It feels like you have to squint fairly hard at this point to continue to see Facebook in the same terms that they define themselves as just being interested in "presenting the marketplace of ideas".
This seems to be the latest in a pretty long series of actions that seem contrary to that idea and that something else might be the real motivating factor.
"CERTIFICATE OF INCORPORATION OF FACEBOOK, INC. ARTICLE III: The purpose of the Corporation is to engage in any lawful act or activity for which corporations may be organized under the Delaware General Corporation Law."
Facebook is no different than any other Delaware corporation. Facebook exists to do anything and everything that will profit its shareholders. Everything else is just PR.
I saw this yesterday. There were a shocking number of people bringing up and defending people like James Damore, the misogynist Google memo guy who guest starred on white power podcasts like Stefan Molyneux's. I don't like to be an an echo chamber, but I feel like praising that sort of thing is definitely in the relm of "far right" and makes me wonder if that's the sort of people HN is attracting?
What's funny? Unionizing in the advertising/tech industry to push a political agenda is acting like sheep! How does anyone get fooled into this kind of philosophy? Mob rules? Look at the big picture and think for yourself for a change.
It's funny how the managers, executives, board of directors, stockholders, business associations and their lobbyists all act together, pushing the political agenda - acting as a mob, as sheep - coming to a consensus - but we who are actually doing the work are lectured to isolate ourselves from one another, and not be a sheep who join a mob.
Excellent point but you're also advocating for a race to the bottom and us-versus-them mentality, which would certainly weaken your product. If anything we need greater attention to the employment-at-will legal standard in most industries, so that poor management can be dealt with effectively (if at all). Anyway it's hard to believe that widespread corruption could be rooted out by an uprising of young angry geeks :)
Is there actual literature on unionizing in software engineering, or is it mostly impassioned blog posts?
It's got nothing to do with echo chambers. The response to his memo might have been a little overblown, but anyone who associates with someone like Molyneux makes quite clear where they stand.
>makes me wonder if that's the sort of people HN is attracting?
I'm not sure about HN, but there's a pretty large subculture of hyper-reactionary stuff in tech around Curtis Yarvin, Thiel, and so on that's been seeping into mainstream communities for ages.
If we're honest, a lot of that is less extreme than a lot of what happens on the "crazy", "woke", "left" these days that we're all kinda accepting and in a lot of cases promoting.
The difference is one is "kinda" accepted and promoted under the guise of "justice", whilst the other is shunned as "extremist" and "far right".
This is not "less extreme" than what you're referencing:
“You cannot run a high IQ [white] society with low IQ [non-white] people…these [non-white] immigrants are going to fail...and they're not just going to fail a little, they are going to fail hard…they're not staying on welfare because they’re lazy...they’re doing what is economically the best option for them...you are importing a gene set that is incompatible with success in a free-market economy.”
The whole point is those white nationalist beliefs are par for the course within that demographic.
You're making generalizations about other groups with no substantive data.
Yes, you _may_ be able to find a left-leaning racist spouting absurdities like this, but it isn't indicative of that group as a whole...the far-right, white nationalist demographic has these vile beliefs as a foundation of their platform.
Molyneux being an extremist does not mean that Danmore must necessarily be an extremist. Contrary to what many people seem to believe, you can appear on a talk show with someone you disagree strongly with, or be interviewed by the same.
And, personally, if I was being lambasted in the mainstream media, I'd be taking whatever opportunities I could to put my side of the story out there, without looking too hard into who was offering a helping hand. I think that's true of just about everyone.
It’s entirely in keeping with the class character of HN: labour aristocracy (well paid workers) and petty bourgeoisie (small business owners). That is historically the social base of the far right.
You're painting with a very broad brush there. There are a lot of reasonable, good people that would disagree with your interpretations of those people/podcasts/events. I.e. the debate is far from settled, and it should be open for discussion such as we have here on HN.
“I don’t view humanity as a single species...”
—Podcast FDR2768, “Collective Guilt for Fun and Profit”, Saturday call-in show, August 9, 2014
“The whole breeding arena of the species needs to be cleaned the f--- up!”
—Podcast FDR2740, “Conformity and the Cult of ‘Friendship’,” Wednesday call-in show July 2, 2014
"Screaming 'racism' at people because blacks are collectively less intelligent...is insane."
—YouTube video, The Death of Europe | European Migrant Crisis, October 4, 2015
“You cannot run a high IQ [white] society with low IQ [non-white] people…these [non-white] immigrants are going to fail...and they're not just going to fail a little, they are going to fail hard…they're not staying on welfare because they’re lazy...they’re doing what is economically the best option for them...you are importing a gene set that is incompatible with success in a free-market economy.”
—YouTube video, The Death of Europe | European Migrant Crisis, October 4, 2015
“...white people will bend over backwards to accommodate you, but when they finally get that they’re just being taken advantage of...you will see a backlash, and that backlash will be quick, decisive, and brutal.”
—YouTube video, The Death of Germany | European Migrant Crisis, September 16, 2015
Molyneux is detestable but SLPC has no credibility. They recently settled a defamation lawsuit against Majid Nawaz an anti-extremism Muslim reformer who they labeled as an anti-muslim extremist. It's in the same vein as people who call Ben Shapiro, an orthodox jew, a Nazi. It's simply ridiculous hysterics.
No... It's to point out that the particular claim to authority that SPLC is the adjudicator on who is racist or not is stupid. OP could have easily posted the quote directly from Molyneux's twitter or wherever he rants at without invoking SPLC.
That's Molyneux though, not Damore, right? Because the GP comment spoke about Damore and all the people who "defended" (aka didn't condemn and had actually read the memo) him. That suddenly turned into "praising that sort of thing" and suddenly it's "far right", which turns into back seat moderation in the form of (paraphrased) "do we really want the literal Nazis here?"
It's a terrible comment that belongs on Reddit, not HN.
The only "defense" I saw were against people who were grossly misrepresenting what Damore had said. If you contrive a fiction to push your narrative, expect pushback.
As to what shows Damore appeared on, note that this was after he was fired by Google and pilloried by a large portion of the pitchfork "simplify everything to an easy villain" mob. It isn't surprising that he leveraged the small group that didn't ostracize him.
Damore's essay was horrendously poorly considered. People like Molyneux are effectively clowns playing to an audience that they can monetize. This doesn't change the fact that Damore's core argument was actually fairly reasonable.
The simple reality that every fist-pounding critic needs to grossly misrepresent what Damore said, turning it into some grotesque caricature far detached from truth, is revealing.
Stefan Molyneux is a pig but your characterization of Damore is low effort and more or less completely wrong. If you read the memo it is a relatively straightforward review of standard Biology and Psychology research. There's virtually nothing controversial in it. If you have issues with it you have issues with science. Which given the "decolonize" science lunacy recently isn't surprising. China is laughing all the way to the bank as both sides of the political divide in the West largely and the US specifically abandon logic and reason for superstition and dogma.
> If you have issues with it you have issues with science.
Dogmatic statements like these just weaken your case; the idea that some memo was the Golden Standard™ of Science and those who question it are questioning Science itself is clearly ridiculous. It's Trump-level hyporbole. The perfect memo.
Damore's evidence was by turns cherry picked, misinterpreted, and unrepresentative of mainstream understanding in the fields it came from. You can read plenty of those researchers complaining about his use of their work. His synthesis is about as scientific as phrenology.
Memo line: "Women, on average, have more Openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Women generally
also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men"
Research summary: "I summarize data from two meta‐analyses and three cross‐cultural studies on gender differences in personality and interests. Results show that gender differences in Big Five personality traits are ‘small’ to ‘moderate,’ with the largest differences occurring for agreeableness and neuroticism (respective d s = 0.40 and 0.34; women higher than men). In contrast, gender differences on the people–things dimension of interests are ‘very large’ (d = 1.18), with women more people‐oriented and less thing‐oriented than men."
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1751-9004...
Wow.. totally misrepresented the research there...
Memo: "Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for
status on average"
Memo: "Women, on average, have more Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance)."
Research: "Secondary analyses of Revised NEO Personality inventory data from 26 cultures (N =23,031) suggest that gender differences are small relative to individual variation within genders; differences are replicated across cultures for both college-age and adult samples, and differences are broadly consistent with gender stereotypes: Women reported themselves to be higher in Neuroticism, Agreeableness, Warmth, and Openness to Feelings, whereas men were higher in Assertiveness and Openness to Ideas"
https://doi.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0022-3514.81.2....
Omg he totally misrepresented the research there...
"your characterization of Damore is low effort and more or less completely wrong".
Your characterization of Damore is equally low effort. The memo is not simply a "relatively straightfoward review of standard Biology and Psychology research". Even if I were to agree that those parts of it were non-controversial, those parts of it are not the point or intention of the memo.
You are completely ignoring the arguments Damore actually makes, that were built on faulty premises and selected studies that validate his worldview. Some of his statements might be non-controversial in isolation, but have been constructed to build a specific narrative about diversity and inclusion. You are also completely ignoring the context in which this memo was distributed, surfaced, and the channels through which it was ultimately publicized.
Damore clearly had an agenda and his own bias against what he perceived as PC-culture at Google. Trying to frame him as some neutral observer of the behavioral psychology of Googlers is ignorant, if not disingenuous.
>have been constructed to build a specific narrative about diversity and inclusion
Just for reference, the first line in the memo is literally: "I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using
stereotypes"
But you kapnobatairza, you actually know what was in Damore's heart better than he himself. You are an oracle and a prophet and the bringer of truth. 2+2=5 amirite.
There is a kneejerk defensive pro D'amore response in a place like this because a bunch of youngish right leaning white dudes see themselves in him. So if you say something disparaging you are attacking Self.
The original memo runs against current mores, and the science is wobbly, but it's not outrageous. Perhaps it's wrong, but it's not outrageous to be wrong! On the other hand, once he was kicked out of Google, he quickly fell in with some nasty characters, like Molyneux.
If you only heard about the memo, and missed or skimmed over the subsequent stuff, it's easy to see Damore as a victim of the dreaded cancel culture. Whereas if you didn't read the memo but saw what he was up to afterwards, it's easy to see him as a straightforward villain.
It wasn't a mysoginist memo, don't be so low effort. He isn't a scientist but he actually bring up stuff that was already being discussed when I studied sociology and AFAIK it's far from being settled.
Toward the beginning of the memo, Damore lists personality differences, on average, between men and women. The third item is that women have more “ Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance)”. I don’t know Damore so I can’t tell you whether he is a mysoginist or not, but he certainly uses arguments and language that mysogonists do. This is just one example of problematic areas of his memo. I realize there’s more to his memo, but I wanted to bring up a concrete example.
Here’s the thing. I get that our current research says men and women are in some ways different, and I don’t think stating that is controversial. But to use that as an argument for why some degree of inequality in the workplace is ok, just doesn’t pass muster. To your point, there’s a lot we still don’t understand about how our biology works, so if you’re going to use research as a reason to limit people, that’s a whole other bar to clear.
Trying to explain inequality or arguing about the performance of current practices are by no mean justification of anything.
Also, it's important to remember that he was fired. And this is central to the whole thing.
IDK, that may be viewed differently from the US, but from my pov it's clear that he was persecuted because of ideological reasons, painting Google as a reactionary organization.
And that's specially bad because Google is extremely powerful. Another stone in the bucket to mistrust Google.
It is mildly off-topic, but it is not intended to derail this conversation. Did anyone else notice that Buzzfeednews and Yahoo news gotten somewhat decent ( as in, Yahoo actually had an in-depth analysis that wasn't all talking points ).
From my basic understanding is that Buzzfeed != Buzzfeed News. News is apparently a well run organization and it’s a shame that it uses the same brand for this very reason.
I'm sure they must have had a conversation on the trade-off of having a "known name" attached to their investigative journalism wing and that very "known name" causing them to be negatively associated with vacuous listicles. Maybe once Buzzfeed News becomes a brand strong enough to stand on its own it'll be spun off as a separate organization altogether.
It sounds like the issue is that fact-checkers are being overridden sometimes when they flag right-wing news sources. I think that if you asked a right-wing person, they would tell you that many of these fact-checker organizations have a distinct left-wing bias. Maybe they (the fact-checkers) aren’t infallible and get it wrong sometimes?
I don't care enough to have a horse in this particular comment race, but your comment is an obvious example of whataboutism. Not a solid foundation for any argument, regardless of the content. Something to consider. Plus the op specifically mentioned falability in fact checkers.
> Whataboutism, also known as whataboutery, is a variant of the tu quoque logical fallacy that attempts to discredit an opponent's position by charging them with hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving their argument.
I'm directly providing a counter example. Most people here are very well equipped to understand the nuance of the warrantless surveillance issue and why the fact checker was quite wrong - part of why it's a meaningful case.
Funny enough, your first statement is an example of the bandwagon fallacy. "Well I'm just a neutral party but..."
Well, since none of the overridden fact checks were described in the article (which seems like a failure of journalism to me) we can’t really know. Anyways Facebook is a private company, they can do whatever they want, right?
Another aspect is that a lot of non-left, or right-leaning viewpoints have been categorized into "naughty idea" territory, despite a lot of reasonable people holding them. E.g. Things such as: Being against mass-migration from 3rd world countries to the west, wanting racially homogenous societies, removing welfare, building a wall, racial profiling, there being no gender pay-gap, protesting spreads the virus, BLM are agitators, etc. All non-inherently "evil" ideas, but we've moved into a territory where they're seen as hateful and as such the mainstream is primed to attack them. That is now manifesting (or stared in?) the internet, and we're seeing the consequences everywhere as a result.
We actually seem to be creeping past "holding those viewpoints results in cancellation" into "not actively condemning those viewpoints results in cancellation".
Sorry, what on Earth are you babbling about? I think the vast majority of decent people if challenged to think about things like "racial profiling, wanting racially homogenous societies, removing welfare" would realize that those ARE inherently evil (and anti-human) ideas. Really disgusting post ringing of racial supremacy.
Wanting racially homegeneous societies is an "evil idea" because to create one, you have to remove groups of people from a society based on their race.
Isn't it what liberals want to do the other way around, when they say that there are too many whites here, too many whites there... gradually pushing for quotas, etc ?
I agree with you, people shouldn't be removed, ejected, forced to move, etc from a society based on their race or at all for any matter (though we kinda collectively agreed that that's okay for criminals? Separate discussion I guess.). What is evil is forcing people to do things against their will, period. But people wanting to be in groups similar to them isn't inherently evil, and I think we need to get past that in conversation. E.g. right now I would definitely prefer to be with people I share common nationality, interest, culture with.
I fear we're in dangerous territory where all such distinctions and nuance are lost in the shouting, essentially making us all "evil" in some way or another.
Eastern Europe has never been homogeneous, except in myth. There have been waves of different peoples coming through since the ice ages, and there has been mingling all along.
Baffled that you’re being downvoted; there’s plenty of arguments for and against those ideas. It’s difficult to come a consensus when the debates surrounding them increasingly turn to shouting matches, Internet rumours and “cancellation”
You're baffled that the person suggesting that creating a racially pure ethnostate is a reasonable idea worthy of discussion is being downvoted? Really? This was literally, not in any sense being hyperbolic, the goal of Hitler and the Nazis. What baffles me is how this talking point has apparently become normalized enough not to be immediately shouted down by every user on this website.
They've suggested that there's a variety of ideas that are no longer discussable for fear of being seen as hateful or evil. You've chosen just one of their many examples and immediately jumped to Nazism and Hitler, in doing so you're proving the parents point.
The problem with most of your "reasonable ideas" (except racially homogenous societies which is straight up racist) is that they have consistently been used for racist reasons in history. I think if you hold almost any of these (except perhaps the first), you should take a good long look in the mirror and research the history behind these.
Facebook seems to have a conservative bias. I've never used it myself though, so I can't completely say. I'm also not saying whether or not they should, but they seem to.
Zuckerburg regularly hangs out with conservative political figures, but not liberal or letist ones. [0]
They censor the left regularly [1]. Also, is there even any leftist publications in the FB news tab?
They let the right slide by on things regularly though. They don't censor racism. [2] And they apparently have a bias that allows right publications to break their rules.
My interpretation of this is not that Facebook has a conservative bias (what does it even mean for a company to have a bias?), but that Facebook's leaders are well aware that the company are extremely vulnerable to regulation, and that keeping the current administration sweet is a good way of evading regulation. If the US enters 2021 with a Democratic administration not hamstrung by a Republican congress, i would expect the apparent bias to evaporate or reverse.
> My interpretation of this is not that Facebook has a conservative bias (what does it even mean for a company to have a bias?)
It would mean that the company's actions benefit members of one side of the political spectrum more than the other.
We're free to speculate about why a company's actions might do that and whether it's deliberate or an emergent consequence of some other intention, but I think it's fairly straightforward to define what bias would mean.
The title buzzfeed came up with is misleading as the article isn't really about an employee getting fired or their evidence. Its more a general editorial on Facebook and the US election.
The engineer joined the company in 2016 and most recently worked on Instagram. He left the company on Wednesday. One employee on an internal thread seen by BuzzFeed News said that they received permission from the engineer to say that the dismissal “was not voluntary.”
I saw a video recently where someone was discussing Facebook's "moat". Essentially, among Big Tech, it has the least defensible moat, which I think is true.
I think Facebook has very little choice right now. Libra could have been a moat, but it is more or less dead now. They are being cornered into being more pro-conservative, because otherwise their moat (engagement, which is what advertisers pay for) will collapse by the time COVID is done. They need to walk the fine line between proving their engagement and hoping that advertisers would actually want to show ads to the group which is engaged.
I read that small businesses' ad spending account for over 90% of Facebook revenue.
If there is one thing you don't want to be right now, it is a small business owner fighting to bring employees back to work in an unsafe environment while operating at reduced capacity. What's the incentive for the employee to return to work? Jim Cramer said it well on CNBC when he asked how he can compete with the federal government to bring people back to work:
This is Jim Cramer we are talking about. He can probably even afford to overpay (and outbid the federal government) for a while to bring back his restaurant staff. Regular small businesses don't enjoy such advantages.
When these small businesses start rolling over one by one, there will just be a lot fewer small businesses left. And those who do survive will probably shrink their ad budgets.
I once heard a funny comment: Google shows you ads for stuff you know you want to buy. Facebook shows you ads for stuff you didn't know you want to buy (search intent of course). I would say search intent will drive ad spend for the foreseeable future. Plus, if it is a secular bear market for small businesses, ad rates on Google would also come down for those small businesses which do make it out alive at the end of COVID.
That all makes sense, I guess I don’t follow how the recession of the advertising market would reduce engagement on FB. Sure, FB would probably see a revenue decline, but the users would still engage whether or not there would be ads on the site.
And while I agree that ad budgets are probably about get slashed across the board, I see more companies shifting from older, more expensive ad spending strategies towards online and Facebook. They’re in the most competitive position in the aggregate advertising market, way cheaper and more effective than traditional advertising channels.
If marketing departments do the work to direct their efforts and funds to other advertising channels, they may keep using them even after the virtue signaling -- or earnest signaling -- expires.
Continuity in marketing metrics can also be important.
I don't think they have any moat at all. People always claim that Facebook's hold over the population is absolute and that the gravity and sheer volume of users will make it impossible for upstarts to make a dent.
And yet every new highschool cohort has a new social media app.
These are simple CRUD apps and anyone can make them. The tech is only getting more accessible. Look at the ages of people launching these things. Young people get young people.
Facebook is for grandmas yelling at liberals. TikTok is exiting and fresh. In four years, it'll be something new.
Of the many failed attempts to make social media apps, the ones I'm most aware of seem to have all failed due to mismanagement (vine, voat, yikyak).
Look at the proliferation of dating apps. Not even Tinder is the end-all be-all. There are new entries in that field all the time, and it's hyper adjacent to social media.
I don't think either industry is a good place to build a moat. You have to keep buying the upstarts to win.
95 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] threadThis seems to be the latest in a pretty long series of actions that seem contrary to that idea and that something else might be the real motivating factor.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000119312512...
Facebook is no different than any other Delaware corporation. Facebook exists to do anything and everything that will profit its shareholders. Everything else is just PR.
Source: if you look at the articles of incorporation for my solely-owned and operated LLC, you'd find an identical purpose statement.
It's funny because the same people who support James Damore are also anti unionizing which would give them a stronger voice....
Is there actual literature on unionizing in software engineering, or is it mostly impassioned blog posts?
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/indi...
It's got nothing to do with echo chambers. The response to his memo might have been a little overblown, but anyone who associates with someone like Molyneux makes quite clear where they stand.
>makes me wonder if that's the sort of people HN is attracting?
I'm not sure about HN, but there's a pretty large subculture of hyper-reactionary stuff in tech around Curtis Yarvin, Thiel, and so on that's been seeping into mainstream communities for ages.
The difference is one is "kinda" accepted and promoted under the guise of "justice", whilst the other is shunned as "extremist" and "far right".
“You cannot run a high IQ [white] society with low IQ [non-white] people…these [non-white] immigrants are going to fail...and they're not just going to fail a little, they are going to fail hard…they're not staying on welfare because they’re lazy...they’re doing what is economically the best option for them...you are importing a gene set that is incompatible with success in a free-market economy.”
You're making generalizations about other groups with no substantive data.
Yes, you _may_ be able to find a left-leaning racist spouting absurdities like this, but it isn't indicative of that group as a whole...the far-right, white nationalist demographic has these vile beliefs as a foundation of their platform.
And, personally, if I was being lambasted in the mainstream media, I'd be taking whatever opportunities I could to put my side of the story out there, without looking too hard into who was offering a helping hand. I think that's true of just about everyone.
“I don’t view humanity as a single species...” —Podcast FDR2768, “Collective Guilt for Fun and Profit”, Saturday call-in show, August 9, 2014
“The whole breeding arena of the species needs to be cleaned the f--- up!” —Podcast FDR2740, “Conformity and the Cult of ‘Friendship’,” Wednesday call-in show July 2, 2014
"Screaming 'racism' at people because blacks are collectively less intelligent...is insane." —YouTube video, The Death of Europe | European Migrant Crisis, October 4, 2015
“You cannot run a high IQ [white] society with low IQ [non-white] people…these [non-white] immigrants are going to fail...and they're not just going to fail a little, they are going to fail hard…they're not staying on welfare because they’re lazy...they’re doing what is economically the best option for them...you are importing a gene set that is incompatible with success in a free-market economy.” —YouTube video, The Death of Europe | European Migrant Crisis, October 4, 2015
“...white people will bend over backwards to accommodate you, but when they finally get that they’re just being taken advantage of...you will see a backlash, and that backlash will be quick, decisive, and brutal.” —YouTube video, The Death of Germany | European Migrant Crisis, September 16, 2015
It's a terrible comment that belongs on Reddit, not HN.
As to what shows Damore appeared on, note that this was after he was fired by Google and pilloried by a large portion of the pitchfork "simplify everything to an easy villain" mob. It isn't surprising that he leveraged the small group that didn't ostracize him.
Damore's essay was horrendously poorly considered. People like Molyneux are effectively clowns playing to an audience that they can monetize. This doesn't change the fact that Damore's core argument was actually fairly reasonable.
The simple reality that every fist-pounding critic needs to grossly misrepresent what Damore said, turning it into some grotesque caricature far detached from truth, is revealing.
Dogmatic statements like these just weaken your case; the idea that some memo was the Golden Standard™ of Science and those who question it are questioning Science itself is clearly ridiculous. It's Trump-level hyporbole. The perfect memo.
Which ones?
Your edit is even more misleading and incoherent than your original comment.
Memo line: "Women, on average, have more Openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men"
Research summary: "I summarize data from two meta‐analyses and three cross‐cultural studies on gender differences in personality and interests. Results show that gender differences in Big Five personality traits are ‘small’ to ‘moderate,’ with the largest differences occurring for agreeableness and neuroticism (respective d s = 0.40 and 0.34; women higher than men). In contrast, gender differences on the people–things dimension of interests are ‘very large’ (d = 1.18), with women more people‐oriented and less thing‐oriented than men." https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1751-9004...
Wow.. totally misrepresented the research there...
Memo: "Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average"
Research: "There are no sex differences in cognitive ability but enduring sex differences in competitiveness, life goals, the relative emphasis on agency versus "connection." https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0306988060076911...
Omg how misogynistic...
Memo: "Women, on average, have more Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance)."
Research: "Secondary analyses of Revised NEO Personality inventory data from 26 cultures (N =23,031) suggest that gender differences are small relative to individual variation within genders; differences are replicated across cultures for both college-age and adult samples, and differences are broadly consistent with gender stereotypes: Women reported themselves to be higher in Neuroticism, Agreeableness, Warmth, and Openness to Feelings, whereas men were higher in Assertiveness and Openness to Ideas" https://doi.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0022-3514.81.2....
Omg he totally misrepresented the research there...
Your characterization of Damore is equally low effort. The memo is not simply a "relatively straightfoward review of standard Biology and Psychology research". Even if I were to agree that those parts of it were non-controversial, those parts of it are not the point or intention of the memo.
You are completely ignoring the arguments Damore actually makes, that were built on faulty premises and selected studies that validate his worldview. Some of his statements might be non-controversial in isolation, but have been constructed to build a specific narrative about diversity and inclusion. You are also completely ignoring the context in which this memo was distributed, surfaced, and the channels through which it was ultimately publicized.
Damore clearly had an agenda and his own bias against what he perceived as PC-culture at Google. Trying to frame him as some neutral observer of the behavioral psychology of Googlers is ignorant, if not disingenuous.
Just for reference, the first line in the memo is literally: "I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes"
But you kapnobatairza, you actually know what was in Damore's heart better than he himself. You are an oracle and a prophet and the bringer of truth. 2+2=5 amirite.
The original memo runs against current mores, and the science is wobbly, but it's not outrageous. Perhaps it's wrong, but it's not outrageous to be wrong! On the other hand, once he was kicked out of Google, he quickly fell in with some nasty characters, like Molyneux.
If you only heard about the memo, and missed or skimmed over the subsequent stuff, it's easy to see Damore as a victim of the dreaded cancel culture. Whereas if you didn't read the memo but saw what he was up to afterwards, it's easy to see him as a straightforward villain.
Here’s the thing. I get that our current research says men and women are in some ways different, and I don’t think stating that is controversial. But to use that as an argument for why some degree of inequality in the workplace is ok, just doesn’t pass muster. To your point, there’s a lot we still don’t understand about how our biology works, so if you’re going to use research as a reason to limit people, that’s a whole other bar to clear.
Also, it's important to remember that he was fired. And this is central to the whole thing.
IDK, that may be viewed differently from the US, but from my pov it's clear that he was persecuted because of ideological reasons, painting Google as a reactionary organization.
And that's specially bad because Google is extremely powerful. Another stone in the bucket to mistrust Google.
https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/07/the-investigations-and-rep...
I'm directly providing a counter example. Most people here are very well equipped to understand the nuance of the warrantless surveillance issue and why the fact checker was quite wrong - part of why it's a meaningful case.
Funny enough, your first statement is an example of the bandwagon fallacy. "Well I'm just a neutral party but..."
Judy Woodruff couldn't drop the n-word in anger on national TV and expect to keep her job.
I fear we're in dangerous territory where all such distinctions and nuance are lost in the shouting, essentially making us all "evil" in some way or another.
It's not exactly a jump to get from "wanting racially homogenous societies" to Nazism; it's more like a short shuffle.
Zuckerburg regularly hangs out with conservative political figures, but not liberal or letist ones. [0]
They censor the left regularly [1]. Also, is there even any leftist publications in the FB news tab?
They let the right slide by on things regularly though. They don't censor racism. [2] And they apparently have a bias that allows right publications to break their rules.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-holding-priv...
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2019/04/24/facebook-whil...
[2] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-employ...
https://heated.world/p/fact-check-of-viral-climate-misinform...
My interpretation of this is not that Facebook has a conservative bias (what does it even mean for a company to have a bias?), but that Facebook's leaders are well aware that the company are extremely vulnerable to regulation, and that keeping the current administration sweet is a good way of evading regulation. If the US enters 2021 with a Democratic administration not hamstrung by a Republican congress, i would expect the apparent bias to evaporate or reverse.
It would mean that the company's actions benefit members of one side of the political spectrum more than the other.
We're free to speculate about why a company's actions might do that and whether it's deliberate or an emergent consequence of some other intention, but I think it's fairly straightforward to define what bias would mean.
The engineer joined the company in 2016 and most recently worked on Instagram. He left the company on Wednesday. One employee on an internal thread seen by BuzzFeed News said that they received permission from the engineer to say that the dismissal “was not voluntary.”
https://youtu.be/4SrxqfKn9Bw?t=1605
I think Facebook has very little choice right now. Libra could have been a moat, but it is more or less dead now. They are being cornered into being more pro-conservative, because otherwise their moat (engagement, which is what advertisers pay for) will collapse by the time COVID is done. They need to walk the fine line between proving their engagement and hoping that advertisers would actually want to show ads to the group which is engaged.
What makes you say this? I don’t quite follow.
If there is one thing you don't want to be right now, it is a small business owner fighting to bring employees back to work in an unsafe environment while operating at reduced capacity. What's the incentive for the employee to return to work? Jim Cramer said it well on CNBC when he asked how he can compete with the federal government to bring people back to work:
https://youtu.be/qG_Nq7kIojI?t=367
This is Jim Cramer we are talking about. He can probably even afford to overpay (and outbid the federal government) for a while to bring back his restaurant staff. Regular small businesses don't enjoy such advantages.
When these small businesses start rolling over one by one, there will just be a lot fewer small businesses left. And those who do survive will probably shrink their ad budgets.
I once heard a funny comment: Google shows you ads for stuff you know you want to buy. Facebook shows you ads for stuff you didn't know you want to buy (search intent of course). I would say search intent will drive ad spend for the foreseeable future. Plus, if it is a secular bear market for small businesses, ad rates on Google would also come down for those small businesses which do make it out alive at the end of COVID.
And while I agree that ad budgets are probably about get slashed across the board, I see more companies shifting from older, more expensive ad spending strategies towards online and Facebook. They’re in the most competitive position in the aggregate advertising market, way cheaper and more effective than traditional advertising channels.
Virtue signaling is cheap.
Is there any evidence that they've specifically cut more from Facebook than from other social media platforms?
Continuity in marketing metrics can also be important.
And yet every new highschool cohort has a new social media app.
These are simple CRUD apps and anyone can make them. The tech is only getting more accessible. Look at the ages of people launching these things. Young people get young people.
Facebook is for grandmas yelling at liberals. TikTok is exiting and fresh. In four years, it'll be something new.
Of the many failed attempts to make social media apps, the ones I'm most aware of seem to have all failed due to mismanagement (vine, voat, yikyak).
Look at the proliferation of dating apps. Not even Tinder is the end-all be-all. There are new entries in that field all the time, and it's hyper adjacent to social media.
I don't think either industry is a good place to build a moat. You have to keep buying the upstarts to win.