> The discourse around the James Damore memo, as divisive as it was, felt like it still led to a broader understanding of the negative perspectives women in tech had to deal with constantly.
Damore was fired for his contributions to this "conversation". Hardly just.
> particularly the ones who felt it was worth staying and using their influence internally to push Google toward creating a more just world.
How about just returning what I'm actually looking for when I search for something? Or not killing products off when they get traction? Google users don't care at all about the politics of Google employees, they just want the product to actually work which seems to be less important that ever internally at Google.
But I also care a lot about the politics of Google employees insofar as they exercise a tremendous amount of influence over both elections and people's ability to broadcast their messages to the world.
Since Googlers tend to veer decidedly towards one end of the political spectrum, I would like to see their ability to censor speech restricted as much as is technologically possible.
So you would agree that since search is entirely technical, then search results by definition cannot present political bias?
Personally I disagree with that claim, but if you feel that search is a wholly technical problem, I'd expect you to agree.
And that doesn't even deal with the obviously political: laws like the right to be forgotten, or other forms of censorship like removals of content due to copyright. How to engage with those is inherently political.
> As a user I want back the documents I’m looking for
Of course! But converting from a search query to an ordered list of documents requires choices about ranking and filtering to be made.
If I search for "irs" do you include spam phone numbers attempting to steal my identity? There's distinct value to not returning garbage results, but how you do that is going to be called political by some people. And choosing not to do anything is going to be called political by others. There is no non-political choice, despite what you keep implying. Like, given a search query, you can't tell me the objectively correct set of results to return. If you could, you'd be very, very, very rich.
In the absence of that objective, perfect, "true" result, any choice is political in some way or another. Pick an algorithm and I'll happily explain to you a failure mode that is "political".
Sadly, a lot of people genuinely believe that everything is political. I recently expressed hope for the "no politics" guideline of HN be more strictly enforced and was told that "not talking about politics is politics". Frustrating to deal with this mindset...
I'm certainly one of those people. What is the boundary between "politics" and "not politics?" Who gets to decide?
Your employer probably has more effect on your day to day life than your government does. Why would you be allowed to debate what the latter should do but not the former?
> I'm certainly one of those people. What is the boundary between "politics" and "not politics?" Who gets to decide?
It's common sense. Anything that revolves around government, elections, laws, etc.
> Your employer probably has more effect on your day to day life than your government does. Why would you be allowed to debate what the latter should do but not the former?
I meant the exact opposite (I forgot that politics could be taken to mean "office politics" or "company politics"). Getting involved in government politics or activism is your role as a private citizen, not as a company employee. Regarding "company politics" (work hours, office arrangement, project management methodology, managerial decisions, coffee machine model, etc.), I guess it's up to your employer to decide what is up for debate.
>>It's common sense. Anything that revolves around government, elections, laws, etc.
Go ahead and google 'Taiwan' and then 'Canada' or 'Japan'. Taiwan (in the right sidebar thing) is listed differently compared to the others. They're listed as "Country in $X" - Taiwan is not.
That's political. Or is it not? It's "just search", sort of.
I don't see where you're going with this. I never claimed that Google was not political (your example wasn't very convincing though, it simply reflects the fact that Taiwan isn't widely recognized as a country). Also, a more charitable interpretation of the comment you are referring to would be that "search doesn't have to be political".
Your initial comment was "Sadly, a lot of people genuinely believe that everything is political"
Taiwan being a country or not, and what shows up in a google search about it, isn't political for you, or for me, or for many people around the world. It may be very political for the people who live in Taiwan (or China).
Nearly everything is political to someone. So it's not very easy to draw a hard line between political or not. A "no politics" rule is very difficult to enforce in a meaningful way for that reason.
You came up with a super dubious example which doesn't help support your point. Plus if you could convince me that those Wikipedia populated information boxes were politically, I could simply argue that Google should stick to returning links in its search results.
> Nearly everything is political to someone.
Saying that something is political to only a few people is an oxymoron. For example, there are some people who do not recognize Donald Trump as the US president. Is it political to state that the US president is Donald Trump? Absolutely not.
HN is an example of a community where a large majority of the content is apolitical. Drawing the line is really not that hard.
That could be the case if the distribution of views were evenly stratified, but they are not. Even the application of very simple mechanics can subtly amplify the views of the majority.
I specifically do not want results manipulated to be more politically correct. It makes sense that the most popular results would be first. I want that.
It's very possible that they are not being manipulated, simply that most people who use the internet are more left/right wing. That's the amplification of the majority.
Damore was fired for his contributions to this conversation". Hardly just.*
According to what you said in this post, It was completely just as Damore basically wrote a dissertation about things that were completely unrelated to any work done for any Google product. All that work would've been tantamount to a complete waste of company time and could be grounds for a firing.
Google users don't care at all about the politics of Google employees
I care a great deal about how Google employees or any employee at any company are treated. You should too since most people spend their lives at companies and policies and laws surrounding them impact people directly.
> It was completely just as Damore basically wrote a dissertation about things that were completely unrelated
It was a completely inconsistent.
Damore was not fired for debating politically-sensitive HR proposals. Many people were involved in the same conversation, with the same degree of relevance to Google's products.
Damore was fired because his proposal was contrary to the majority.
---
It's possible to maintain both that widespread workplace political discussion is a poor idea, and that Damore was unfairly treated relative to his peers.
Do you really think that there are no liberal opinions that are fireable? Like if I said all men are rapists, you think that’s a safe thing to say at work?
I think people took notice that saying “women earn less money because their genes make them less good at stuff” is a fireable offense. I actually don’t believe conservatism has anything to do with it.
Damore didn't say that, but that didn't stop lots of people lying about what he wrote.
I guess those few of us who actually read his memo will have to keep repeating this over and over against the wall of lying about it, but one more time - Damore argued women were less interested in computing, and that's why they are "underrepresented". He explained why they might be less interested and showed that this isn't controversial at all, neither with scientists nor anyone who ever tried to interest a pretty girl in the merits of AVX512.
He explicitly didn't argue women were worse at computing though. He said that very clearly.
You ask what liberal opinions get you fired at Google. I'd also like to know that. Here is a petition by nearly 1500 of them which claims border control is comparable to the Holocaust. That's unbelievably extreme, but apparently nobody was fired for it.
For someone who claims to be trying to tackle the misinterpretation of Damore, no where in the medium post you linked does it say what you claim it says. It doesn't compare CBP to the Holocaust. It sites the human rights abuses that it is enabling that has lead to the death of 7 people by forcing these people into indefinite detention for what could be, at worst argued, a misdemeanor. They're held enmasse in cages in warehouses which fits the textbook definition of a concentration camp.
It's surely not as bad as the Holocaust (which this petition doesn't claim what you claim it does), but it's not any better.
In working with CBP, ICE, or ORR, Google would be trading its integrity for a bit of profit, and joining a shameful lineage. We have only to look to IBM’s role working with the Nazis during the Holocaust to understand the role that technology can play in automating mass atrocity.
That's pretty direct. Working with ICE would be a "mass atrocity" and "we have only to look at IBM's role working with the Nazis during the Holocaust to understand".
You say, "It doesn't compare CBP to the Holocaust" but I'm going to have to disagree. Why bring up the Nazis at all if they aren't making that comparison, which a plain reading of their words absolutely seems to do?
They're held enmasse in cages in warehouses which fits the textbook definition of a concentration camp
Huh, and now you seem to be doing it too.
No, it fits the definition of a prison, which is where you'd expect them to be given that they're breaking the law. Are all prisons concentration camps now? No, concentration camps are defined by the fact that they imprison identity-based groups of people who haven't committed any normal crime - e.g. political prisoners, disfavoured ethnic groups and so on.
It's surely not as bad as the Holocaust (which this petition doesn't claim what you claim it does), but it's not any better.
This last part is a puzzle to figure out. It's not as bad, but also not better - those two things are in contradiction.
I don't think comparing immigration laws of any country to the Holocaust is helpful at all, as that would make literally every country basically the same as the Third Reich, which they clearly are not. And not only those Googlers are doing it but now you are too!
It's not direct. IBM was just an example to illustrate the point of what CBP is doing in terms of following a lineage of supporting mass atrocity, of which indefinitely detaining people in an inadequate facility is a mass atrocity. They aren't making an equivalence like you claimed. They could've used Japanese internment camps. However, people know what the Holocaust is a lot more.
A prison is when you're incarcerated in your own cell and not a crowded cell. A prison provides adequate comfort that meets a minimum standard of care for inmates. A prison is not putting 30 people in one room, putting 30 people in a fenced in cage, providing lack of hygiene products and having 30 people to a single toilet. They're not provided space blankets and given no bed.
A concentration camp, by definition is deliberate incarceration of a minority group in inadequate facilities to sometimes perform labor or be exterminated. Going through this one by one:
1) They're being incarcerated even for claiming asylum (which is legal in the US) and crossing a port of entry is not illegal.
2) They're being incarcerated indefinitely which is also illegal.
3) They're an identity group (ie. of latin heritage). There are no detention centers for Canadian immigrants.
4) They're placed in warehouses in cages with little access to hygienic facilities. They're placed in mass groups with no beds or individual cells. This fits the inadequate facilities criteria.
So yes, that fits the definition of a concentration camp pretty clearly.
> women earn less money because their genes make them less good at stuff
That's a poor paraphrase.
A more accurate one would be "Women earn less money on average because on average they are less interested in earning due to long-standing innate differences."
But that isn't one off Google's workplace rules, and evaluation of whether or not someone is being "just" should be partially based on how well they apply their own rules.
If I say "this thing is permitted" and then punish someone for doing that thing, it should be unjust in your eyes whether or not you would have said "this thing is permitted."
No. Why do you presume they don't apply their rules correctly? And what makes you think this isn't one of Google's rules? A diversity class usually means diversity in the sense of protected classes, not political opinions.
"According to what you said in this post, It was completely just as Damore basically wrote a dissertation about things that were completely unrelated to any work done for any Google product."
My comment was explaining why i disagree with the above. It has nothing to do with whether I agree or disagree with Google's policies, past or present.
My understanding is that Damore was asked for his response to a training class he had taken. That would make the dissertation, as you call it, a work assignment. Is that understanding incorrect?
That doesn't address either of the things I said, so I'll restate them:
1. Anything he did was optional, it was therefore not a work assignment.
2. If such a report was solicited (which I don't actually agree with in the way you're implying), the way to provide it wasn't to post it on public company mailing lists, but to give the report to the people in charge of the class.
Do you disagree with either of those claims?
I'll now add a third one:
3. A "report" of the form he provided wasn't solicited by Google. They solicited feedback on the class. Your claiming this wasn't feedback on the class. Therefore it wasn't solicited.
The second one is completely wrong, and I think the first is though I'm not certain.
* No one was looking for feedback on the class as far as I remember.
* He went to an external session to learn how to improve their own processes, which is the report he wrote. I believe in one interview he said his did do it at some manager's suggestion, and so did use work time for the trip with their (figurative) blessing.
* He sent his report only to one or two internal groups, never a public internal mailing list (one was meant to privately poke holes so submitters could improve their arguments before submitting it to HR or whoever. I've heard conflicting stuff on the order of events, so he may or may not have sent it to HR).
* It was the internal quality group that leaked it to a public internal mailing list instead of maintaining privacy.
This is the problem with these things. Literally every claim you've made is wrong. I don't know where you got it, but if you aren't a google employee, I can promise I'm more reliable than whatever you got it from. But nothing I can say is verifiable, except through oft-contradictory leaks. It's infuriating and unproductive, so I'll stop.
That's what he claims it was. He also posted it on an internally accessible mail list within the company. That's a very odd way to give feedback about a course. Usually you provide feedback directly to whoever is in charge of the course and not let the entirety of the company view it.
Damore was fired for his contributions to this "conversation". Hardly just.
> particularly the ones who felt it was worth staying and using their influence internally to push Google toward creating a more just world.
How about just returning what I'm actually looking for when I search for something? Or not killing products off when they get traction? Google users don't care at all about the politics of Google employees, they just want the product to actually work which seems to be less important that ever internally at Google.