5 ms·

Google’s Testament to Political Correctness

35 points by RealityNow 9y ago

beaconstudios 9y ago
Of all the things the author mentions as being propped up by political correctness, this: > Capitalism is the best economic system sticks out like a sore thumb. I thought progressivism was more of a market socialism type affair? A disproportionate number of diversity quota advocates are open socialists or communists.
- RealityNow 9y ago
  Open communists? Interesting, I've never met any of those. Perhaps Silicon Valley and California are a lot different in that regards to NYC, where declaring yourself a communist is sacrilege.
  - beaconstudios 9y ago
    well I don't know the situation on the ground so well as I'm in the UK, but certainly online most of the PC types I've spoken to are avowed socialists (as in proper socialism, not the Republican definition) and a few are communists. Looking at the on-the-ground anti-free-speech protests that have become so iconic of the movement you'll see a lot of anarcho-communist symbology and tactics like the black bloc.
ErikVandeWater 9y ago
What I found unusual is that many of the initial stories about the memo had no quotes from the memo whatsoever.[1] Is this SV PR doing a good job, or is it that it was impossible to verify the memo? From what I read, I did not see any mention of attempts to find, verify and link to/quote/distribute the memo in question. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/google-fires-employee-behind-controversial-diversity-memo https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/google-fi... https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/8/16111724/google-sundar-pichai-employee-memo-diversity https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/8/16111724/google-sundar-pic... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/08/08/google-fires-employee-behind-anti-diversity-memo-perpetuating/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/08/08/google-fire... The Federalist is the only site I found to apparently include the memo, though I did not fact-check the article: https://thefederalist.com/2017/08/08/read-the-google-diversity-memo-that-that-everyone-is-freaking-out-about/ https://thefederalist.com/2017/08/08/read-the-google-diversi...
- cyphar 9y ago
  Considering the main version of the memo that was circulated was doctored (and the article stated they had doctored it), I wouldn't put much stock into anyone having bothered verifying it. But I don't think that's the reason nobody has quoted the document, it's because nobody bothered to do their research. "Professional" journalism really isn't doing it's job well at the moment. Everyone just copies the same article contents and titles, and nobody does any actual research. It's quite apparent if you read two articles by similar publications on the same topic -- they contain effectively the same contents which tells me that very little independent research is done. There was a particularly striking recent example of this, when the director of the movie "The Red Pill" was being interviewed on Australian TV. The questions being asked of her came from people who clearly had only seen the movie trailer, and upon asking whether they had seen the movie (she had sent them links to stream the movie for free several times) they said they "couldn't get it to work". Which means that they objectively were conducting an interview without the faintest clue what the subject was.
- gnahckire 9y ago
  Motherboard (Vice) did it. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/evzjww/here-are-the-citations-for-the-anti-diversity-manifesto-circulating-at-google https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/evzjww/here-are-t...
prepend 9y ago
I don't think it's safe to comment on these types of articles online. These comments are stored and indexed forever and whatever we say could be used against us at some point in the future. You may think you are reasonably debating or discussing something, but you have to consider that someone in the next 50 years may review your post history and use it against you. Theoretically, we would need to make throwaway accounts to have meaningful discussions.
- chii 9y ago
  This is why you don't tie your real life identity to your online one. Freedom of expression requires that you can't be persecuted for saying your piece.
  - prepend 9y ago
    Indeed. But I wholly expect that sometime in the next few decades machine learning will be able to identify real people and their online personas based on text patterns and such and not the current method that's based on leakage, or having a handle like "johnasmith" or something. What you think is discrete today, may not be tomorrow. Even today I'm sure Google and Facebook could identify you just based on traffic patterns (e.g., "chii" has lots of traffic on hacker news and then from the same location "john a smith" has traffic on facebook). They don't sell that info today, but perhaps in the future.
- jedmeyers 9y ago
  > These comments are stored and indexed forever and whatever we say could be used against us at some point in the future. https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/hacker-news https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/hacker-news This dataset contains all stories and comments from Hacker News from its launch in 2006. Each story contains a story ID, the author that made the post, when it was written, and the number of points the story received.
- RealityNow 9y ago
  That's essentially the problem that the article is trying to bring attention to - our culture of intellectual hostility. The only way this will ever change is if people stop caving in to political correctness. I realize it's a prisoner's dilemma in that individually it's in nobody's best interest to speak out, but that's an incredibly selfish mindset. We need to start valuing integrity and doing the right thing. It was never in any slaveholder's best interest to speak out against slavery, or in any white person's best interest to speak out against racism in a Southern community in the early 1900s after a lynching - but speaking out was the right thing to do and should be commended.
taysic 9y ago
According to the article some of the things that will "and will get you socially lambasted" "Any statement that perpetuates female stereotypes is sexist, even an innocuous joke (or even a misconstrued joke in someone else’s private conversation)" "Prostitution is sexist against women" etc Um wtf? No these are not appropriate in a work environment. If you want to have a place with meaningful controversial discussion that's not the work environment. I'm a lady and I honestly would feel uncomfortable if people were discussing these things at work. I really could not care less what other people's opinions are on these issues but I know I'm there to do my job as best as I can no get siderailed into lengthy controversial and highly likely uncomfortable discussions. Suggesting that Google needs to be a place to comfortably voice off your random ideas is pretty irrational. It really doesn't. Anyway, what does that even look like tangibly? Unprofessional... uncomfortable. It would not result in people agreeing with each other more just becoming less likely to like one another.
- davemp 9y ago
  You have a very valid point, but it's not exactly the issue at hand. - The memo was posted in an opt-in group for these types of discussions. - The issue is very lopsided. I have personally never heard of someone being fired over saying much more offensive statements in the other direction (ie: men are dense / white people ruin everthing / etc). I would have no problem with a zero tolerance policy as long as it were evenly enforced.
  - taysic 9y ago
    Google must be a pretty interesting place to work in with an opt in group for these types of discussions. I guess that could be good but it seems like their informality might be coming to bite them. Maybe I've just been exceptionally good at picking professional places to work at but I've never heard comments like the ones you've mentioned. Why not go to HR? Those are pretty strong statements. My understanding is our harassment laws are pretty strong. During a sexual harassment compliance training at one of my companies, I learned that the fastest growing sexual harassment cases are men suing men. (If I remember it correctly) for things like feeling pressured to have acted more manly. And they win. The laws in this country are incredible and add enormously to the productivity we have in our companies.
debatem1 9y ago
Not going into the merits of any particular point of view, but it's amazing to me how few people talking about identity or diversity work to ensure that their arguments aren't perceived as naked self-interest. In most areas of political life factions work to recruit seemingly nonpartisan entities to advance their agendas. They go to great lengths to compellingly demonstrate how what they want is really good for everyone. Saying "I was elected by X so I'm doing Y" is only used as an argument of last resort. But on diversity issues people get up on soap boxes and unabashedly advocate for their side. Arguments for diversity as a broader virtue are seldom advanced forcefully, and when they are there's usually not much of an effort made to reconcile that virtue with specific policy prescriptions. It's bizarre. The end result is that you have a game of tribes and quislings, where facts don't matter and nobody agrees on what appropriate steps are to deal with diversity issues because the only thing people agree on is that everybody else is acting selfishly. So here you have a guy who wrote a thing advocating for guys. The rest of the world views him as a sexist. Sundar fires him. The guys who agreed with the author of the manifesto view Sundar as a quisling. The rest of the world still views Sundar with suspicion as a member of Tribe Guy. Nothing improved, but lots of anger was generated. Eventually there will be something from Tribe X, and more or less the same thing will occur with roles reversed. Is it so hard to consensus build on these issues that even bothering to frame the discussion better is a waste? Or is it just easier and more cathartic to be angry and build support that way?
- zimpenfish 9y ago
  > it's amazing to me how few people talking about identity or diversity work to ensure that their arguments aren't perceived as naked self-interest I argue strongly for diversity etc. and I am a privileged high-earning healthy English speaking white dude - literally one of the easiest levels of life there is.
mindfulplay 9y ago
I don't understand this stupidity - the original dude who wrote this thing. A company is not a place to air out your public opinion internally and expect no consequences. This is not the National Monument. This is not your open Mike night in your comedy club. This is not where you scream and run and then cry first amendment first amendment. This is a place of work. Actual women work with this dude. Imagine how they would feel. Imagine the potential number of people he interviewed that were women or minorities. Nobody's telling this sad dude what to do outside of work. He could very well go and participate in all far right movements as he pleases. But to espouse a stupid thing as 'women are less capable' and expect NOT to be fired seems like he was playing with fire by first setting things on fire. And let's not get started on 'did you ACTUALLY read his memo? He didn't say that on page 4 line 43' like this is some Tolstoy level philosophical meta writing. This is mediocre crap written by a dude looking for a reason to get offended and throw shit around - someone who I think probably landed on the wrong side of Reddit or 4chan often times. Sorry. The most serious crime I think is his ingenious creativity that made the CEO and many well-respected people to actually read his crap. If I only had that talent, I would become a professional performance artist and quit software engineering.
- funnyguys 9y ago
  This exactly - it was mediocre crap. When you insinuate that some of your co-workers have certain drawbacks because of their gender, it makes that gender more aware of their behaviour and they are put in a position where they to take extra effort to prove otherwise. This is creating hostile environment for them. This is the reason why similar forms of generalisation, like racism, is frowned upon – not just because of innate sense of right or wrong. If this is being politically correct, then damn right I am politically correct. This reminds me of the movie Gattaca - let us start deciding the traits of people based on the gender, race and blood samples and assign jobs based on that.
  - RealityNow 9y ago
    So is stating that women tend to be more empathic than men sexist and creating a hostile environment?

35 points by RealityNow 9y ago

Of all the things the author mentions as being propped up by political correctness, this: > Capitalism is the best economic system sticks out like a sore thumb. I thought progressivism was more of a market socialism type affair? A disproportionate number of diversity quota advocates are open socialists or communists.

RealityNow 9y ago
Open communists? Interesting, I've never met any of those. Perhaps Silicon Valley and California are a lot different in that regards to NYC, where declaring yourself a communist is sacrilege.
- beaconstudios 9y ago
  well I don't know the situation on the ground so well as I'm in the UK, but certainly online most of the PC types I've spoken to are avowed socialists (as in proper socialism, not the Republican definition) and a few are communists. Looking at the on-the-ground anti-free-speech protests that have become so iconic of the movement you'll see a lot of anarcho-communist symbology and tactics like the black bloc.

ErikVandeWater 9y ago

What I found unusual is that many of the initial stories about the memo had no quotes from the memo whatsoever.[1] Is this SV PR doing a good job, or is it that it was impossible to verify the memo? From what I read, I did not see any mention of attempts to find, verify and link to/quote/distribute the memo in question. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/google-fires-employee-behind-controversial-diversity-memo https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/google-fi... https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/8/16111724/google-sundar-pichai-employee-memo-diversity https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/8/16111724/google-sundar-pic... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/08/08/google-fires-employee-behind-anti-diversity-memo-perpetuating/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/08/08/google-fire... The Federalist is the only site I found to apparently include the memo, though I did not fact-check the article: https://thefederalist.com/2017/08/08/read-the-google-diversity-memo-that-that-everyone-is-freaking-out-about/ https://thefederalist.com/2017/08/08/read-the-google-diversi...

cyphar 9y ago
Considering the main version of the memo that was circulated was doctored (and the article stated they had doctored it), I wouldn't put much stock into anyone having bothered verifying it. But I don't think that's the reason nobody has quoted the document, it's because nobody bothered to do their research. "Professional" journalism really isn't doing it's job well at the moment. Everyone just copies the same article contents and titles, and nobody does any actual research. It's quite apparent if you read two articles by similar publications on the same topic -- they contain effectively the same contents which tells me that very little independent research is done. There was a particularly striking recent example of this, when the director of the movie "The Red Pill" was being interviewed on Australian TV. The questions being asked of her came from people who clearly had only seen the movie trailer, and upon asking whether they had seen the movie (she had sent them links to stream the movie for free several times) they said they "couldn't get it to work". Which means that they objectively were conducting an interview without the faintest clue what the subject was.
gnahckire 9y ago
Motherboard (Vice) did it. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/evzjww/here-are-the-citations-for-the-anti-diversity-manifesto-circulating-at-google https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/evzjww/here-are-t...

prepend 9y ago

I don't think it's safe to comment on these types of articles online. These comments are stored and indexed forever and whatever we say could be used against us at some point in the future. You may think you are reasonably debating or discussing something, but you have to consider that someone in the next 50 years may review your post history and use it against you. Theoretically, we would need to make throwaway accounts to have meaningful discussions.

chii 9y ago
This is why you don't tie your real life identity to your online one. Freedom of expression requires that you can't be persecuted for saying your piece.
- prepend 9y ago
  Indeed. But I wholly expect that sometime in the next few decades machine learning will be able to identify real people and their online personas based on text patterns and such and not the current method that's based on leakage, or having a handle like "johnasmith" or something. What you think is discrete today, may not be tomorrow. Even today I'm sure Google and Facebook could identify you just based on traffic patterns (e.g., "chii" has lots of traffic on hacker news and then from the same location "john a smith" has traffic on facebook). They don't sell that info today, but perhaps in the future.
jedmeyers 9y ago
> These comments are stored and indexed forever and whatever we say could be used against us at some point in the future. https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/hacker-news https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/hacker-news This dataset contains all stories and comments from Hacker News from its launch in 2006. Each story contains a story ID, the author that made the post, when it was written, and the number of points the story received.
RealityNow 9y ago
That's essentially the problem that the article is trying to bring attention to - our culture of intellectual hostility. The only way this will ever change is if people stop caving in to political correctness. I realize it's a prisoner's dilemma in that individually it's in nobody's best interest to speak out, but that's an incredibly selfish mindset. We need to start valuing integrity and doing the right thing. It was never in any slaveholder's best interest to speak out against slavery, or in any white person's best interest to speak out against racism in a Southern community in the early 1900s after a lynching - but speaking out was the right thing to do and should be commended.

taysic 9y ago

According to the article some of the things that will "and will get you socially lambasted" "Any statement that perpetuates female stereotypes is sexist, even an innocuous joke (or even a misconstrued joke in someone else’s private conversation)" "Prostitution is sexist against women" etc Um wtf? No these are not appropriate in a work environment. If you want to have a place with meaningful controversial discussion that's not the work environment. I'm a lady and I honestly would feel uncomfortable if people were discussing these things at work. I really could not care less what other people's opinions are on these issues but I know I'm there to do my job as best as I can no get siderailed into lengthy controversial and highly likely uncomfortable discussions. Suggesting that Google needs to be a place to comfortably voice off your random ideas is pretty irrational. It really doesn't. Anyway, what does that even look like tangibly? Unprofessional... uncomfortable. It would not result in people agreeing with each other more just becoming less likely to like one another.

davemp 9y ago
You have a very valid point, but it's not exactly the issue at hand. - The memo was posted in an opt-in group for these types of discussions. - The issue is very lopsided. I have personally never heard of someone being fired over saying much more offensive statements in the other direction (ie: men are dense / white people ruin everthing / etc). I would have no problem with a zero tolerance policy as long as it were evenly enforced.
- taysic 9y ago
  Google must be a pretty interesting place to work in with an opt in group for these types of discussions. I guess that could be good but it seems like their informality might be coming to bite them. Maybe I've just been exceptionally good at picking professional places to work at but I've never heard comments like the ones you've mentioned. Why not go to HR? Those are pretty strong statements. My understanding is our harassment laws are pretty strong. During a sexual harassment compliance training at one of my companies, I learned that the fastest growing sexual harassment cases are men suing men. (If I remember it correctly) for things like feeling pressured to have acted more manly. And they win. The laws in this country are incredible and add enormously to the productivity we have in our companies.

debatem1 9y ago

Not going into the merits of any particular point of view, but it's amazing to me how few people talking about identity or diversity work to ensure that their arguments aren't perceived as naked self-interest. In most areas of political life factions work to recruit seemingly nonpartisan entities to advance their agendas. They go to great lengths to compellingly demonstrate how what they want is really good for everyone. Saying "I was elected by X so I'm doing Y" is only used as an argument of last resort. But on diversity issues people get up on soap boxes and unabashedly advocate for their side. Arguments for diversity as a broader virtue are seldom advanced forcefully, and when they are there's usually not much of an effort made to reconcile that virtue with specific policy prescriptions. It's bizarre. The end result is that you have a game of tribes and quislings, where facts don't matter and nobody agrees on what appropriate steps are to deal with diversity issues because the only thing people agree on is that everybody else is acting selfishly. So here you have a guy who wrote a thing advocating for guys. The rest of the world views him as a sexist. Sundar fires him. The guys who agreed with the author of the manifesto view Sundar as a quisling. The rest of the world still views Sundar with suspicion as a member of Tribe Guy. Nothing improved, but lots of anger was generated. Eventually there will be something from Tribe X, and more or less the same thing will occur with roles reversed. Is it so hard to consensus build on these issues that even bothering to frame the discussion better is a waste? Or is it just easier and more cathartic to be angry and build support that way?

zimpenfish 9y ago
> it's amazing to me how few people talking about identity or diversity work to ensure that their arguments aren't perceived as naked self-interest I argue strongly for diversity etc. and I am a privileged high-earning healthy English speaking white dude - literally one of the easiest levels of life there is.

mindfulplay 9y ago

I don't understand this stupidity - the original dude who wrote this thing. A company is not a place to air out your public opinion internally and expect no consequences. This is not the National Monument. This is not your open Mike night in your comedy club. This is not where you scream and run and then cry first amendment first amendment. This is a place of work. Actual women work with this dude. Imagine how they would feel. Imagine the potential number of people he interviewed that were women or minorities. Nobody's telling this sad dude what to do outside of work. He could very well go and participate in all far right movements as he pleases. But to espouse a stupid thing as 'women are less capable' and expect NOT to be fired seems like he was playing with fire by first setting things on fire. And let's not get started on 'did you ACTUALLY read his memo? He didn't say that on page 4 line 43' like this is some Tolstoy level philosophical meta writing. This is mediocre crap written by a dude looking for a reason to get offended and throw shit around - someone who I think probably landed on the wrong side of Reddit or 4chan often times. Sorry. The most serious crime I think is his ingenious creativity that made the CEO and many well-respected people to actually read his crap. If I only had that talent, I would become a professional performance artist and quit software engineering.

funnyguys 9y ago
This exactly - it was mediocre crap. When you insinuate that some of your co-workers have certain drawbacks because of their gender, it makes that gender more aware of their behaviour and they are put in a position where they to take extra effort to prove otherwise. This is creating hostile environment for them. This is the reason why similar forms of generalisation, like racism, is frowned upon – not just because of innate sense of right or wrong. If this is being politically correct, then damn right I am politically correct. This reminds me of the movie Gattaca - let us start deciding the traits of people based on the gender, race and blood samples and assign jobs based on that.
- RealityNow 9y ago
  So is stating that women tend to be more empathic than men sexist and creating a hostile environment?