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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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].
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.)
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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'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 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
Why shouldn’t employees of the company with the goal of organizing all the worlds information debate politics? Everything is political. Especially information.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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 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.”
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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".
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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'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".
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.
> 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”?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
---------
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.
> 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.
> 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."
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 344 ms ] threadWhat are you complaining about? Clearly you don't mind racism and sexism.
i'm paid to be professional and do my job. there's nothing to do with being male or white.
> creating a team of moderators to monitor conversations on company chat boards
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.
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.
Seems completely reasonable for an employer to moderate internal message boards, of all entities.
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.
..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.
Guns are power, power is political.
Math is not 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.
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...
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 :)
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
"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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What? Says who?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Math is not political.
https://pbfcomics.com/comics/skub/
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"?
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.
http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3947
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I mean, wasting 10 minutes is wasting 10 minutes, whether I'm talking about politics or football or TV.
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
There's a difference between "differing world views" and "I don't think people of your race should be allowed in this country."
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.
https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1120320958382755840
@Pinboard has collected a bunch of these.
https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Apinboard%20PAC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_in_the_United...
Google is usually maxing the donations it's allowed.
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.
Edit: very high, it seems https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Apinboard%20PAC
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.
I'm having a hard time finding politics in: "Hey $COWORKER, how's that REST endpoint coming along?"
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.
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.
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.”
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.
That'll never work.
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?
>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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.
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.
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.
They may have had to make the restrictions overly broad to avoid tripping over some labor organization laws.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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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.
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.
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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."
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Womanizer: a man who often has temporary sexual relationships with women or tries to get women to have sex with him.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
You don't, you just need to understand that the idea that identity is always centered on immutable characteristics is wrong.
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.
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.
This is sort of the lesson of Europe from the 30 years war to doay.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And because politics are non-discussable, no employee will be able to stop this.
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.
(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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Are you aware that Google solicited that feedback?
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.
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.”
> 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.
> 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.
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.
"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.
Are you referring to James Damore's memo?