Apparently he has moved to Twitter due to “fewer ethical qualms.” Never mind his new employer has built one of the most polarizing and divisive platforms in the history of humankind.
Sometimes I don’t know where to begin processing people like this.
> "The mismatch between what they say and what they really do is growing," Cornet said. "The thicker the gap is, the easier it is to point out that hypocrisy."
Maybe Twitter internally completely recognize the bad side of the platform and work accordingly.
I personally make a big chunk of my money from oil & gas, I recognize that oil & gas for transportation should die, but I know we need oil & gas for materials at the moment (but should reduce, reduce and reduce the use as fast as possible). Sometimes part of your work is not all unicorns, pink and friendly, having the honesty to deal with it and not being hypocrite about it is really important.
Sagan says we're just a mote of dust. Jesus says throw no stones. Hate cannot drive out hate, MLK.
Humans evolved as carnivores, killing to survive. Bleaker still, the universe doesn't care when the tiny speck we live on boils away.
And here we are but for a brief moment. A tiny kindness goes a long way.
The parent poster was being pragmatic. They're going to die, just like the two of us.
Work to end the perceived problem instead of talking about it sanctimoniously. Because mimetic vitriol creates interference waves and drives us into factions. It accomplishes nothing and amplifies hate.
If no one or to few talk about the problem, the problem will not be solved either. So both is needed, the talk and the doing. That means the talk is legitimate as well.
Sanctimony doesn't work that well. Incentives do. Shaming someone into feeling like a robber baron may sting, but behind them may be a family to support, a sick partner, a struggling child, a gender transition and associated medications and surgeries, and more. The world is a complicated place and reducing it by wagging a finger can only get you so far. Changing systems and incentives is key.
I hate to use such a dire trope, but sometimes it’s better to have someone thoughtful in a bad place than leaving it to the others all by themselves.
I think the point OP was trying to make was, change has to start somewhere, and it won’t happen all at once.
That doesn't really make sense to me. Isn't it better to be a hypocrite and be evil only some of the time, rather than be consistently evil all of the time?
I don't believe that Twitter has worked out how to act accordingly to the bad side of their platform. There's still a ton of misinformation, it's still incredibly polarizing, and IMO it has a worse overall impact than Google.
I think one of the main factors of it being polarizing is that big tech tried to kill misinformation on the internet.
10 years ago people would have laughed at the mere suggestion that everything on the net is true.
There will always be misinformation, but this dogma that this is somehow even an issue is completely festered by now but still ridiculous in my opinion.
Of course these rules against misinformation are not enforced equally, so people get angry at the unfairness and dig in. Not really surprising.
Solution: Sit back an relax and let there be misinformation. Even 5 year olds can handle this easily...
Playing censorship whack a mole on social media was one of the things that drove recruits into ISIS's arms.
It didnt potential recruits from seeing the propaganda but it did quell incipient doubts in their minds that they might be the bad guys.
Censorship is good at that.
Censorship can work but only if you lock EVERYTHING down, north korea/china style. The more failed censorship governments engage in the more attractive this route becomes.
Rules should definitely be applied equally, yet even still it's somewhat obvious that in the western world certain sides engage in misinformation more than others and that very same side is more susceptible to it.
"Five year olds can handle this": That is the exact problem, they can't. They are sometimes less capable than that.
I would agree if we were just talking about accidental, spontaneous misinformation.
But on twitter you've got bad actors pushing propaganda that can be very hard to differentiate from honest opinion.
And I think you underestimate how gullible a lot of people really are.
Many people will believe the self-professed 43 year old mom of 4 from Idaho is really just that -- even though the profile picture is copied from an Australian cooking blog and there's cyrillic replies early in the account's history.
There's no way for the platforms to really deal with gullibility and propaganda without making the problem worse and they have no real incentive to either. The cure (censorship, most likely) will be worse than the disease.
The platforms will make a valiant effort to solve the problem in the way which is most politically expeditious for them. Not in a way that solves the problem.
The effects of this frankly terrifies me. Way more than Russian psyops campaigns running mommyblogger tweets.
> no way for the platforms to really deal with gullibility and propaganda without making the problem worse
These are uncharted waters. I’d be wary of mistaking such hypotheses for absolute truths.
When mass journalism arrived we had yellow journalism. Journalistic standards arose, people chose their papers, and while it wasn’t a monotonic rise to goodness, what followed was better than what was.
I don’t know what the Internet will look like in a few years. But I’m fairly confident it won’t be laissez faire.
They're not that uncharted. It's why the first amendment exists.
I'm fairly confident it won't be laissez faire in the future either. That's coz there's a consolidation of media platforms and a wave of populist authoritarianism sweeping the world, not coz censorship ever fixed anything.
A. Let's not mince words, it hasn't done the US any favours.
B. The world is bigger than just the US, so I would say that while you may think it's not uncharted it is definitely not solved (and can therefore be called uncharted enough).
> A. Let's not mince words, it hasn't done the US any favours.
It’s done phenomenal favors for centuries. Aside from freedom of speech being very effective for growth in ideas and innovation, it’s prevented National religions, limited press interference, limited censorship.
It’s odd to even hear the idea that it’s a bad thing.
A lot of people prefer stronger government restrictions on certain speech. I don’t “get it” either, but I find a lot of my European colleagues prefer their system over the US system, about as equally strongly as I prefer the US system.
It’s pretty understandable given Europe’s history with inflammatory speech leading to continental war, a process which has been repeating itself ever since the invention of the printing press.
> It’s odd to even hear the idea that it’s a bad thing.
And strikingly illiberal, although both liberals and libertarians tend to agree on most matters of free speech.
For decades, liberals have fought for more freedom of speech, even in grotesque situations[0], and now we throw it all away, because we're suddenly winning?
"on twitter you've got bad actors pushing propaganda"
This statement is vague enough that it could mean a lot of things, but due to your reference to Cyrillic, I feel a need to point out that the most common conspiracy theory about Twitter being filled with fake accounts controlled by Russian bots or "bad actors" is completely false.
I can say this with some small authority, because I'm actually a cited expert on the topic of false claims about Twitter propaganda bots. In 2017 I wrote an essay [1] analyzing an academic paper which claimed the Brexit vote had been heavily influenced by Russian Twitter bots. It was a form of scientific fraud and its claims reduced to nothing. (I'd worked on bot detection at Google for several years so knew that their claims were impossible, and it started influencing the Prime Minister at the time, which is why I read it).
That article was then later cited in a paper [2] titled, "The Rise and Fall of 'Social Bot' Research". The paper is perhaps more easily digested in talk form, and I'm cited in that too [3]. It shows that there's an entire subfield of "science" with thousands of research papers, claiming that Twitter is overrun with bots engaging in political propaganda and subtly controlling elections. None of these papers are logically or scientifically valid. The bots they think they're finding are in reality just artifacts of measurement and logic errors. In most cases the mistakes the papers make are so basic they cannot possibly be actual errors, and thus it seems plausible to assume that the widespread belief in Russian Twitter bots is itself deliberate propaganda spread by academics who are trying to delegitimize social trends they disapprove of.
Here are some of the ways these papers mislead people:
• They define a bot as any account that posts a lot to Twitter using a smartphone.
• They mathematically obfuscate their own data to hide the fact that it doesn't support their conclusions.
• They define a bot as anyone labelled as such by an opaque ML model called "BotOrNot"/"Botometer".
BotOrNot is pure pseudo-science because it's not replicable: the model isn't available for study or re-creation. It can only be used via an API.
But beyond being unscientific the model outputs random noise, and as a consequence papers that use it rarely disclose the actual list of accounts identified as bots, because it would be obvious that the papers were fraudulent. For example when it was shown that BotOrNot classed a large chunk of US Congressmen as bots, the academics who created it simply attacked the discoverers as "academic trolls", then quietly hard-coded Congress to be humans. Of course there are many other lists of known-human accounts and so it was easy to show that this model classifies anywhere between 10% and 30% of humans as bots. None of these papers care about the FP rate on the model, nor that it's not actually a scientific tool at all due to its entirely secret methodology.
Journalists enthusiastically spread these lies. The paper by Gallwitz & Kreil has a diagram showing how fake papers ended up in a huge list of media outlets and the talk goes on to show that in many cases the media have stopped even requiring a bogus academic paper to repeat these allegations. A mere statement by a professor is considered sufficient.
It's important that people understand this: practically any claim you've read about hordes of bots on Twitter influencing politics is false. There is a well funded effort across the entire political left (academics, left wing journalists, a small number of tech workers) to create the illusion that such bots are rife and that non-left wing political outcomes are not genuinely "real" as a consequence, but when actual evidence is demanded the claims evaporate. Do not be fooled by this.
> Twitter being filled with fake accounts controlled by Russian bots or "bad actors" is completely false.
Yeah. I mean, everyone knows that they're actually Chinese. /s
From your first link: "I am one of the very, very few people in the world who has actually fought bots on social media platforms." At this point, I think most people "get" just how little FAANG companies are doing to combat... uh, let's call it... "coordinated uses of their platforms for user-hostile purposes." For years I have said that they could be doing much, much more, and people just hand-wave the criticism aside with, "but but but it's really HARD." Yeah, I know. But these companies continue to print money like the Fed, year after year. They could be throwing A LOT more manpower and machines at the problem, and it shows. We all feel it. Anyway, it's just nice to see some side channel data that proves my point.
What specific tricks do you think tech firms are missing? At least when I worked on the problem, both machines and manpower were plentiful.
At any rate, you seem to be assuming there's a large uncontrolled bot problem. The point of the research quoted above is that there isn't. Unless you're talking about ordinary commercial spam?
For the longest time "everybody knew" that downloading files from a BBS or the Internet would infect you with digital viruses.. There's still "Antivirus software".
If we don't see the hordes of "russian Bots" we must be insane, right?
What makes you think this problem isn't being tackled? Every year Twitter and Facebook talk about how they detected and removed XXX million bots from their platform. For example, the spam problem has been rapidly iterated on [1] to little fanfare. The abuse, T&S and security teams at these companies probably cost on the order of hundreds of millions of $, how is that consistent with your framing that the problem is being ignored?
You can't simply throw machines and manpower at a problem.
> At this point, I think most people "get" just how little FAANG companies are doing to combat
Do you have any evidence of this claim or do you just “get” it. This kinda reminds of the rhetorical device where somebody says “you know it, I know it, everybody knows it” without actually citing any proof.
This whole thing exposed how the platform was gamed. That's what I'm referring to. This sort of thing is being done in large and small ways all the time, and there's no chance that Facebook and Twitter are doing enough to detect it, because it's in their financial interests NOT to.
It sounds like you reject their methodology, which is fine, but that doesn't mean they were wrong, just that they are failing to prove it.
As far as I can tell the reason why many people on twitter thought there was a massive russian bot problem is because they(I) saw the massive influx of political bots and shills with the rise of the election and could clearly tell someone had their finger on the scale.
If their methodology is wrong then there is no support for their hypothesis, meaning we accept the null hypothesis (that there's nothing there).
Rejection of what they're doing isn't some personal quirk of mine, by the way. Their methodology is entirely invalid. It should be rejected by anyone because it can't tell us anything true about the world.
The statement was purposefully vague because I cannot claim to know who the bad actors are -- only that I stumbled onto a few. Also I never said they were bots.
My example was from one account that I personally found and reported. And someone at Twitter must have agreed with me because the accounts no longer exist.
And, in terms of evidence, I actually still have screenshots that I posted to discord to share with some friends. But if you don't trust my word then it's not like the screenshots are any more trustworthy.
The issue isn't the misinformation in itself. We've had misinformation before the internet and social media as well. The issue is algorithmic amplification of misinformation into cult-like echo-chambers for which these companies are themselves responsible.
And the solution to this isn't to let the companies responsible for the problem in the first place attempt to self-regulate with more black-box algorithms. The fundamental product they are selling is to manipulate people. There is a clear conflict of interest.
Completely agree.This is just governments as well as big tech on a power trip trying to censor things by whatever morals are in vogue now. It is quite insulting treating grown adults like "don't see this. we are telling you it is bad for you."
While I don't disagree that Twitter has plenty of work to do, I think if you stack YouTube up against Twitter, it's pretty clear that the former has done more to drag people down the rabbit hole. Does Twitter help keep them there once they've gone down? Sure, yeah it does. Should Twitter have dealt with this all better in 2015-2017? Of course, yes. But still, it seems to me that YouTube (and, while we're at it, Facebook) has done far more damage to the information zeitgeist.
I can't disagree more with this sentiment, YouTube has been invaluable for me looking up tutorials of anything that I want to know. My experience of Twitter is that it's a hate-filled cesspit, where the loudest get heard the most, and there is no room for debate (given the character limit).
I've used YouTube to learn how to build a bike from scratch, how to fit tiles, plumbing repairs, how to make 3d games engines, as well as the plethora of maths and science / general interest channels (Veritasium, Tom Scott, etc).
I never said YouTube is all or even mostly bad — I use it every day and find it hugely valuable. That said, is the question “which platform’s features go against my desire for rich, informative, interest-driven content?” or “which platform provides a more potent means of spreading disinformation through a mixture of algorithmic enticement and rich, engaging, interest-driven content?” I ask because it seems like you think we’re talking about question #1 and I’m talking about question #2.
I'm not sure if i follow you when you mention YouTube.
I thought just yesterday how YouTube changed the world again on making knowledge much more accessable than ever before.
I have seen very well done YouTube videos debunking things, explaining things, visual showing things.
I asked my mother about cooking and in here time, you needed to go to a cooking class. I have already more diverse cooking experience thanks to getting inspired and learning certain aspects of cooking through youtube.
Even the most gullible among us don't fall into the conspiracy theory trap by reading 140 characters (I hope). YouTube videos with decent production quality, which these days is accessible to anyone, lend some credibility to the content. Then you get the next recommended video, on the same topic, with some different bits of evidence but the same conclusion and equally well made.
If you were to replace the paragraph about cooking classes with one that lauded “A better way to understand who’s really in power in this country and the sick things they’re up to” you would have made a comment that is both a) totally believably real in the current climate (and actually exists many times over in variously worded approximations), and b) the perfect example of what I’m talking about.
I'm also seeing a lot of good videos explaining political views or debating them.
The flat earth movement for example spun up on youtube and is going down again.
Which feels to me that there are mechanism in place or persistency on information sharing which of course can go both directions, but its harder to just be in your own bubble.
Nonetheless, i did not use a political example because i wanted to make my point on something non controversial and still highly positive.
Woodworking, car repair, item testing (the guy who tests 20 brands of oils, blades, tools etc.
Im not sure though, completly what your point is though, i hope i understood it correctly.
I'm sorry, but YouTube is a much less harmful platform than Twitter. YouTube can facilitate multi-hour long discussions and deep dives into issues with nuance. That doesn't mean that all content on there is nuanced, but the ability for it to exist automatically elevates the platform above Twitter...for which the whole problem is clearly a lack of nuance and depth.
But the issue isn’t “lack of nuance” at all. Do I like that “lack of nuance” myself? No, I look at Twitter maybe once a week, if that. But do cults start simply because there’s a “lack of nuance” in the communication channels they use? Also no.
I think it’s important to note that nothing in your comment leads me to believe you’re not a diehard, Qanon-believing, Trump-loving, lizard-people-are-actually-a-thing kinda person…which is kinda my point. YouTube’s strengths are also a significant part of its weakness (and that’s why it has such a massive responsibility).
> nothing in your comment leads me to believe you’re not a diehard, Qanon-believing, Trump-loving, lizard-people-are-actually-a-thing kinda person…which is kinda my point.
And my point is that you're upset that you can't assume everything you'd like to about me from a paragraph that I wrote. Twitter is tribal warfare.
YouTube proposed me an essay on that yesterday, with a sub-title of : An analysis of the dissonance between morality and heroism in stories, and the reality and moral complexities of our modern society.
It raises some points regarding the questions you pose, you may find interesting. I'd love to do the TL;DR but it's slightly more nuanced than that so I'll post the link
I don't think he means twitter worked out the problems they have, just that it's possible they could be honestly trying to address their issues. It's a tough problem to solve well. Whether we like it or not, public companies are held hostage to shareholder value and that ties one hand behind their back while they try to solve the problem. I think we need government regulation to force their hand. We don't allow companies to fuck up the environment for the rest of society, it seems logical to not allow companies to fuck up our government. Dorsey seems less bad than zuckerberg, but it could be fake.
Yup pointing at hypocrisy and contradictions is much simpler than resolving them.
The more complex problems get, the less likely anyone in the room is going to solve them any time soon(Bounded Rationality) . So beyond a point laughing at that reality becomes counter productivs. It just gets people to spend more time and energy reacting, defending, justifying and hiding things.
Bottom line - if you want to do something about a very complex problem, pick a small sub problem within it to work on. That approach has better odds of producing outcomes than poking fun at people who have bit off more than they can chew.
> I personally make a big chunk of my money from oil & gas, I recognize that oil & gas for transportation should die, but I know we need oil & gas for materials at the moment (but should reduce, reduce and reduce the use as fast as possible).
I've been thinking about that recently, and was wondering if not accepting a job in """bad""" industries (bad is a gross oversimplification here covering things like oil, gas, tobacco, weapons, these kind of things) is in fact running away from your duty. If you don't take a job in these industries, other people will, and these people may be worse than you. Maybe the best moral option is to in fact try as hard as you can to get an influencial position in the industry to promote energy transition, reduce harm from smoking, etc.
I apologize again for the oversimplification of grouping together these different industries, my point here is to group what people think usually as "morally bad", not to pass judgment on people who work in those industries.
So ethical people in tech should be lining up to work for Oracle and patent trolls? I think it's pretty fair to pass judgment on people who choose to work in either.
Companies are empires, and empires don't change because an underling thinks they should.
Empires change because they're overrun from outside, or - vanishingly rarely, on moral issues - because the emperor decrees it and/or is replaced.
Amazon may go in a different direction with Bezos gone. It almost certainly won't, but there's always a tiny sliver of potential when the big jobs change.
The political opinions of an Ln are irrelevant. Not even L10s get to set moral policy.
If I joined the military for example, I suspect that the dominant culture and established way of doing things is just so much more powerful than I am individually, and I wouldn't really have an opportunity to affect change. That is, unless somehow I got promoted to be a general. But then to get there I also might have to do a lot of compromising things.
It seems more effective to go outside the system: e.g. for affecting change in the military, use civic action. Run for office and change the rules. This works for fighting against bad companies like weapons manufacturers and polluters too btw, since you can push legislation to shape what they do.
^ The cynical take is that everything is too locked-in-place for an individual to make a difference. But all important changes require a collective.
Going back to the original topic: if someone feels that Google as an organization of humans is broken from a values perspective (e.g. lacking systems to capture feedback from bottom up and allow that to shape decisions), the most effective way to change things is not to hopelessly try to become a C-level exec who makes those kinds of decisions. You either need to directly approach the folks in charge (e.g. a union actually helps with this, but also hopefully, if things aren't totally broken, there are internal forums that enable these kinds of interactions), or gather enough internal gravity to get their attention.
If you're in a workplace where neither seems feasible, all you can really do is leave.
I feel that this is an excuse often used by people who want to do virtue signalling but also want a big paycheck along with it.
The number of talented people in any industry are always limited. If enough people refuse to work at places that they don't ideologically agree with (and maybe dedicate their time working on solutions), at the very least, the operational cost of these companies would increase.
Chances of getting to an influential position in a corporation if you're not already an influential person are a good approximation to zero.
And even if you did get somehow manage to get into an influential position, you're still going to get pushback from the board, from shareholders, from customers, and sometimes also from employees.
How many examples can you give of people successfully improving toxic industries from the inside?
> I've been thinking about that recently, and was wondering if not accepting a job in """bad""" industries (bad is a gross oversimplification here covering things like oil, gas, tobacco, weapons, these kind of things) is in fact running away from your duty. If you don't take a job in these industries, other people will, and these people may be worse than you
One employee can not have even the slightest influence over the world's largest tech firm, even ignoring that it's publicly traded thus institutional investors are the only people steering the ship. Or ignoring that Brin and Page's research was heavily funded by the CIA and NSA as part of a program specifically designed to encourage silicon valley to develop technology and services to make it easier for them to track social connections between people.
This is a bit like going to work at an oil refinery because you think it'll help climate change. Or working for Marlboro's marketing department thinking you'll help them stop marketing to children.
Even top corporate leadership doesn't really get to steer the ship. It's investors - in publicly traded companies, typically institutional investors, mostly funds. Any sort of corporate "listen to the employees" initiatives are just window dressing; a tap at the bottom of the tank of "employee rabble-rousing."
Just to finish driving home how little impact any worker could have on companies of this size: do you know how Walmart reacts to a store that looks like it's about to successfully unionize despite their union-busting efforts? They turn off the lights and leave.
Now consider that Walmart's goal is to undercut all the small businesses in a community, driving them into the ground. Shutting down an established store leaves a huge vacuum. Walmart is capable of destroying communities at the multi-county level and they do not care.
> Maybe the best moral option is to in fact try as hard as you can to get an influencial position in the industry to promote energy transition, reduce harm from smoking, etc.
I think this makes sense in situations where there’s an oligopoly or exclusive options (eg, work in government or not).
But when there are thousands of options for engineers (including starting your own) then it doesn’t make sense to me and definitely seems like a societal net negative as well would be really stressful to me.
Knowing that every day, my code is making people angrier and more disconnected would be tough to outweigh with the hope of one day being able to fix things.
It’s not my duty to fix every broken thing so I should focus on fixing and building good things. Maybe one day when all the causes that I think are important are solved, I would consider moving down the chain.
I once met a man who worked in oil & gas who was a pretty vocal (and frankly, unpleasant) "young Earth creationist". As he was in a relationship with someone in my professional social-circle at the time I wound up coming across him on a regular basis for a couple of years.
I don't believe I have had a more uncomfortable, baffling, and frustrating conversation in my sixty years of existence than the one I had with him at social gathering where after him bringing it up, I asked him how he balanced his work and religion.
> I asked him how he balanced his work and religion.
When I see personally-baffling worldviews in other people, I try to remind myself that there are 7+ billion people on the earth. Someone, somewhere, believes anything you can think of.
And now the internet and social media helps them get together and reinforce their beliefs.
We can't quit oil & gas overnight, the world will come to a standstill. But if Twitter were to disappear overnight, it would have zero effect on humanity, isn't it? In other words, he could have joined any number of good companies making good products, he chose to join Twitter. That is interesting to note.
That's unfair. Twitter does have a huge impact on a lot of people. Twitter banning Donald Trump was a huge deal, for example. He has a smaller platform now and (imo) the world is a better place for it. The Earth wouldn't stop rotating on its axis if Twitter were to shut down, I'll give you that, but business as usual would change for a lot of people.
I would not say "zero effects" since quite a lot of news agency relies on it but that's safe to say that the platform would be replaced by something else in less than a month.
Twitter is not important to me personally, but has been instrumental in organizing public protests within oppressive and authoritarian countries for over a decade. I would say that has had a materially positive impact on humanity, and could continue to do so in the future, despite all the downsides of the platform.
> Sometimes part of your work is not all unicorns, pink and friendly, having the honesty to deal with it and not being hypocrite about it is really important.
Which is something sorely missing from the current discourse and media, no one is saint. But I guess the media or most public don't care,
"The public aren't interested in affairs. All they want to know is who are the goodies and who are the baddies."
- Sir Humphrey Appleby
>"The mismatch between what they say and what they really do is growing," Cornet said. "The thicker the gap is, the easier it is to point out that hypocrisy."
I mean it has been there since Day one. The first time I read about "Do No Evil" in the early 2000s was when my hypocrisy radar on red alert. And the insane amount of PR shit / submarine articles [1] that came in the next few years before they IPO. They were so righteous to the point everything that was in their way was evil. Indeed, Most evil are created by those who think themselves as so righteous. They stopped talking about it from early 2010s and stopped using the tagline in 2015.
But the "Do No Evil" disease or ideology still managed to spread across Silicon Valley and Tech Industry. These PR shit managed to dialled to a whole new level, Uber, Snapchat and even Apple once Steve Jobs' RDF was no longer there to shield them. ( And became more apparent once Katie Cotton retired ) I sometimes wonder if those PR people managed to jump from one company to another.
I get your point but there is definitely a difference between creating a platform where everybody is the same and a platform where engagement algorithms and recommendations push certain messages (or hashtags) to the top to be seen by millions.
Twitter didn’t just make a simple communication platform, they made a platform and wrote algorithms that (intended or not) elevate extremist and divisive voices.
If they just made a simple chat app your metaphor would hold but they are directly responsible because they choose which content is shown and which isn’t.
Agreed. It is one of the worst types of scam and people get taken advantage off. But if you exile Alex Jones, you also exile its users and their ability to get out of there is severely dimmed.
"There must be some truth to what he says if he gets that much backlash" is always a convincing argument. I don't even mean that ironically.
Better have that in the open because on the internet there will always be at least one person that disagrees with any view that is espoused.
This analogy is not really exact. One can argue that paper companies are not responsible for extremist views, since they do not have advertisement algorithms which elevate such pamphlets. Paper is a neutral platform in that sense. So are smartphones, more or less. They sell based on features, the wow factor, a desire for mingling in with the in-crowd etc.
Social media platform algorithms, whether by design or not, drive discussion into the most extreme polarising tones.
In pragmatic terms, there is a world of difference between smartphones and social media.
I don't like Twitter but I suspect the effects of Twitter are often exaggerated because everything is public by default, whereas in other networks a lot of stuff happens in groups/channels by default, where it is not immediately visible, so it is simply less amenable to OSINT, scraping and media analysis.
In any case, between Twitter and Google it is quite obvious who is doing more harm to more people in more places and more ways. Twitter may still be a net-negative overall (in fact I believe it is) - a lot of stuff is.
In many ways Google is on the same playbook as Microsoft's Embrace/Extend strategy, but perhaps in slightly more creative and net positive way.
Google embraced search, and they're basically the only one left.
They embraced email and their free offering distorted the market to enough extent to make most other providers also-rans, except a few key players.
Youtube is the only viable player left in the video sharing field. RSS readers are recovering but it also was a blood bath. I could go on for long, Google coming and leaving(or not) markets has huge negative impacts that I don't see Twitter having in general.
Twitter is actually under-rated, IMO. It’s public, popular, and all the data is for sale for custom analytics. So journalists are in there amplifying tweets into other media. Companies (many/most of the medium and big ones) are desperately monitoring Twitter (Reddit is gaining) because it’s the only window they have into what people say about them. Government agencies are doing the same, for reasons ranging from vaccine disinformation research to protecting senior politicians (and post offices).
> Companies (many/most of the medium and big ones) are desperately monitoring Twitter (Reddit is gaining) because it’s the only window they have into what people say about them.
This just makes Twitter even worse. Only a tiny percentage of the US population are active posters on Twitter. If governments are using Twitter to decide public policy, then they are going to design policy that tailors to only a narrow subset of the population.
If companies/politicians want to know what people think of them, they should be sending out surveys to their customers/constituents. Twitter is not a statistically sound replacement for actual research.
Twitter is a clout machine. It is purely for brand building and very little else. After all, there's only so much you can do in a hundred-or-so characters/words/whatever it is now. The result is a huge incentive to take extreme positions to generate as much noise and controversy as possible.
I'm always a bit baffled at people ascribing morals to these big companies.
I'd be willing to bet that many Twitter execs would kill to switch places with Google, ethical quandary and all. In that case, it's not that Twitter is more "ethical" than Google because of superior morals, it's because Twitter has not had the same opportunities to trade morals for profit.
I'm not saying this out of moral superiority (I worked for Google), I just think it's silly to expect companies to do the right thing without a strong incentive to.
Because these companies are pretending to be moral, usually until it affects the financial side of things, after that, anything goes, if people don't find out.
It seems to me that this guy has spent years thinking about ethical and moral workplace questions and that you have spent a whole two seconds coming up with a sappy zinger. He may have had good reasons to prefer Twitter over Google, these reasons may have been clearly explained, and they may have been glossed over by you.
From an ethical point of few, twitter doesn't matter and didn't add anything real to our socieity.
Google did: Maps, Android, gmail (yes gmail gave free https email accounts when others not even enforced https), skin cancer research, Alphafold, co2 neutral datacenters, pushing now for 24/7 reneweable.
Google literally changed the world.
In my personal opinion, Google would be worth to stay and try to change google 'back' or whatever is going wrong.
What has twitter changed for anyone? Srsly? The reacted when Trump became president they didn't forsee or work on mechanism to fix sharing and multiplying fake news. Other companies like Facebook for example are a global net negative as well. I'm seeing much more fakenewes and uneducated people on facebook commenting as antivaxer than anything else.
I can't understand why you would go to twitter and rant about ethical and moral workplace questions.
From the other point of view: through Maps, Android and Gmail Google has absolutely dominated the ad marketplace to a point where only Facebook can compete (and even then, weakly). They’ve built out incredible, unprecedented datasets of user activity online. If Twitter is polarising then YouTube is hyper-polarising.
Twitter, I agree, is too insignificant to have done any of those things. So I can see how working there would feel a lot less morally compromising.
> stay and try to change Google
They’ve been at Google for 14 years. I think at that point you probably have a pretty clear idea what you, as an individual, are going to be able to change in the place.
My argument was and still is, that Google as a company has and had such a positive impact, that in my opinion it is worth to stay at Google while there is no real sence of pride or anything beeing part of Twitter in comparison.
I personally wouldn't put something like bootstrap in the same category as all the things i wrote down.
Android is not 'just' an mobile os ;its a free globally used mobile operating system used activly by over 3 billion people with an easy way to incorporate your own app market.
I have not mentioned something like googles material design or angular.
Google maps gave everyone a free few on the earth in a time where you had to pay for maps on your expensive navigation system. It took OpenStreetMap a while to do the same.
> Google maps gave everyone a free [view] on the earth in a time where you had to pay for maps on your expensive navigation system. It took OpenStreetMap a while to do the same.
If took them years to figure that out, perhaps they weren't interested in finding it out in the first place. A good paycheck, plenty of perks and the thrill of working on products with hundreds of millions of customers at global scale can go a long way towards suppressing moral qualms.
But one can't dismiss the fact that Twitter and Google are cut from the same mass surveillance cloth, with the former just being smaller.
>It seems to me that this guy has spent years thinking about ethical and moral workplace questions and that you have spent a whole two seconds coming up with a sappy zinger.
Ironically, these are the exact same objections I have with the Goomics. They take complicated issues and reduces them to "DAE think corporations evil?"
To understand it just look at the complaints of tech workers. The majority of them consider internal actions as grossly more important than any outside effects. Thus, if the hiring policy is progressive and if they have good HR, and a happy working life and if the managers don't trip up with certain internal political issues this far outstrips any negative actual real world effects. Walk outs of employees happen due to internal drama, not any external actions. Twitter therefore is a great, comfortable, safe and inclusive place to work even if history might prove it to be more damaging to mental health and physical security of the world than Google.
Now, the new tech unions that are occurring in a few companies give some hope against this hypocrisy as they all seem to have a line or two in their mission statements which speak up about shaping the direction and action of their employers. I hope they live up to their promise.
> Never mind his new employer has built one of the most polarizing and divisive platforms in the history of humankind.
Pretty much all the FAANGs operate in pretty much the same way. Google just has a very benign image, even while they ban people left, right and center on Youtube, censor search results, and delete adsense accounts of inconvenient news orgs.
It's a bit ironic that I've to now use Yandex, from "repressive" Russia no less, in order to access sites and information not approved by the Ministry of Truth in the "freedom-loving" lands of the yee United States.
If you know your "banned, unapproved, history" (the kind even Chomsky would admonish you for), you'd also know this is not new for either the US, or its predecessor, the British Empire.
Simple, he doesn't want to let go of a big wage so makes some ethical compromises. As if we all don't do the same, and I am not sure what value does your comment bring to the discussion because almost none of us can afford to bring 100% of their ethics into their work.
If you actually can, I am happy for you, but do recognize that then you'd be in a tiny minority.
I think the impact of Twitter on public discourse is massively overstated. Facebook and Youtube are both way more significant.
In general I think platforms where you the user explicitly indicates their interest are less socially destructive than ones where an algorithm guesses. At least that way you are aware of what bubble you are in, and can relatively easily see what other people are seeing. On Facebook there is basically no way to do this.
Unfortunately social networking sites in the latter category are much more profitable, hence why e.g. reddit is moving in that direction.
If your concern is polarising and divisive platforms I don’t know how you could ever give Google a free pass for YouTube. Its recommendation algorithm is a radicalisation program that targets divisive videos by design because they get higher engagement. It’s not something they intended but they’ve done near nothing to stop it. And in terms of number of people it reaches YouTube eclipses Twitter easily.
Twitter is just a bad website. Google terrifies me on surveillance, freedom of speech, and the general destruction of the internet. Twitter just annoys me. The problem with twitter is too much freedom of speech, and that's not a problem that I'm concerned about.
If your ethical compass is just bad/good, I could see how this would be confusing.
Down-voted. Twitter has built a platform which has allowed me, a nobody, to connect with people who are famous or experts in their field and directly interact with them. Earlier efforts to use e-mail had 0 success as most likely my mails would go to their spam.
It has allowed me to discover people who would find it very difficult to make themselves heard if there was no central platform where they could post their views and allow any random person on the internet to follow them. Using Twitter, I have discovered a lot of communities which I did not know even exist.
It is probably the only useful platform in existence today. Just because some people use it for hate means nothing to me.
I like how it starts out as quirky jokes about tech minutiae and slowly mutates into bitter social criticism directed at the company and its leadership, presumably as the old systems of power crept in and eroded the idealism that was present when they joined the company.
Heh, it certainly visualized his decline in hope very well. Google was a cool company once and some of its products and tech still are, but you simply have to manage your expectations when a companies goes public. It stops belonging to the people working there.
Also, companies have proven to be inept to tackle social problems, even if they genuinely wanted to.
For me, the beginning of the end of my enchantment with the company was when one of the founders responded to a major internal scandal at TGIF with the thought that he didn't want to deal with this distraction; he just wanted to make cool things.
And my internal response was "Friend, you manage a ten-thousand-person company. Garage tinkerers have the luxury of their job being 'make cool things.' Your job is people."
I would love if it was possible to just track general industry sentiment over the same time period. As someone who was working at another big tech company nearly over the same duration he was at Google, I myself noticed it became "less fun and exciting" to be in tech within that large company. However, some of that is undoubtedly just a part of getting older and becoming less naive about the world.
I have to say, that plenty of those videos describe already a level of quality a lot of people probably never get.
Complaining about taking a paycut of 10-30% when you want to move while some topshot person is allowed to move without issues, might not be 'fair' but holy shit is that life far away from normal reality.
And this discord is what makes it very hard to read for me.
Maybe Google (and other companies in general) should take better care of checking for cultural fit before ending up with those "timebombs". There are plenty of Google level engineers out there who'd be proud to work for the military, consider strong border protection a good thing for themselves and their country and don't view everything from the gender angle.
For a reason unknown to me, Google (and other big tech firms), has to pick a political camp and strictly follow their agenda, key points of which you've just enumerated. I don't really know what would happen if Google said "we support strong borders and military from now on", perhaps an antitrust suit?
"Strong borders" aka "preserve the needlessly byzantine immigration process". Untold suffering has been imbued upon those lacking the fortune to bypass it and we are all poorer as a result.
You can have strong borders without a byzantine process. For example: Just stamp any entry application with "nope". Predictable, fair, strong, easy, cheap.
He's saying that there may be centrists or conservative people with Google level engineering skills that have no issue with things like ICE or military contracts.
I'd imagine such characters would not be popular inside the company, and best shut up. Hence, you could argue the culture already pre-selects for progressive ideology.
The "women in tech" memo is a perfect example of it. Sure enough, it was clumsy and likely full of inaccuracies. But the core thesis is hardly harmful or controversial. It was saying that women have less "tendency" to be interested in hardcore tech, therefore aggressively enforcing quotas on this representation is something you could at the very least debate.
The memo doesn't even classify as specifically right-wing. It's just a counter point against how to achieve diversity and how far to take that goal, and which method to use.
The consequence is that he's fired on the spot.
So that proves the point. Centrists and conservatives, or anybody challenging the most progressive views can work at Google yet best shut up. Ideological selection is already in place.
Isn't it already the case at many companies? I thought that was what the magical umbrella term "culture fit" was for.
At my 2 previous jobs, I was explicitly asked during interview what my position was on "diversity" and "equity". To this day, I still don't know what that had to do with me writing code.
That's the tension Google is facing internally right now. Having traded on "Don't Be Evil" for over a decade, Google has already established a culture.
It's not the employees that are a bad culture fit; the employees are the culture. It's these projects.
This problem will resolve itself over time though. If Google continues to lean into these projects, it will self-select for people who have no ethical qualms with them. But for over a decade, such selection was unnecessary.
This is not a cultural-fit issue. Over 14 years, both the company culture and the employee's attitudes change quite a lot. Even an absolutely perfect fit at time of hire is likely not to be that way for long. It would be amazing if this didn't happen, especially with the kind of growth Google has had during that period.
I'd go even further and say that the FAANGs plan for this "time bomb" effect. They hire mostly impressionable kids, and the rate at which they hire is based on an expectation of short tenures (even by the historical standards of this young industry). Their famously high compensation levels are not just about attracting talent but also about keeping that tenure from being even shorter. They know that people's misgivings and frustrations will add up over time. They know that the "price of their souls" in Cornet's graph will keep increasing. Everything from their onboarding processes to their review/promotion processes to their engineering standards are designed to reduce and/or make up for this kind of attrition.
Hiring people with a particular kind of politics doesn't make any sense at all for them, whether that kind is enlightened or yours. The only kind of culture they select for is around non-political issues such as technical approaches and work/collaboration styles.
If you feel any need to do that, you should probably consider looking for some different job. There's a karmic burden for making a living in an immoral way.
Yeah, man, fire up the last "Who's Hiring" thread and jump ship. This industry is so friggin hot, it doesn't make any sense to stay in a job you hate
Talking shit about management and rousing the rabble isn't really a great move in any case. They might have legitimate reasons for doing what they're doing, and you're just going to hurt everyone's morale
eh, some morale needs hurting. If I somehow suddenly found myself working for the reichstag, it would be a moral injury to simply find a new employer. Whistleblowing at all levels is important. Whether reasons are legitimate is something of a judgement call in any case.
That doesn't mean you can't leave a nice little desk fire on the way out, though.
Sorry if it's not thread related, but a while ago someone posted some kind of "comic" where the author tried to explain all the elements a good project visual/war room should have. If someone has a link I would really appreciate it.
I'm frankly amazed he quit and wasn't fired, and that google allowed him to be openly critical.
I guess he already had a following early on? and if they dissapeared him later it would have looked bad?
.
It's like there is literally no developer support from google when your app gets taken down for no reason, unless you have a big twitter following and complain there, then they fix it.
From my experience, there is plenty of room for open dissension at Google. One of the reasons they stopped doing all-hands (aka TGIF) is because people kept bringing up unrelated controversies in protest (Maven, Dragonfly, etc).
The flip side is the execs are really good at dodging and ignoring you. It doesn't matter if it's an ethical decision or if it's something as simple as "why the hell are we making another messaging app?" you will be allowed (within reason) to scream your head off because you will be ignored.
If Cornet has spent 14 years at Google, his basis for comparison might be mainly to time earlier at Google.
While perspectives on change over time can be very valuable, is it harder to assess where the grass is greener?
Industry outside Google isn't the same as when he left. And he's also been at one place long enough, that some goodness might be so familiar that he doesn't realize it.
His point about the hypocrisy of leaders strikes a chord with my experiences of my employer.
It almost seems like an unavoidable aspect of seniority: as though one day after a promotion you get taken into a dark room and taught the new corporate language, and how to not answer questions directly.
People think CEOs are kings of publicly traded companies. They aren't, they are employees themselves that are most exposed to market and government demands.
You have the responsibility for economic success in the name of all other employees. That severely limits your ability to just be nice for a moment.
Kings are generally much less free in their decisions than most people think. Even the absolutist monarch like Louis XIV had to consider a lot of factors in his decisions to simply keep his head on the shoulders. Being king is dangerous: his grandfather was assassinated, and his grandson's son literally lost his head on a guillotine.
This is a fact that is often absolutely overlooked. History class does not give you space for proper historical, sociological perspective or mostly anything broader than sheer facts and narrative. I can not recommend this book enough:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Political_Surviva...
An absolute monarch governing with God’s own authority on Earth can only do what he pleases so long as what he pleases is aligned with society’s expectations for an absolute monarch ruling on behalf of God.
It's all fun and games until you're the one who has to pick up everyone else's slack.
Self-determination is the luxury of the responsibility-less, the foolish, or the oblivious. The more and more of business I get exposed to, the more I realize the level of interconnection and constraint propagation is so high, it really does require an eyes fully open approach. That means making some seriously hard decisions sometimes.
>as though one day after a promotion you get taken into a dark room and taught the new corporate language, and how to not answer questions directly.
remove the dark room and that is exactly what happens, at least according to my manager friends from several BigCo-s. And not only "how to not answer questions directly", there is a lot of what can be summarized as how to manipulate the employees, etc.
From a different angle: why do almost all people who assume power change the way they communicate? Alternatively, why do candid people not attain power?
The answer is probably that being candid makes you vulnerable. This is a guy who would systematically attack management for their decisions. Yet he failed to connect the dots between his actions and theirs.
In the real world you'll frequently find situations where there is no unequivocally good answer, but a decision needs to be made. In new companies leadership has more blind trust from employees that they can rely on. In mature companies where staff frequently challenge decisions it is easier for management to just present a smaller target and give non answers.
Regarding changing the way they communicate, I think some of it is just a natural filter that gets applied to people who move up. At some point, you notice that the people who move up the management chain are more "diplomatic" and don't really reveal what they actually think, at least not in public. They toe the company line.
People who are too candid can't be controlled and can't be trusted to do what may be in the company's best interests. If you don't agree with toeing the company line, you either leave or aren't promoted. At some point, a company needs its management to move in lock-step, otherwise it can't predictably meet its goals.
Which is the cause and which is the effect? You might have less candid people being promoted (survival of the fittest) or it might be that people become less candid (learned behaviour).
I suspect it's more learned behaviour.
I see my younger self in the author of these cartoons. I saw myself as the smartest guy in the room and would complain about everything as though the answers were obvious. Now I have more responsibility everything has become a lot less black and white. I realised that bitching about stuff in this way is cheap (and to be honest, I think it's intellectually lazy). It's also a privilege you lose as soon as you have power, because now it's your job to fix the stuff that everything is complaining about.
I agree that there's a lot of learned behavior here.
I feel the same way about my younger self. I also thought I knew better than people above me, and I also now recognize that it's not so simple. Even if I was right and we took action based on what I thought was best, there would be effects elsewhere that I hadn't thought of, mostly political effects, which would have larger organizational ramifications.
What's more, I have found recently that I've accepted this attitude of "find ways to accomplish goals, don't rock the boat, and find a way to get everyone moving in the same direction without complaining" and a lot of it is really not about "being right" but making it possible for the largest number of people to succeed. Even if I dislike aspects of how we're doing things, I've recognized that it doesn't help the cause to be overly candid about it as that just introduces chaos organizational (it tends to encourage discord and behavior that isn't constructive).
The strangest thing about this recent change in behavior is my manager and skip-level manager have both independently suggested I consider management, which was never my goal (still not a goal).
> While Cornet's comics included plenty of critiques, he also found they were sometimes a way to have a positive impact within the company. After Google employee James Damore circulated his memo that included many sexist statements about the "natural abilities" of female vs. male engineers
I think this is misleading and to me makes it sound like James Damore is some sort of male supremacist, memo here: firedfortruth.com
Pretty sure the whole point of imaginary internet points is so that you can pop people's happy little bubbles of denial when a chance comes along, and James Damore's letter is spot on in that regard.
He comics seem to criticize giant wasteful stupid evil bureaucracies... But he worked for google for years and now moved to twitter.. If he's genuinely critical why does he continue working for mega-corporations?
To feel better about being inside of one, of course. See, if I criticize the machine then I’m not just a cog in it.
What truly matters isn’t what I wake up and do every day, it’s what’s in my heart that counts. My soul is pure, don’t look at my hands.
He’s a long time employee with a presumably significant amount of equity. Significant at an individual level, I mean. He’s fully imbricated and implicated in what he portrays as so horrible (see the ICE comic if you think I’m exaggerating). Truly acknowledging this would likely be traumatic.
I mean, shit, he’d have to do something about it! He’d have to live a totally different way, for just one thing. He’d have to divest... all of that is not gonna happen.
Twitter's visibility might be high, but as a company they're tiny compared to Google (about 1/20 by headcount). They're also several years younger as a company. Those differences could have a pretty big effect on how far down the "mega-corp bureaucracy curve" they are, so maybe compare Twitter today to Google in 2013 (less than half way through Cornet's tenure there). Or maybe he sees a genuine difference in corporate culture, or in technical content, or in work from home policies, etc. How you feel about any one thing at a company can color how you feel about it in general, even if other aspects are actually the same.
'After Google employee James Damore circulated his memo that included many sexist statements about the "natural abilities" of female vs. male engineers...'
Really? Do people (who actually read the study) really think it was sexist? It stated the obvious - that there are differences in interests in men compared to women by aggregate.
I read his study at the time and it said no such thing, he was vilifed for questioning an orthodoxy that said any difference in representation must necessarily be caused by discrimination. Respected psychologists like Steven Pinker agreed with Damore.
This guy either didn't read it or he's easily influenced by cancel mobs.
Yes, both the tone and the words on paper were sexist. I would give it another look and try and read it in the most empathic light you can, you might reflect on it.
Believe it or not, that isn’t the “original” in the sense of the first thing Damore did on the subject. The external world just got to see this one event.
It's important to read the stated reason from the company for his firing. He was fired for spreading "unhelpful stereotypes". These differences might be obvious and natural to most of the world but they are unhelpful and not welcome in that company. The company wanted to fight against the stereotypes as they considered those a barrier. It's important to realise that the company in that episode never fought to properly and logically argue against the stereotypes and why they were factually false versus others arguing why they were true because that would have been much more troublesome. Much discussions on HN seem to get stuck around the logic and truth nature of the issue - where the actual stated reasons is all about what's "helpful" or not.
In other words, if enough people feel something is sexist then it's in a company's best interest to agree with them.
That was the whole point of the debacle, though. IIRC Google noticed that what they were currently doing was not bringing more women onboard, so they asked some of their employees for opinions. Damore wrote his, which circulated internally for a while with no issues. Then it was leaked and the cancel mob got to him. Only then Google fired him. It wasn't like he was trying to promote these opinions like a googler Alex Jones, at least not from what I know.
I think firing Damore for an opinion shows what cowards they are and everything that is wrong with the current woke movement: don't talk about new ideas or possible solutions, don't open up uncomfortable discussions, only bow to mob led slogans otherwise you're burned at the stake.
My old accountant maintained that $1+$1=$2, which was very harmful to my finances. I fired them immediately for such unhelpful stereotypes.
My new accountant agrees that $1+$1=$3, creating a much less hostile work environment. S/He even practises intersectionality wrt profit vs debt - me and my employees have never been happier!
Now we use the word “study” for it? The text preemptively claims that people will reject it because they are too politically correct. It was never presented as a neutral scientific analysis. From the beginning it was a slanted criticism of Google’s hiring practices.
Quite probably. They're welcome to disagree about the reality we are literally discussing right now, just as there were no doubt members that disagreed with the realities outlined in the letter, and in taking part helped cause the situation (that according to you they are denying) in the first place.
I personally viewed the statement as verging-on-sexism because the I think the extent to which gender disparities are explained by "biological differences" is still much smaller than plain old discrimination
I don't think he's evil or sexist for writing what he did, but I strongly disagree with what he wrote and even more disappointed he went on to become a poster child for Fox News
Yeah but he was pretty liberal with his conclusions he claimed were derived from data. It's pretty easy to see flaws in his arguments like how he inflated the behavioral differences between genders, and his inability to thoroughly consider differences being caused by societal factors (nature vs. nurture).
I think the main issue with his memo is the implication that diversity efforts were, at the time, problematic. The truth is, with such low diversity numbers even with the diversity programs, it's likely that any subpar candidates admitted probably equaled the subpar candidates admitted into Google at large. The numbers for gender diversity are even more skewed when viewed through the lens of the engineering department (which is the one relevant to the memo), which is unfortunately not available from the google diversity site like it used to be.
Looks like the wired analysis and your own views can be summarised as "we don't understand everything about psychology", and that "biological differences barely matter, it largely comes down to nurture instead of nature." One is worthless noise, the other demonstrably false.
Whats more, this has had progressives crawling all over it with arguments including "Just allow the slander to go on unanswered", "its someone else's definition of sexist so he's sexist", "I heard he does other evil things" and attempts to distract from the point.
At this stage vaguery without clear examples can be dismissed as nothing at best or marked as evidence of bad faith debate driven by religious compulsion at worst.
You go check the statistics so you don't accuse me of cherry picking or anything:
Go right ahead and look at all scientific studies you can find. See if men and women score exactly the same or if there are sometimes huge differences.
Why in hell would societies start by nurturing the sexes differently if they weren’t different to start.
I know that lots of girls are mechanically inclined, but in average they aren’t.
14 years and thousands of dollars of robots, mindstorms and all kind of stuff that my daughter is not into technical stuff, no matter how much I tried to avoid the barbies and make up stuff. And she is like most, but not all the friends her age.
We need to make sure that girls that want to do stuff that usually is more associated with boys are free to pursue their interests in equal conditions. But extrapolating this to “we need to have parity in all those predominantly masculine professions(of course, only the well paid).
> Why in hell would societies start by nurturing the sexes differently if they weren’t different to start.
We're talking about biological differences in either cognitive ability or interest in engineering/CS.
The well understood answer to your question is that there was a split in gender roles at about the time agriculture was adopted, with men working outside and women doing indoor tasks. This led to a breadwinner/homemaker split across gender lines which impacted the way genders were conventionally taught.
This extended to higher education opportunities, which in the US for example only really began to be open to women in the mid to late 1800s.
Note how none of this has anything to do with any cognitive ability that women might have had. It extends from the fact that men were superior agricultural fieldworkers thousands of years ago.
A) You start out with "either cognitive ability or interest in engineering/CS", but by your last paragraph you're down to "cognitive ability" alone. Damore's thesis was, AFAICR, mainly about the "interest" bit. Does this divergence in what you are talking about vs what he was mean anything, and if so what?
B) > The well understood answer to your question is that there was a split in gender roles at about the time agriculture was adopted, with men working outside and women doing indoor tasks.
And this split... Just happened? Or was it maybe due to differences in, well, how interested people of different sexes on average were/are in different kinds of tasks? Or why else were men "superior agricultural fieldworkers thousands of years ago"?
The data[1] shows that as countries get more egalitarian, the personality differences between the sexes increases rather than decreases, which is the opposite of what would be predicted if these differences were 100% due to socialization.
> he was pretty liberal with his conclusions he claimed were derived from data
Well, ok, fair enough, but if that's the case then the correct response was, "I can see why you think that, but have you considered..." not immediate banishment.
Don't worry, there was quite a bit of that. He was asked to tone down the document and remove some of the most ridiculous parts (including for example the antisemitic conspiracy bit) and refused.
> including for example the antisemitic conspiracy bit
I don’t recall hearing about this at the time. Do you have any links to what this was about. I tried to Google, but just got results related to more recent Google removals.
"postmodern neo Marxists" in a foot note. It may have been unintentional, but it's essentially the cultural Marxism conspiracy, repackaged by Jordan Peterson.
It had nothing to do with anything else in the document but had to stay for some reason.
Edit: actually it looks like by the version that's public he did reword it, but I recall it being worse originally. It's still like a completely terrible understanding of intersectionality, but at least it's not as overtly antisemitic.
I agree: Cultural Marxism is a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory which claims Western Marxism as the basis of continuing academic and intellectual efforts to subvert Western culture.
If that's not what you mean, I'd kindly suggest not using that terminology, as that's the common definition of the term. There's no hard definition you'll be able to tease from someone who claims cultural Marxism is a threat to the west.
Joshua has been here for many years and you're a complete newbie, how about you save your patronizing tone for situations where you have the standing to do so.
So, what matters if someone has been here for a long time and I am a newbie?
It doesn't matter at all. It is just a rehashed argument of authority, just the same old bubble mutual-congratulatory stuff that this fake enforced politeness of HN so efficiently maintains.
As someone faintly familiar with various Marxist ideologies (admittedly, not particularly well read though) how would you define the latter. I assume you are contrasting it with textual Marxism or Marxist theory.
That has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. You made a bold claim above and have nothing to back it up.
Please specifically link an article from a well regarded source that covers Damore's alleged anti-Semitism.
If you're unable to produce, what you're doing is actively trying to tie as much negativity to the name in order to gas light people into thinking he's a monster. You're propagandizing and poisoning the well.
Throughout this entire comment tree starting from its base you have multiple long term HN users all consciously going out of their way to constructs lies in the pursuit of defaming this man.
joshuamorton is supposedly a google employee according to his profile and yet was perfectly happy to throw the antisemitism bs around.
There's several accounts down the bottom, each a number of years old and ostensibly regular otherwise; all of which have made efforts to come to this discussion and make up slander. And then of course run when pressed to provide evidence.
And they do all this despite the counter evidence being available to all.
Honestly, what is happening there? Is it some sort of collective insanity? Is it something they all agree needs to be done for some greater good? And if that's the case do they agree to it subconsciously/consciously? Is it all just people who are incredibly susceptible to group pressure and who will go along with any absurdity so long as it's ordered from the right authority.
How do you go about justifying deliberately attempting to hurt a person like this?
It's possible that each of the individuals, rather than act with bad intentions, simply exist in bubbles in which they heard these allegations, and repeated them here without checking them first.
Hopefully, if this is the case, these individuals realise the bubble they exist in, and give such topics more scrutiny in future.
That said @textgel, I find bringing up individual user's details a bit unsavoury; By all means, distinguish between long-term vs short-term users, but I don't think you should bring up employer, even if it's public info.
Despite HN being explicitly not a venue for politics, enough of the userbase has de-facto decided it should be. This of course invites all the sort of internet antics that come with politics which HN users in the past have decried and claimed that the lack of here makes it a more pleasant place in general.
That's when you find these otherwise normal accounts, acting up, accounts that exist solely for flamebating, drive by throwaways attempting to derail threads, etc. And since HN is primarily user-moderated (ironically despite what a subset of the previously described types often insinuate), these sort of behavior can become encouraged if enough people agree the the text or subtext of such comments.
That has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. You made a bold claim above and have nothing to back it up.
Please specifically link an article from a well regarded source that covers Damore's alleged anti-Semitism.
If you're unable to produce, what you're doing is actively trying to tie as much negativity to the name in order to gas light people into thinking he's a monster. You're propagandizing and poisoning the well.
> and his inability to thoroughly consider differences being caused by societal factors (nature vs. nurture).
The goal was to find how to make the job more attractive to female developers. If the difference exists, then in this context the distinction does not matter.
> The goal was to find how to make the job more attractive to female developers.
But why should that be a goal? Is there any inherent value in having all jobs be equally attractive to everybody? If so, where are all the efforts to make jobs like garbage collection less male-dominated?
I have come to the conclusion that we humans have a very difficult time perceiving reality once our tribe has decided something. I'm sure it saved our ancestors from ostracism and exile. I have no doubt that some people read that memo thoroughly and are sincerely convinced it is sexist while being unable to point to anything sexist in the memo. Scary. Humans are scary apes.
Lol, yes. I agree. It's not "our tribe" that has bias. It's "their tribe". "Our tribe" is noble, generous and infallible. "Their tribe" is misinformed at best, but probably crazy if not outright evil.
Well not completely but yes more or less. Look at this comment collection surrounding Damore. The one thing that unifies the group defending the firing is that they are all willing to lie to do so and are doing it in pursuit of socially destroying someone who is by rational, innocent. After all if he wasn't the group wouldn't have to lie.
At that stage if you can't reflect on your behaviour and that of those on your side, well there either is no hope for you or you're just further lying along with your fellow ideologues.
Ok. But still, Damore's situation as part of a general human trend, from which the pro-Damore faction is not immune. There are no doubt pro-Damore people who are pro-Damore just because their tribe* is pro-Damore, and not because of the actual content of the memo. This is the identical error as the antis.
It's difficult not to make such errors because those of our tribal ancestors who did not immediately and unconditionally support the tribe died. Those who did, lived.
If you want to help, pointing out which faction is making the error is not as helpful as insisting on the principled truth no matter which faction is correct. It's a dangerous road, because humans are scary, genocidal apes.
* > - our tribe have no consensus on the issue / there is no "our tribe"
Agreed. If one can lift one's perceptions out of partisanship, there is only a unified group of people who all (with a few psychopathic exceptions) want the best for themselves, their families, and society as a whole, whose only disagreement is as to method of getting there. And nevertheless, these small disagreements can easily magnify and become physically violent, because humans are scary apes who will elevate tribal affiliation even above literal perception. So, for some people, they absolutely have a tribe, and if you disagree with it, you are them.
> If you want to help, pointing out which faction is making the error is not as helpful as insisting on the principled truth no matter which faction is correct
Which also doesn't work, precisely because of the "tribal error" being made, that removes all nuance of principle.
> whose only disagreement is as to method of getting there
This isn't really true. as a group of people, our circumstances are different, and hence we are motivated towards different, non-unified goals. It's hard to fight zero-sum instincts.
Well, there have always been those of us who do hold principles above partisan affiliation. Doing so brought the world Enlightenment, Democracy, Emancipation, Suffrage. Give it a go.
Affiliation and principle aren't always different. Hitler was defeated by murdering his associates. Taking credit for the fruits of civilization is to whitewash the history of the world.
Came here and CTRL+F Damore, glad I wasn't the only one disappointed with that framing.
We are now living in an age where it is simply not possible to discuss some topics without someone twisting the discussion into one of the various deadly sins, and everyone who engages becomes guilty of it by association.
For example, in the USA if you are in favor of less immigration, the assumption is that you are operating from a place of xenophobia and racism, because there is no other possible explanation in the universe from having those views. If you state your views coherently, demonstrated that the concerns are rooted in other factors entirely - then the bogeymen of subconscious and unconscious biases and inability to confront deeply rooted bigotry and revealed as the causes, much like the spirits of evil who possessed you when you said things to criticize orthodoxy in the past.
Likewise if one wants to discuss topics like representation across groups, one is inevitably branded a heretic for a heterodox view, regardless of the reasoning.
It's really terrible that this kind of attitude is so widespread in the west.
Forever, because HN constantly argues the content of his stupid document while ignoring the fact that he wasn't fired for writing it, he was fired for going all around the company harassing people and waving it in their faces, for months.
There is no usual pattern of these things. Damore had been shopping his thing around for a long time. I first saw it on the libertarians mailing list, where the members of that group told him in no vague terms to fuck right off with that noise. Then he crashed the "women in engineering" conference to whine about its existence. Finally they got rid of him.
When does a HN thread ever have a fruitful end? Most threads I read here on the topic end the same way: One side is convincing, the other is not. This topic in particular is important because it concerns an specific document, and the facts therein, rather than a more subjective interpretation of events. Whenever these claims are made, references (from the memo) are requested, and never/rarely supplied.
I agree this is repetitive, but so is the repeated lie of sexism. Since "a lie oft repeated becomes truth" - the boring repetition is simply a means to prevent this.
I find it really fascinating that your response to my frustration on the subject is to attempt to engage me on the subject I visibly and clearly am sick of. You seem to be under the impression that I am interested in this matter; you are wrong.
If only there were some way to not read something we are uninterested in. But alas, we live in a world where we have no choice in what to read. Until that day comes when we can just choose not to read something, I guess we will have to resort to... raging because other people read and discuss topics we would rather not read about ourselves.
You utterly misunderstood the comment you replied to. Re-read it, and maybe you'll understand. If not, maybe my re-formulation of it will help:
It is not about convincing you. It's about not letting your wrong-headed viewpoint stand unopposed, sine otherwise the preponderance of such unopposed viewpoints might give uninformed bystanders the impression that they're actually true.
It wasn't a study, it was basically a MGTOW chain letter. Anyone who has experience in science knows that the arguments it purported to show were cherry picked nonsense. A conclusion looking for evidence.
And yes, obviously people read it that way. He was fired because he wouldn't stop arguing about it, remember?
People acting like sharing a "study" that [minorities] are intellectually inferior is just normal behavior for an engineer. Who the hell does that?
I don't need to read it for you. If you walked away from that and didn't notice that the entire thesis is that [minorities] are worse engineers than [majority] then you just didn't read it
And beyond that, it's a moot point, because even if you don't see it, plenty of other people read it that way. Enough people read it that way that he was fired for it. It doesn't matter which citation I make. It's been dissected by hundreds of people in excruciating detail. Go read one of those ready analyses for the gory details and citations. It will be more intellectually fulfilling than rehashing it here again
Oh isn't that convenient. The definitely racist memo full of racism has so much in it that it is somehow completely impossible to quote any section at all that contains it.
> And beyond that, it's a moot point, because even if you don't see it, plenty of other people read it that way. Enough people read it that way that he was fired for it.
Well you personally are absolutely certain that a document definitely contains racist statements despite being completely incapable of quoting even one. Seems this is an affliction that can affect quite a few people. Well seeing as that's the "logic" you can muster perhaps we should put some sort of protections in place to the shipping industry. After all quite a few people are adamant the world is flat and we don't want to see cruise liners falling off the edge of the world now do we.
We are not supposed to discuss this.
Please just accept it as a taboo topic, not only here on HN but elsewhere too.
Probably even Damore would like to be forgotten
I'm sure it was a massive decision after 14 years. I wonder if he thought about whether his comics have surpassed his career in importance. He was in a unique position to criticise and publicise mis-doings of the most powerful company in the world and he appeared to have the patronage to do so. It's a very privileged position with the potential to really influence many things. In a way, I feel sad for this loss, but it is a very personal decision in the end and one must respect it for whatever it is. Hope someone else will continue the torch because - "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to say nothing."
It seems to me the author's divergence of views may be due to his increasing focus on politics, with a particular orientation that explicitly shows through the comics. It may just be a reflection of what's happening at scale in Silicon Valley's tech world, a movement which Twitter, which the author joined most likely not coincidentally, is at the forefront of.
Sure. Referring to the topics mentioned by the article: the one that is anti-military, pro-labour, anti-sexism/misogyny, pro-migration. On the 1-bit political spectrum of the USA, this would be the left. I'm convinced, though, that this is a special breed of progressivism and political activism, especially popular on the west coast. I'm not from the USA either and this is just what I understand from the outside of it.
Not about that specific case. If i remember correctly some people mentioned what Google may not give a refresher, and that is like cutting your comp several times down, a very clear message removing the reason to stay there without any need to actually fire.
> Software engineer Manu Cornet says Google went from being "like Disneyland" to like any other profit-driven company.
Presumably he means the fantasy of Disneyland, and not the corporation that owns it.
He raises a larger question, which is how these soulless, ethically barren profit seeking entities are able to take over everything we value as human beings, and turn them into something else.
They likely were, and think of me what you like but I've noticed the same with most Americans I've known. Not sure why that is but apparently there's some good amount of propaganda going on in the USA and people apparently believe it. Meanwhile people have to pay $5000 after an ambulance picks them up. Or $90000 for semi-trivial medical procedures.
I believe asking yourself "is my country really like I believe it is?" is a good food for thought even it's a bit sideways to this here topic at hand.
--
On topic:
I can sympathize with the author. I know what it is to have been a long time in a company; it becomes much more than a workplace. You have friends, you even have people you invite to your Sunday barbecues. It's also very likely that a number of internal processes are going smoother for you because you know whom to ping and what exactly to write in a form so your stuff gets done quicker. You have job stability and unless you are rocking the boat too much your seat is likely 99% safe.
All of those become true stoppers when you start pondering leaving. They pull you back and make you doubt yourself and your idea of switching company.
But unlike a number of commenters here I find nothing hypocritical about the decision to go to Twitter. We don't know how Twitter operates internally; maybe it's still better than Google. Or maybe they are still after FAANG level of wages so are ready to make some ethical compromises for them?
In any case, immediately discounting somebody's opinion on a corporation because they joined another corporation misses a lot of context, is flamey and non-constructive and almost smells like a paid troll, and is something I don't expect HN to condone. But sadly, here we go, it's the top comment here.
> But unlike a number of commenters here I find nothing hypocritical about the decision to go to Twitter…
It’s not just about which is less ethical or hypocritical. These are imperfect organisations filled with people who want to have a positive impact, and this person may reasonably believe that a fresh start or a particular role positions them better to make the impact they want to have.
Of course I'm not. I realized this some years ago and started actively trying to prevent it. But I'm sure I'm buying a propaganda that I shouldn't, even today.
> They likely were, and think of me what you like but I've noticed the same with most Americans I've known.
I am probably misunderstanding what you say, but Cornet has grown up in France, and is probably very aware that health care cost in the US is not a normal thing since he comes from a country where it is considerably cheaper if not free.
His naiveté was about the nature of Google and how he thought a giant corporation basing their revenue on ads and collecting information could be a positive force in the world and not abuse its power. It seems to me his gripe is about the hypocrisy, which in a sense make it even harder to fix the company: if people denies the company ethics problems, you can be sure they are not going to get better.
Twitter in that sense has never promised to not be evil. You can't be naive about its ethics because you just have to doom-scroll the app for an hour to feel bad about it.
> His naiveté was about the nature of Google and how he thought a giant corporation basing their revenue on ads and collecting information could be a positive force in the world and not abuse its power.
I agree with your refinement. Admittedly the first part of my comment was a rant on a bigger topic that rubs me the wrong way every now and then -- with the slight clarification that to me "an American" isn't "USA-born", it's more like "has lived in USA for a long time".
> It seems to me his gripe is about the hypocrisy
I think so too but then again, a big company changing ethics is also smart enough to know they have to peddle certain propaganda at their more naive hard workers. Sadly it has been the case ever since written history and it seems to be a general weakness of the human brain: we can trade things in our lives (physical and mental health, personal happiness, alone time, leisure time etc.) for some "bigger cause".
People are especially vulnerable to these "bigger causes require sacrifices" propaganda when they are young. And such huge companies are run by excellent psychologists (I mean that higher management / politicians naturally are such) and they know how to manipulate those younger people.
> if people denies the company ethics problems, you can be sure they are not going to get better.
Herein lies the conundrum, you are correct. And I'd point out that maybe you here are projecting some naivete: we are not ants, dude, and we don't possess collective hive-mind consciousness so we cannot ever all work together towards a common cause.
For every single programmer refusing to work due to warped company ethics there are 1000 more waiting in Africa / India / Eastern Europe / Brazil / etc. These companies' awful ethics will never disappear because the world is too big and there is always somebody who will pick up the job.
The only way out is this: that the jobs require so much expertise, experience and a surgical touch that a random hungry team from India cannot ever hope to do the job properly. And for a number of positions inside big companies this is already the case. However the temptation to hire cheaper devs is too great and the companies usually sink a lot of money in those "cheaper" devs until they realize they aren't saving any money due to reduced quality of work, huge communication overhead, general chaos and no planning, and several other such nasty problems that the cheaper dev teams always seem to carry with them.
> You can't be naive about its ethics because you just have to doom-scroll the app for an hour to feel bad about it.
I am completely with you here. The thing is though, what we find bad/evil about Twitter's model is what other people absolutely LOVE about it. What can you do. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
He reminds me of Scott Adams, Creator of the Dilbert Cartoons started with PacBell way back and got a lot of early inspiration from that experience. Maybe this guy should consider becoming a full time cartoonist as well instead of going to work for another "evil tech giant" ?
Newspapers are dead. They syndicated Adams' comics throughout the 90s and 2000s. There's no compensation and distribution model that can replace it as yet. Probably won't ever be, the future is all video.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 317 ms ] threadSometimes I don’t know where to begin processing people like this.
> "The mismatch between what they say and what they really do is growing," Cornet said. "The thicker the gap is, the easier it is to point out that hypocrisy."
Maybe Twitter internally completely recognize the bad side of the platform and work accordingly.
I personally make a big chunk of my money from oil & gas, I recognize that oil & gas for transportation should die, but I know we need oil & gas for materials at the moment (but should reduce, reduce and reduce the use as fast as possible). Sometimes part of your work is not all unicorns, pink and friendly, having the honesty to deal with it and not being hypocrite about it is really important.
Sagan says we're just a mote of dust. Jesus says throw no stones. Hate cannot drive out hate, MLK.
Humans evolved as carnivores, killing to survive. Bleaker still, the universe doesn't care when the tiny speck we live on boils away.
And here we are but for a brief moment. A tiny kindness goes a long way.
The parent poster was being pragmatic. They're going to die, just like the two of us.
Work to end the perceived problem instead of talking about it sanctimoniously. Because mimetic vitriol creates interference waves and drives us into factions. It accomplishes nothing and amplifies hate.
Humanity is delicate. There are a lot of risks, and trade-offs in how to address them.
Presumably, the implicit message the OP tried to get across is to also work within the system to improve it.
I don't believe that Twitter has worked out how to act accordingly to the bad side of their platform. There's still a ton of misinformation, it's still incredibly polarizing, and IMO it has a worse overall impact than Google.
10 years ago people would have laughed at the mere suggestion that everything on the net is true.
There will always be misinformation, but this dogma that this is somehow even an issue is completely festered by now but still ridiculous in my opinion.
Of course these rules against misinformation are not enforced equally, so people get angry at the unfairness and dig in. Not really surprising.
Solution: Sit back an relax and let there be misinformation. Even 5 year olds can handle this easily...
Are you referring to the Viking?
It didnt potential recruits from seeing the propaganda but it did quell incipient doubts in their minds that they might be the bad guys.
Censorship is good at that.
Censorship can work but only if you lock EVERYTHING down, north korea/china style. The more failed censorship governments engage in the more attractive this route becomes.
"Five year olds can handle this": That is the exact problem, they can't. They are sometimes less capable than that.
But on twitter you've got bad actors pushing propaganda that can be very hard to differentiate from honest opinion.
And I think you underestimate how gullible a lot of people really are. Many people will believe the self-professed 43 year old mom of 4 from Idaho is really just that -- even though the profile picture is copied from an Australian cooking blog and there's cyrillic replies early in the account's history.
The platforms will make a valiant effort to solve the problem in the way which is most politically expeditious for them. Not in a way that solves the problem.
The effects of this frankly terrifies me. Way more than Russian psyops campaigns running mommyblogger tweets.
"First, do no harm" doesnt just apply to doctors.
These are uncharted waters. I’d be wary of mistaking such hypotheses for absolute truths.
When mass journalism arrived we had yellow journalism. Journalistic standards arose, people chose their papers, and while it wasn’t a monotonic rise to goodness, what followed was better than what was.
I don’t know what the Internet will look like in a few years. But I’m fairly confident it won’t be laissez faire.
I'm fairly confident it won't be laissez faire in the future either. That's coz there's a consolidation of media platforms and a wave of populist authoritarianism sweeping the world, not coz censorship ever fixed anything.
A. Let's not mince words, it hasn't done the US any favours.
B. The world is bigger than just the US, so I would say that while you may think it's not uncharted it is definitely not solved (and can therefore be called uncharted enough).
It’s done phenomenal favors for centuries. Aside from freedom of speech being very effective for growth in ideas and innovation, it’s prevented National religions, limited press interference, limited censorship.
It’s odd to even hear the idea that it’s a bad thing.
And strikingly illiberal, although both liberals and libertarians tend to agree on most matters of free speech.
For decades, liberals have fought for more freedom of speech, even in grotesque situations[0], and now we throw it all away, because we're suddenly winning?
0. https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-em-defends-kkks-rig...
This statement is vague enough that it could mean a lot of things, but due to your reference to Cyrillic, I feel a need to point out that the most common conspiracy theory about Twitter being filled with fake accounts controlled by Russian bots or "bad actors" is completely false.
I can say this with some small authority, because I'm actually a cited expert on the topic of false claims about Twitter propaganda bots. In 2017 I wrote an essay [1] analyzing an academic paper which claimed the Brexit vote had been heavily influenced by Russian Twitter bots. It was a form of scientific fraud and its claims reduced to nothing. (I'd worked on bot detection at Google for several years so knew that their claims were impossible, and it started influencing the Prime Minister at the time, which is why I read it).
That article was then later cited in a paper [2] titled, "The Rise and Fall of 'Social Bot' Research". The paper is perhaps more easily digested in talk form, and I'm cited in that too [3]. It shows that there's an entire subfield of "science" with thousands of research papers, claiming that Twitter is overrun with bots engaging in political propaganda and subtly controlling elections. None of these papers are logically or scientifically valid. The bots they think they're finding are in reality just artifacts of measurement and logic errors. In most cases the mistakes the papers make are so basic they cannot possibly be actual errors, and thus it seems plausible to assume that the widespread belief in Russian Twitter bots is itself deliberate propaganda spread by academics who are trying to delegitimize social trends they disapprove of.
Here are some of the ways these papers mislead people:
• They define a bot as any account that posts a lot to Twitter using a smartphone.
• They mathematically obfuscate their own data to hide the fact that it doesn't support their conclusions.
• They define a bot as anyone labelled as such by an opaque ML model called "BotOrNot"/"Botometer".
BotOrNot is pure pseudo-science because it's not replicable: the model isn't available for study or re-creation. It can only be used via an API.
But beyond being unscientific the model outputs random noise, and as a consequence papers that use it rarely disclose the actual list of accounts identified as bots, because it would be obvious that the papers were fraudulent. For example when it was shown that BotOrNot classed a large chunk of US Congressmen as bots, the academics who created it simply attacked the discoverers as "academic trolls", then quietly hard-coded Congress to be humans. Of course there are many other lists of known-human accounts and so it was easy to show that this model classifies anywhere between 10% and 30% of humans as bots. None of these papers care about the FP rate on the model, nor that it's not actually a scientific tool at all due to its entirely secret methodology.
Journalists enthusiastically spread these lies. The paper by Gallwitz & Kreil has a diagram showing how fake papers ended up in a huge list of media outlets and the talk goes on to show that in many cases the media have stopped even requiring a bogus academic paper to repeat these allegations. A mere statement by a professor is considered sufficient.
It's important that people understand this: practically any claim you've read about hordes of bots on Twitter influencing politics is false. There is a well funded effort across the entire political left (academics, left wing journalists, a small number of tech workers) to create the illusion that such bots are rife and that non-left wing political outcomes are not genuinely "real" as a consequence, but when actual evidence is demanded the claims evaporate. Do not be fooled by this.
[1] TheRealDunkirk ↗ > Twitter being filled with fake accounts controlled by Russian bots or "bad actors" is completely false. mike_hearn ↗ What specific tricks do you think tech firms are missing? At least when I worked on the problem, both machines and manpower were plentiful. h2odragon ↗ For the longest time "everybody knew" that downloading files from a BBS or the Internet would infect you with digital viruses.. There's still "Antivirus software". throwaways885 ↗ What makes you think this problem isn't being tackled? Every year Twitter and Facebook talk about how they detected and removed XXX million bots from their platform. For example, the spam problem has been rapidly iterated on [1] to little fanfare. The abuse, T&S and security teams at these companies probably cost on the order of hundreds of millions of $, how is that consistent with your framing that the problem is being ignored? TheRealDunkirk ↗ > how is that consistent with your framing that the problem is being ignored? dcolkitt ↗ > At this point, I think most people "get" just how little FAANG companies are doing to combat TheRealDunkirk ↗ https://www.indiewire.com/2019/11/ida-the-great-hack-documen... [deleted] ↗ (comment deleted) hobs ↗ It sounds like you reject their methodology, which is fine, but that doesn't mean they were wrong, just that they are failing to prove it. mike_hearn ↗ If their methodology is wrong then there is no support for their hypothesis, meaning we accept the null hypothesis (that there's nothing there). Brybry ↗ The statement was purposefully vague because I cannot claim to know who the bad actors are -- only that I stumbled onto a few. Also I never said they were bots.
Yeah. I mean, everyone knows that they're actually Chinese. /s
From your first link: "I am one of the very, very few people in the world who has actually fought bots on social media platforms." At this point, I think most people "get" just how little FAANG companies are doing to combat... uh, let's call it... "coordinated uses of their platforms for user-hostile purposes." For years I have said that they could be doing much, much more, and people just hand-wave the criticism aside with, "but but but it's really HARD." Yeah, I know. But these companies continue to print money like the Fed, year after year. They could be throwing A LOT more manpower and machines at the problem, and it shows. We all feel it. Anyway, it's just nice to see some side channel data that proves my point.
At any rate, you seem to be assuming there's a large uncontrolled bot problem. The point of the research quoted above is that there isn't. Unless you're talking about ordinary commercial spam?
If we don't see the hordes of "russian Bots" we must be insane, right?
You can't simply throw machines and manpower at a problem.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/420400/spam-email-traffi...
And here I'm struggling to understand how anyone can read my comment and conclude that I'm framing the problem as being "ignored." Silly me.
Do you have any evidence of this claim or do you just “get” it. This kinda reminds of the rhetorical device where somebody says “you know it, I know it, everybody knows it” without actually citing any proof.
This whole thing exposed how the platform was gamed. That's what I'm referring to. This sort of thing is being done in large and small ways all the time, and there's no chance that Facebook and Twitter are doing enough to detect it, because it's in their financial interests NOT to.
As far as I can tell the reason why many people on twitter thought there was a massive russian bot problem is because they(I) saw the massive influx of political bots and shills with the rise of the election and could clearly tell someone had their finger on the scale.
Russia seemed the most obvious culprit given various signals coming out ahead of the election (and after it) eg https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/15/kremlin-papers...
Rejection of what they're doing isn't some personal quirk of mine, by the way. Their methodology is entirely invalid. It should be rejected by anyone because it can't tell us anything true about the world.
My example was from one account that I personally found and reported. And someone at Twitter must have agreed with me because the accounts no longer exist.
And, in terms of evidence, I actually still have screenshots that I posted to discord to share with some friends. But if you don't trust my word then it's not like the screenshots are any more trustworthy.
And the solution to this isn't to let the companies responsible for the problem in the first place attempt to self-regulate with more black-box algorithms. The fundamental product they are selling is to manipulate people. There is a clear conflict of interest.
I've used YouTube to learn how to build a bike from scratch, how to fit tiles, plumbing repairs, how to make 3d games engines, as well as the plethora of maths and science / general interest channels (Veritasium, Tom Scott, etc).
I thought just yesterday how YouTube changed the world again on making knowledge much more accessable than ever before.
I have seen very well done YouTube videos debunking things, explaining things, visual showing things.
I asked my mother about cooking and in here time, you needed to go to a cooking class. I have already more diverse cooking experience thanks to getting inspired and learning certain aspects of cooking through youtube.
Facebook? just burn that shit.
The flat earth movement for example spun up on youtube and is going down again.
Which feels to me that there are mechanism in place or persistency on information sharing which of course can go both directions, but its harder to just be in your own bubble.
Nonetheless, i did not use a political example because i wanted to make my point on something non controversial and still highly positive.
Woodworking, car repair, item testing (the guy who tests 20 brands of oils, blades, tools etc.
Im not sure though, completly what your point is though, i hope i understood it correctly.
I think it’s important to note that nothing in your comment leads me to believe you’re not a diehard, Qanon-believing, Trump-loving, lizard-people-are-actually-a-thing kinda person…which is kinda my point. YouTube’s strengths are also a significant part of its weakness (and that’s why it has such a massive responsibility).
And my point is that you're upset that you can't assume everything you'd like to about me from a paragraph that I wrote. Twitter is tribal warfare.
It raises some points regarding the questions you pose, you may find interesting. I'd love to do the TL;DR but it's slightly more nuanced than that so I'll post the link
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tooiNm9WmkM
The more complex problems get, the less likely anyone in the room is going to solve them any time soon(Bounded Rationality) . So beyond a point laughing at that reality becomes counter productivs. It just gets people to spend more time and energy reacting, defending, justifying and hiding things.
Bottom line - if you want to do something about a very complex problem, pick a small sub problem within it to work on. That approach has better odds of producing outcomes than poking fun at people who have bit off more than they can chew.
I've been thinking about that recently, and was wondering if not accepting a job in """bad""" industries (bad is a gross oversimplification here covering things like oil, gas, tobacco, weapons, these kind of things) is in fact running away from your duty. If you don't take a job in these industries, other people will, and these people may be worse than you. Maybe the best moral option is to in fact try as hard as you can to get an influencial position in the industry to promote energy transition, reduce harm from smoking, etc.
I apologize again for the oversimplification of grouping together these different industries, my point here is to group what people think usually as "morally bad", not to pass judgment on people who work in those industries.
Companies act on the will of the people within them, and as the people change, so do they.
Empires change because they're overrun from outside, or - vanishingly rarely, on moral issues - because the emperor decrees it and/or is replaced.
Amazon may go in a different direction with Bezos gone. It almost certainly won't, but there's always a tiny sliver of potential when the big jobs change.
The political opinions of an Ln are irrelevant. Not even L10s get to set moral policy.
This is the exact argument I used against my Mum when I was joining the Army at 17
It seems more effective to go outside the system: e.g. for affecting change in the military, use civic action. Run for office and change the rules. This works for fighting against bad companies like weapons manufacturers and polluters too btw, since you can push legislation to shape what they do.
^ The cynical take is that everything is too locked-in-place for an individual to make a difference. But all important changes require a collective.
Going back to the original topic: if someone feels that Google as an organization of humans is broken from a values perspective (e.g. lacking systems to capture feedback from bottom up and allow that to shape decisions), the most effective way to change things is not to hopelessly try to become a C-level exec who makes those kinds of decisions. You either need to directly approach the folks in charge (e.g. a union actually helps with this, but also hopefully, if things aren't totally broken, there are internal forums that enable these kinds of interactions), or gather enough internal gravity to get their attention.
If you're in a workplace where neither seems feasible, all you can really do is leave.
The number of talented people in any industry are always limited. If enough people refuse to work at places that they don't ideologically agree with (and maybe dedicate their time working on solutions), at the very least, the operational cost of these companies would increase.
And even if you did get somehow manage to get into an influential position, you're still going to get pushback from the board, from shareholders, from customers, and sometimes also from employees.
How many examples can you give of people successfully improving toxic industries from the inside?
All of the influential people that will ever exist, already exist. No new people will ever become influential.
One employee can not have even the slightest influence over the world's largest tech firm, even ignoring that it's publicly traded thus institutional investors are the only people steering the ship. Or ignoring that Brin and Page's research was heavily funded by the CIA and NSA as part of a program specifically designed to encourage silicon valley to develop technology and services to make it easier for them to track social connections between people.
This is a bit like going to work at an oil refinery because you think it'll help climate change. Or working for Marlboro's marketing department thinking you'll help them stop marketing to children.
Even top corporate leadership doesn't really get to steer the ship. It's investors - in publicly traded companies, typically institutional investors, mostly funds. Any sort of corporate "listen to the employees" initiatives are just window dressing; a tap at the bottom of the tank of "employee rabble-rousing."
Just to finish driving home how little impact any worker could have on companies of this size: do you know how Walmart reacts to a store that looks like it's about to successfully unionize despite their union-busting efforts? They turn off the lights and leave.
Now consider that Walmart's goal is to undercut all the small businesses in a community, driving them into the ground. Shutting down an established store leaves a huge vacuum. Walmart is capable of destroying communities at the multi-county level and they do not care.
I think this makes sense in situations where there’s an oligopoly or exclusive options (eg, work in government or not).
But when there are thousands of options for engineers (including starting your own) then it doesn’t make sense to me and definitely seems like a societal net negative as well would be really stressful to me.
Knowing that every day, my code is making people angrier and more disconnected would be tough to outweigh with the hope of one day being able to fix things.
It’s not my duty to fix every broken thing so I should focus on fixing and building good things. Maybe one day when all the causes that I think are important are solved, I would consider moving down the chain.
I don't believe I have had a more uncomfortable, baffling, and frustrating conversation in my sixty years of existence than the one I had with him at social gathering where after him bringing it up, I asked him how he balanced his work and religion.
When I see personally-baffling worldviews in other people, I try to remind myself that there are 7+ billion people on the earth. Someone, somewhere, believes anything you can think of.
And now the internet and social media helps them get together and reinforce their beliefs.
Which is something sorely missing from the current discourse and media, no one is saint. But I guess the media or most public don't care,
"The public aren't interested in affairs. All they want to know is who are the goodies and who are the baddies."
- Sir Humphrey Appleby
>"The mismatch between what they say and what they really do is growing," Cornet said. "The thicker the gap is, the easier it is to point out that hypocrisy."
I mean it has been there since Day one. The first time I read about "Do No Evil" in the early 2000s was when my hypocrisy radar on red alert. And the insane amount of PR shit / submarine articles [1] that came in the next few years before they IPO. They were so righteous to the point everything that was in their way was evil. Indeed, Most evil are created by those who think themselves as so righteous. They stopped talking about it from early 2010s and stopped using the tagline in 2015.
But the "Do No Evil" disease or ideology still managed to spread across Silicon Valley and Tech Industry. These PR shit managed to dialled to a whole new level, Uber, Snapchat and even Apple once Steve Jobs' RDF was no longer there to shield them. ( And became more apparent once Katie Cotton retired ) I sometimes wonder if those PR people managed to jump from one company to another.
[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Apple and iPhone is the most evil company of humankind. They invent a device that helps facilitate human trafficking.
Coming next: road and electricity!
If they just made a simple chat app your metaphor would hold but they are directly responsible because they choose which content is shown and which isn’t.
Now it is a mix that many regard as repulsive by default.
"There must be some truth to what he says if he gets that much backlash" is always a convincing argument. I don't even mean that ironically.
Better have that in the open because on the internet there will always be at least one person that disagrees with any view that is espoused.
Social media platform algorithms, whether by design or not, drive discussion into the most extreme polarising tones.
In pragmatic terms, there is a world of difference between smartphones and social media.
Your goal isn't to understand, but to criticize; and from a perspective of superiority no less.
In any case, between Twitter and Google it is quite obvious who is doing more harm to more people in more places and more ways. Twitter may still be a net-negative overall (in fact I believe it is) - a lot of stuff is.
To me it's "obviously" Twitter, so I'm quite curious how you came to the conclusion it's Google.
Google embraced search, and they're basically the only one left.
They embraced email and their free offering distorted the market to enough extent to make most other providers also-rans, except a few key players.
Youtube is the only viable player left in the video sharing field. RSS readers are recovering but it also was a blood bath. I could go on for long, Google coming and leaving(or not) markets has huge negative impacts that I don't see Twitter having in general.
This just makes Twitter even worse. Only a tiny percentage of the US population are active posters on Twitter. If governments are using Twitter to decide public policy, then they are going to design policy that tailors to only a narrow subset of the population.
If companies/politicians want to know what people think of them, they should be sending out surveys to their customers/constituents. Twitter is not a statistically sound replacement for actual research.
Twitter is a clout machine. It is purely for brand building and very little else. After all, there's only so much you can do in a hundred-or-so characters/words/whatever it is now. The result is a huge incentive to take extreme positions to generate as much noise and controversy as possible.
I'd be willing to bet that many Twitter execs would kill to switch places with Google, ethical quandary and all. In that case, it's not that Twitter is more "ethical" than Google because of superior morals, it's because Twitter has not had the same opportunities to trade morals for profit.
I'm not saying this out of moral superiority (I worked for Google), I just think it's silly to expect companies to do the right thing without a strong incentive to.
Google did: Maps, Android, gmail (yes gmail gave free https email accounts when others not even enforced https), skin cancer research, Alphafold, co2 neutral datacenters, pushing now for 24/7 reneweable.
Google literally changed the world.
In my personal opinion, Google would be worth to stay and try to change google 'back' or whatever is going wrong.
What has twitter changed for anyone? Srsly? The reacted when Trump became president they didn't forsee or work on mechanism to fix sharing and multiplying fake news. Other companies like Facebook for example are a global net negative as well. I'm seeing much more fakenewes and uneducated people on facebook commenting as antivaxer than anything else.
I can't understand why you would go to twitter and rant about ethical and moral workplace questions.
Twitter, I agree, is too insignificant to have done any of those things. So I can see how working there would feel a lot less morally compromising.
> stay and try to change Google
They’ve been at Google for 14 years. I think at that point you probably have a pretty clear idea what you, as an individual, are going to be able to change in the place.
Android is not 'just' an mobile os ;its a free globally used mobile operating system used activly by over 3 billion people with an easy way to incorporate your own app market.
I have not mentioned something like googles material design or angular.
Google maps gave everyone a free few on the earth in a time where you had to pay for maps on your expensive navigation system. It took OpenStreetMap a while to do the same.
Comparing the [history of OSM](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/History_of_OpenStreetMap) with the [history of Google Maps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Maps#History) I'm not entirely sure about that statement. OSM started in 2004, Google Maps was announced in 2005. No information on quality at that time, though :)
But one can't dismiss the fact that Twitter and Google are cut from the same mass surveillance cloth, with the former just being smaller.
Ironically, these are the exact same objections I have with the Goomics. They take complicated issues and reduces them to "DAE think corporations evil?"
they were not. the "zinger" was a quote from the article
Now, the new tech unions that are occurring in a few companies give some hope against this hypocrisy as they all seem to have a line or two in their mission statements which speak up about shaping the direction and action of their employers. I hope they live up to their promise.
Pretty much all the FAANGs operate in pretty much the same way. Google just has a very benign image, even while they ban people left, right and center on Youtube, censor search results, and delete adsense accounts of inconvenient news orgs.
It's a bit ironic that I've to now use Yandex, from "repressive" Russia no less, in order to access sites and information not approved by the Ministry of Truth in the "freedom-loving" lands of the yee United States.
If you know your "banned, unapproved, history" (the kind even Chomsky would admonish you for), you'd also know this is not new for either the US, or its predecessor, the British Empire.
Hypocrisy, you tempt us, and protect us so.
If you actually can, I am happy for you, but do recognize that then you'd be in a tiny minority.
In general I think platforms where you the user explicitly indicates their interest are less socially destructive than ones where an algorithm guesses. At least that way you are aware of what bubble you are in, and can relatively easily see what other people are seeing. On Facebook there is basically no way to do this.
Unfortunately social networking sites in the latter category are much more profitable, hence why e.g. reddit is moving in that direction.
If your ethical compass is just bad/good, I could see how this would be confusing.
It has allowed me to discover people who would find it very difficult to make themselves heard if there was no central platform where they could post their views and allow any random person on the internet to follow them. Using Twitter, I have discovered a lot of communities which I did not know even exist.
It is probably the only useful platform in existence today. Just because some people use it for hate means nothing to me.
Super cute comics, though there's a lot of references to internal Google culture or figures that I had to look up at times to get the joke.
Also, companies have proven to be inept to tackle social problems, even if they genuinely wanted to.
And my internal response was "Friend, you manage a ten-thousand-person company. Garage tinkerers have the luxury of their job being 'make cool things.' Your job is people."
Complaining about taking a paycut of 10-30% when you want to move while some topshot person is allowed to move without issues, might not be 'fair' but holy shit is that life far away from normal reality.
And this discord is what makes it very hard to read for me.
Maybe better technology could improve it?
Seriously?
If their tests selected for a differing ideology from the points you state, would you be happy?
He's saying that there may be centrists or conservative people with Google level engineering skills that have no issue with things like ICE or military contracts.
I'd imagine such characters would not be popular inside the company, and best shut up. Hence, you could argue the culture already pre-selects for progressive ideology.
The "women in tech" memo is a perfect example of it. Sure enough, it was clumsy and likely full of inaccuracies. But the core thesis is hardly harmful or controversial. It was saying that women have less "tendency" to be interested in hardcore tech, therefore aggressively enforcing quotas on this representation is something you could at the very least debate.
The memo doesn't even classify as specifically right-wing. It's just a counter point against how to achieve diversity and how far to take that goal, and which method to use.
The consequence is that he's fired on the spot.
So that proves the point. Centrists and conservatives, or anybody challenging the most progressive views can work at Google yet best shut up. Ideological selection is already in place.
At my 2 previous jobs, I was explicitly asked during interview what my position was on "diversity" and "equity". To this day, I still don't know what that had to do with me writing code.
It's not the employees that are a bad culture fit; the employees are the culture. It's these projects.
This problem will resolve itself over time though. If Google continues to lean into these projects, it will self-select for people who have no ethical qualms with them. But for over a decade, such selection was unnecessary.
I'd go even further and say that the FAANGs plan for this "time bomb" effect. They hire mostly impressionable kids, and the rate at which they hire is based on an expectation of short tenures (even by the historical standards of this young industry). Their famously high compensation levels are not just about attracting talent but also about keeping that tenure from being even shorter. They know that people's misgivings and frustrations will add up over time. They know that the "price of their souls" in Cornet's graph will keep increasing. Everything from their onboarding processes to their review/promotion processes to their engineering standards are designed to reduce and/or make up for this kind of attrition.
Hiring people with a particular kind of politics doesn't make any sense at all for them, whether that kind is enlightened or yours. The only kind of culture they select for is around non-political issues such as technical approaches and work/collaboration styles.
Talking shit about management and rousing the rabble isn't really a great move in any case. They might have legitimate reasons for doing what they're doing, and you're just going to hurt everyone's morale
That doesn't mean you can't leave a nice little desk fire on the way out, though.
https://gmail.googleblog.com/2011/03/faces-of-gmail-manu-cor...
I guess he already had a following early on? and if they dissapeared him later it would have looked bad?
.
It's like there is literally no developer support from google when your app gets taken down for no reason, unless you have a big twitter following and complain there, then they fix it.
The flip side is the execs are really good at dodging and ignoring you. It doesn't matter if it's an ethical decision or if it's something as simple as "why the hell are we making another messaging app?" you will be allowed (within reason) to scream your head off because you will be ignored.
While perspectives on change over time can be very valuable, is it harder to assess where the grass is greener?
Industry outside Google isn't the same as when he left. And he's also been at one place long enough, that some goodness might be so familiar that he doesn't realize it.
It almost seems like an unavoidable aspect of seniority: as though one day after a promotion you get taken into a dark room and taught the new corporate language, and how to not answer questions directly.
You have the responsibility for economic success in the name of all other employees. That severely limits your ability to just be nice for a moment.
Self-determination is the luxury of the responsibility-less, the foolish, or the oblivious. The more and more of business I get exposed to, the more I realize the level of interconnection and constraint propagation is so high, it really does require an eyes fully open approach. That means making some seriously hard decisions sometimes.
remove the dark room and that is exactly what happens, at least according to my manager friends from several BigCo-s. And not only "how to not answer questions directly", there is a lot of what can be summarized as how to manipulate the employees, etc.
The answer is probably that being candid makes you vulnerable. This is a guy who would systematically attack management for their decisions. Yet he failed to connect the dots between his actions and theirs.
In the real world you'll frequently find situations where there is no unequivocally good answer, but a decision needs to be made. In new companies leadership has more blind trust from employees that they can rely on. In mature companies where staff frequently challenge decisions it is easier for management to just present a smaller target and give non answers.
People who are too candid can't be controlled and can't be trusted to do what may be in the company's best interests. If you don't agree with toeing the company line, you either leave or aren't promoted. At some point, a company needs its management to move in lock-step, otherwise it can't predictably meet its goals.
I suspect it's more learned behaviour.
I see my younger self in the author of these cartoons. I saw myself as the smartest guy in the room and would complain about everything as though the answers were obvious. Now I have more responsibility everything has become a lot less black and white. I realised that bitching about stuff in this way is cheap (and to be honest, I think it's intellectually lazy). It's also a privilege you lose as soon as you have power, because now it's your job to fix the stuff that everything is complaining about.
I feel the same way about my younger self. I also thought I knew better than people above me, and I also now recognize that it's not so simple. Even if I was right and we took action based on what I thought was best, there would be effects elsewhere that I hadn't thought of, mostly political effects, which would have larger organizational ramifications.
What's more, I have found recently that I've accepted this attitude of "find ways to accomplish goals, don't rock the boat, and find a way to get everyone moving in the same direction without complaining" and a lot of it is really not about "being right" but making it possible for the largest number of people to succeed. Even if I dislike aspects of how we're doing things, I've recognized that it doesn't help the cause to be overly candid about it as that just introduces chaos organizational (it tends to encourage discord and behavior that isn't constructive).
The strangest thing about this recent change in behavior is my manager and skip-level manager have both independently suggested I consider management, which was never my goal (still not a goal).
I think this is misleading and to me makes it sound like James Damore is some sort of male supremacist, memo here: firedfortruth.com
What truly matters isn’t what I wake up and do every day, it’s what’s in my heart that counts. My soul is pure, don’t look at my hands.
He’s a long time employee with a presumably significant amount of equity. Significant at an individual level, I mean. He’s fully imbricated and implicated in what he portrays as so horrible (see the ICE comic if you think I’m exaggerating). Truly acknowledging this would likely be traumatic.
I mean, shit, he’d have to do something about it! He’d have to live a totally different way, for just one thing. He’d have to divest... all of that is not gonna happen.
So, comics.
At most places I have worked, you'll be fired for this kind of snarky criticism.
Really? Do people (who actually read the study) really think it was sexist? It stated the obvious - that there are differences in interests in men compared to women by aggregate.
This guy either didn't read it or he's easily influenced by cancel mobs.
Here is the original memo for your convenience: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...
In other words, if enough people feel something is sexist then it's in a company's best interest to agree with them.
It just demonstrates a collective insanity at the organisation in question.
They're welcome to put their heads in the sand and claim whatever irrational bs they desire is "unhelpful" and "sexist" but that doesn't make it so.
I think firing Damore for an opinion shows what cowards they are and everything that is wrong with the current woke movement: don't talk about new ideas or possible solutions, don't open up uncomfortable discussions, only bow to mob led slogans otherwise you're burned at the stake.
My new accountant agrees that $1+$1=$3, creating a much less hostile work environment. S/He even practises intersectionality wrt profit vs debt - me and my employees have never been happier!
> The text preemptively claims that people will reject it because they are too politically correct.
The text was right.
> From the beginning it was a slanted criticism of Google’s hiring practices.
Yes, how does this relate to the original point?
Weird how a lot of academics don't agree.
Even in the legal system "expert testimony" can be a dubious process - in the court of press-media there is no bar to cherry-picking.
Yeah, so? You say that as if the fact that a lot of people did exactly that for exactly that reason somehow shows some flaw with the text.
I don't think he's evil or sexist for writing what he did, but I strongly disagree with what he wrote and even more disappointed he went on to become a poster child for Fox News
I think the main issue with his memo is the implication that diversity efforts were, at the time, problematic. The truth is, with such low diversity numbers even with the diversity programs, it's likely that any subpar candidates admitted probably equaled the subpar candidates admitted into Google at large. The numbers for gender diversity are even more skewed when viewed through the lens of the engineering department (which is the one relevant to the memo), which is unfortunately not available from the google diversity site like it used to be.
You can see the diversity breakdown for yourself here: https://diversity.google/annual-report/representation/
You can also see a longer analysis Damore's liberal assumptions here: https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-...
Whats more, this has had progressives crawling all over it with arguments including "Just allow the slander to go on unanswered", "its someone else's definition of sexist so he's sexist", "I heard he does other evil things" and attempts to distract from the point.
At this stage vaguery without clear examples can be dismissed as nothing at best or marked as evidence of bad faith debate driven by religious compulsion at worst.
Go on... Demonstrate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning
We can advance once you've got the above mastered.
You go check the statistics so you don't accuse me of cherry picking or anything:
Go right ahead and look at all scientific studies you can find. See if men and women score exactly the same or if there are sometimes huge differences.
Assume for a minute we all agree that there are observable iq differences and observable differences in likelyhood one ventures into computer science.
Then what? You've claimed that this is due to biolgical factors not social ones. Prove it.
We're talking about biological differences in either cognitive ability or interest in engineering/CS.
The well understood answer to your question is that there was a split in gender roles at about the time agriculture was adopted, with men working outside and women doing indoor tasks. This led to a breadwinner/homemaker split across gender lines which impacted the way genders were conventionally taught.
This extended to higher education opportunities, which in the US for example only really began to be open to women in the mid to late 1800s.
Note how none of this has anything to do with any cognitive ability that women might have had. It extends from the fact that men were superior agricultural fieldworkers thousands of years ago.
A) You start out with "either cognitive ability or interest in engineering/CS", but by your last paragraph you're down to "cognitive ability" alone. Damore's thesis was, AFAICR, mainly about the "interest" bit. Does this divergence in what you are talking about vs what he was mean anything, and if so what?
B) > The well understood answer to your question is that there was a split in gender roles at about the time agriculture was adopted, with men working outside and women doing indoor tasks.
And this split... Just happened? Or was it maybe due to differences in, well, how interested people of different sexes on average were/are in different kinds of tasks? Or why else were men "superior agricultural fieldworkers thousands of years ago"?
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30206941/
Well, ok, fair enough, but if that's the case then the correct response was, "I can see why you think that, but have you considered..." not immediate banishment.
I don’t recall hearing about this at the time. Do you have any links to what this was about. I tried to Google, but just got results related to more recent Google removals.
It had nothing to do with anything else in the document but had to stay for some reason.
Edit: actually it looks like by the version that's public he did reword it, but I recall it being worse originally. It's still like a completely terrible understanding of intersectionality, but at least it's not as overtly antisemitic.
If that's not what you mean, I'd kindly suggest not using that terminology, as that's the common definition of the term. There's no hard definition you'll be able to tease from someone who claims cultural Marxism is a threat to the west.
Please specifically link an article from a well regarded source that covers Damore's alleged anti-Semitism.
If you're unable to produce, what you're doing is actively trying to tie as much negativity to the name in order to gas light people into thinking he's a monster. You're propagandizing and poisoning the well.
Throughout this entire comment tree starting from its base you have multiple long term HN users all consciously going out of their way to constructs lies in the pursuit of defaming this man.
joshuamorton is supposedly a google employee according to his profile and yet was perfectly happy to throw the antisemitism bs around.
There's several accounts down the bottom, each a number of years old and ostensibly regular otherwise; all of which have made efforts to come to this discussion and make up slander. And then of course run when pressed to provide evidence.
And they do all this despite the counter evidence being available to all.
Honestly, what is happening there? Is it some sort of collective insanity? Is it something they all agree needs to be done for some greater good? And if that's the case do they agree to it subconsciously/consciously? Is it all just people who are incredibly susceptible to group pressure and who will go along with any absurdity so long as it's ordered from the right authority.
How do you go about justifying deliberately attempting to hurt a person like this?
Just the sight of it astounds me.
Hopefully, if this is the case, these individuals realise the bubble they exist in, and give such topics more scrutiny in future.
That said @textgel, I find bringing up individual user's details a bit unsavoury; By all means, distinguish between long-term vs short-term users, but I don't think you should bring up employer, even if it's public info.
Despite HN being explicitly not a venue for politics, enough of the userbase has de-facto decided it should be. This of course invites all the sort of internet antics that come with politics which HN users in the past have decried and claimed that the lack of here makes it a more pleasant place in general.
That's when you find these otherwise normal accounts, acting up, accounts that exist solely for flamebating, drive by throwaways attempting to derail threads, etc. And since HN is primarily user-moderated (ironically despite what a subset of the previously described types often insinuate), these sort of behavior can become encouraged if enough people agree the the text or subtext of such comments.
Please specifically link an article from a well regarded source that covers Damore's alleged anti-Semitism.
If you're unable to produce, what you're doing is actively trying to tie as much negativity to the name in order to gas light people into thinking he's a monster. You're propagandizing and poisoning the well.
The goal was to find how to make the job more attractive to female developers. If the difference exists, then in this context the distinction does not matter.
But why should that be a goal? Is there any inherent value in having all jobs be equally attractive to everybody? If so, where are all the efforts to make jobs like garbage collection less male-dominated?
That's to say: This isn't just the chaotic whisperings of twitter, but many complicit media outlets repeating this.
At that stage if you can't reflect on your behaviour and that of those on your side, well there either is no hope for you or you're just further lying along with your fellow ideologues.
I said "our tribe" isn't saying this, where "our tribe" is a quote of the original comment.
This is consistent with any of these statements:
- our tribe say the opposite
- our tribe say something different entirely
- our tribe have no consensus on the issue / there is no "our tribe"
It's difficult not to make such errors because those of our tribal ancestors who did not immediately and unconditionally support the tribe died. Those who did, lived.
If you want to help, pointing out which faction is making the error is not as helpful as insisting on the principled truth no matter which faction is correct. It's a dangerous road, because humans are scary, genocidal apes.
* > - our tribe have no consensus on the issue / there is no "our tribe"
Agreed. If one can lift one's perceptions out of partisanship, there is only a unified group of people who all (with a few psychopathic exceptions) want the best for themselves, their families, and society as a whole, whose only disagreement is as to method of getting there. And nevertheless, these small disagreements can easily magnify and become physically violent, because humans are scary apes who will elevate tribal affiliation even above literal perception. So, for some people, they absolutely have a tribe, and if you disagree with it, you are them.
Which also doesn't work, precisely because of the "tribal error" being made, that removes all nuance of principle.
> whose only disagreement is as to method of getting there
This isn't really true. as a group of people, our circumstances are different, and hence we are motivated towards different, non-unified goals. It's hard to fight zero-sum instincts.
We are now living in an age where it is simply not possible to discuss some topics without someone twisting the discussion into one of the various deadly sins, and everyone who engages becomes guilty of it by association.
For example, in the USA if you are in favor of less immigration, the assumption is that you are operating from a place of xenophobia and racism, because there is no other possible explanation in the universe from having those views. If you state your views coherently, demonstrated that the concerns are rooted in other factors entirely - then the bogeymen of subconscious and unconscious biases and inability to confront deeply rooted bigotry and revealed as the causes, much like the spirits of evil who possessed you when you said things to criticize orthodoxy in the past.
Likewise if one wants to discuss topics like representation across groups, one is inevitably branded a heretic for a heterodox view, regardless of the reasoning.
It's really terrible that this kind of attitude is so widespread in the west.
https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/diversity/note-empl...
If he were literally harassing people I'm pretty sure that would have been mentioned.
What usually happens in these cases is people that object to the material wave it in everyone's face.
I agree this is repetitive, but so is the repeated lie of sexism. Since "a lie oft repeated becomes truth" - the boring repetition is simply a means to prevent this.
It is not about convincing you. It's about not letting your wrong-headed viewpoint stand unopposed, sine otherwise the preponderance of such unopposed viewpoints might give uninformed bystanders the impression that they're actually true.
It wasn't a study, it was basically a MGTOW chain letter. Anyone who has experience in science knows that the arguments it purported to show were cherry picked nonsense. A conclusion looking for evidence.
And yes, obviously people read it that way. He was fired because he wouldn't stop arguing about it, remember?
People acting like sharing a "study" that [minorities] are intellectually inferior is just normal behavior for an engineer. Who the hell does that?
Various people keep claiming that but there doesn't appear to be any proof of it.
> People acting like sharing a "study" that [minorities] are intellectually inferior is just normal behavior for an engineer.
Quote the part where he says this.
I don't need to read it for you. If you walked away from that and didn't notice that the entire thesis is that [minorities] are worse engineers than [majority] then you just didn't read it
And beyond that, it's a moot point, because even if you don't see it, plenty of other people read it that way. Enough people read it that way that he was fired for it. It doesn't matter which citation I make. It's been dissected by hundreds of people in excruciating detail. Go read one of those ready analyses for the gory details and citations. It will be more intellectually fulfilling than rehashing it here again
> And beyond that, it's a moot point, because even if you don't see it, plenty of other people read it that way. Enough people read it that way that he was fired for it.
Well you personally are absolutely certain that a document definitely contains racist statements despite being completely incapable of quoting even one. Seems this is an affliction that can affect quite a few people. Well seeing as that's the "logic" you can muster perhaps we should put some sort of protections in place to the shipping industry. After all quite a few people are adamant the world is flat and we don't want to see cruise liners falling off the edge of the world now do we.
Cause there are never culture-wide delusions?
If this is being "rehash[ed] here again" it should be easy enough to find a quote from the previous it was "hashed", no?
Presumably he means the fantasy of Disneyland, and not the corporation that owns it.
He raises a larger question, which is how these soulless, ethically barren profit seeking entities are able to take over everything we value as human beings, and turn them into something else.
They likely were, and think of me what you like but I've noticed the same with most Americans I've known. Not sure why that is but apparently there's some good amount of propaganda going on in the USA and people apparently believe it. Meanwhile people have to pay $5000 after an ambulance picks them up. Or $90000 for semi-trivial medical procedures.
I believe asking yourself "is my country really like I believe it is?" is a good food for thought even it's a bit sideways to this here topic at hand.
--
On topic:
I can sympathize with the author. I know what it is to have been a long time in a company; it becomes much more than a workplace. You have friends, you even have people you invite to your Sunday barbecues. It's also very likely that a number of internal processes are going smoother for you because you know whom to ping and what exactly to write in a form so your stuff gets done quicker. You have job stability and unless you are rocking the boat too much your seat is likely 99% safe.
All of those become true stoppers when you start pondering leaving. They pull you back and make you doubt yourself and your idea of switching company.
But unlike a number of commenters here I find nothing hypocritical about the decision to go to Twitter. We don't know how Twitter operates internally; maybe it's still better than Google. Or maybe they are still after FAANG level of wages so are ready to make some ethical compromises for them?
In any case, immediately discounting somebody's opinion on a corporation because they joined another corporation misses a lot of context, is flamey and non-constructive and almost smells like a paid troll, and is something I don't expect HN to condone. But sadly, here we go, it's the top comment here.
It’s not just about which is less ethical or hypocritical. These are imperfect organisations filled with people who want to have a positive impact, and this person may reasonably believe that a fresh start or a particular role positions them better to make the impact they want to have.
>Meanwhile people have to pay $5000 after an ambulance picks them up. Or $90000 for semi-trivial medical procedures.
Ironic
I am probably misunderstanding what you say, but Cornet has grown up in France, and is probably very aware that health care cost in the US is not a normal thing since he comes from a country where it is considerably cheaper if not free.
His naiveté was about the nature of Google and how he thought a giant corporation basing their revenue on ads and collecting information could be a positive force in the world and not abuse its power. It seems to me his gripe is about the hypocrisy, which in a sense make it even harder to fix the company: if people denies the company ethics problems, you can be sure they are not going to get better.
Twitter in that sense has never promised to not be evil. You can't be naive about its ethics because you just have to doom-scroll the app for an hour to feel bad about it.
I agree with your refinement. Admittedly the first part of my comment was a rant on a bigger topic that rubs me the wrong way every now and then -- with the slight clarification that to me "an American" isn't "USA-born", it's more like "has lived in USA for a long time".
> It seems to me his gripe is about the hypocrisy
I think so too but then again, a big company changing ethics is also smart enough to know they have to peddle certain propaganda at their more naive hard workers. Sadly it has been the case ever since written history and it seems to be a general weakness of the human brain: we can trade things in our lives (physical and mental health, personal happiness, alone time, leisure time etc.) for some "bigger cause".
People are especially vulnerable to these "bigger causes require sacrifices" propaganda when they are young. And such huge companies are run by excellent psychologists (I mean that higher management / politicians naturally are such) and they know how to manipulate those younger people.
> if people denies the company ethics problems, you can be sure they are not going to get better.
Herein lies the conundrum, you are correct. And I'd point out that maybe you here are projecting some naivete: we are not ants, dude, and we don't possess collective hive-mind consciousness so we cannot ever all work together towards a common cause.
For every single programmer refusing to work due to warped company ethics there are 1000 more waiting in Africa / India / Eastern Europe / Brazil / etc. These companies' awful ethics will never disappear because the world is too big and there is always somebody who will pick up the job.
The only way out is this: that the jobs require so much expertise, experience and a surgical touch that a random hungry team from India cannot ever hope to do the job properly. And for a number of positions inside big companies this is already the case. However the temptation to hire cheaper devs is too great and the companies usually sink a lot of money in those "cheaper" devs until they realize they aren't saving any money due to reduced quality of work, huge communication overhead, general chaos and no planning, and several other such nasty problems that the cheaper dev teams always seem to carry with them.
> You can't be naive about its ethics because you just have to doom-scroll the app for an hour to feel bad about it.
I am completely with you here. The thing is though, what we find bad/evil about Twitter's model is what other people absolutely LOVE about it. What can you do. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If all the sudden Company X woke up to find 30% of its staff was officially resigning at noon the same day ... well now things just might change.
I've never heard of this happening.