonomously infer relevance from ambiguous signals. And once you do that, you're still not unbiased; you've simply delegated bias to your audience.
Humans are not perfect, but I would still privilege human editorial judgement above algorithms for the time being. But I agree the question of what issues and perspectives people are exposed to, and who controls what they see, is incredibly important. Just too important to abstract away to a machine.
Does anyone even take Guardian seriously except liberal left socialists living in a dream world?
Isn't the definition of trending that something got into a positive human-bias feedback loop?
So, Facebook makes an error of using one set of people to decide what is trending for another set of people. And to be honest, I don't think that typical US journalist has the same taste (and the same political preference, for that matter) as general US population.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_%28Eggers_novel%29
I have a feeling the curators were seen as a necessary evil until the machines were good enough to replace them. So they were treated as such and their work wasn't well planned/prioritized from the top.
The lack of direct guidelines and hand-holding from management indicates that there wasn't much interest in establishing long-term processes. Which high-turnover contractor worker bees usually require, compared to leaving them alone where they are required to make their own decisions (with potential consequences).
If they just need you to get more work done, you may be right.
But if you got a skill no one else at the company has, they are rather nice to you.
I can't make heads or tails of what I'm supposed to pay attention to.
It might be a combination of designers and writers working on large monitors, having multiple tall narrow windows open, and people using iPads in portrait mode.
Users of 11" and 13" laptops seems to have been forgotten in this new design trend.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11727133 and marked it off-topic.
This sounds a bit drama-queeny. She manages to seamlessly blend workplace sexism with product failures and other complaints all in a few sentences. To me that sounds like a broad swipe at her employer, the details and truth of which are far from conclusive based on her words alone.
It's not an easy topic to sum up neatly, but sexist allegations often have an unjustified momentum. Joining dots and drawing conclusions about co-worker and manager intent, when often the explanation is quite different.
For example, the first time someone complains about a discrepancy, it may be ignored not because the complainer was a woman, but that it was the first complaint. When others start to complain about the same thing, action is more likely to happen. A woman seeking evidence of sexism in the workplace will ignore the sensible explanation, and hurry to point the finger: "you ignored my complaint because I'm a woman".
Cognitive bias in the workplace is unfortunately the more likely story, less interesting as it may be. I enjoy a good "what did FB do wrong now" article, but I can't swallow this one.
"Reading his comments it made me wonder if men might be disposed to scar more easily (or women are more defiant) from this kind of treatment, creating a negative feedback loop in subsequent jobs and roles which negatively affects their careers. This is not intended to be a criticism of men, but rather it's question which may have important implications. Women may externalize this kind of sandbagging and stonewalling while men may tend to internalize it. If so it may be a much bigger deal than it may appear to a woman because we're damaging our talent pool."
Could have maybe used a couple more "tend to" statements, but doesn't seem horribly unreasonable to me.
(And looks, in many ways, equally valid as a hypothesis. Not in all elements, but there is a culture of the "strong man" who simply internalises stress and conflict in a lot of places.)
Why isn't that level of intensity of noise given to issues like men not going to university as much as women? Where are the men-only scholarships? Where are the university quotas for men?
Why are only men drafted? Why are they almost always sent to the front lines to fight and die and women, if they decide to join the military, are given much safer support roles?
Why are there more male suicides then women?
Why are men almost exclusively put in jail for failing to pay child support even though there is a greater percentage of deadbeat moms than deadbeat dads.
Who is supposedly "fixing men's problems"? The candidates don't care. The news doesn't care. The only one who can seem to do it is the man himself.
I stand by my statement.
For example, it is very likely that I will get banned for this statement:
"The Y chromosome in primates results in sexual dimorphism, which leads to differences in physiology and behavior between the sexes."
A research team in Sweden wanted to test if there existed bias in who get declared criminal insane. They took a larger number of current working criminal psychiatrist and gave them a fake profile of a criminal. For half the participants, the otherwise identical profile had the name of the criminal be that of a typical male, and the other half got the profile with a typical female name. Everything else being equal, both group should have rated the profile as equally in/sane.
The result was that the female version was 4 times more likely to be deemed criminal insane and thus not responsible for their action. This has real effect on justice, and its not getting fixed in any time soon. The culture just is that men who do bad things are evil, and women who do bad things are insane, and justice reflect the people who live in that culture.
Or to bring an other example. In the duration of a single week there were two stories on Swedish national news. In the first one, a young women was put against her will in a mental institute, and had her arms and leg put into a cast in order to "prevent her from harming herself". The cause of this was a meeting with a psychiatrist where she had said "I don't know what I might do to myself", and the whole story was presented as an strong example of current overreaction by the psychiatric system towards women.
The second story had a man go to the hospital telling the staff that he was hearing gods voice and it was telling him to kill his daughter in order to grant her eternal life. The staff sad that it sounded serious, but the psychiatry ward were full so he should return next week. He then went home and murdered his daughter with a knife. The hospital said in the article that maybe they should taken the situation a bit more serious.
The problems that get fixed are only those that fit the current gender culture and gender identity. Men are all strong, has perfect health, and are wealthy, so biases from those assumptions are not getting fixed any time soon. Same is true for biases for women, in that the biases that people do care about is those that fit current gender culture and gender identity. Neither women or men is benefiting from this.
>“Facebook relies heavily on just 10 news sources to determine whether a trending news story has editorial authority.”
>"Several times curators were penalized for using Twitter in descriptions."
It seems that Facebook is likely to manipulate the news by selecting the "right" sources. If there's bias it most likely come from the selection, I wonder what are the source titles. Also, penalizing for mentioning Twitter shows that they put their own intrest over their users. It is understandable to some degree from the economic point of view, but it also shows the danger of having one company dominating the market. Facebook is not that benign, even now.
That's quite disturbing