18 ms·

Google Doesn't Want What's Best for Us

177 points by Eduardo3rd 9y ago

bhauer 9y ago
> Peter Thiel, one of the ideological leaders in the Valley, wrote in 2009 on a blog affiliated with the Cato Institute that “since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” > If women should not even have the vote, why should we worry about gender diversity in the engineering ranks? These two paragraphs read as a microcosm of this whole episode. Think what you may about Peter Thiel, but the quote does not say or even suggest that "women should not even have the vote." It merely points out that as the voting public has been broadened, it has been broadened to include sectors that are not (historically) as amenable to limited-government policies. Therefore, the relative popularity of limited-government policy among the totality of voters has diminished, suggesting that democracy and capitalism are presently at odds. Reading the quote with a reasonable level of charity suggests Thiel would prefer to convince these voters of the appeal of limited-government policy, not revoke their right to vote. Simultaneously, he is also presumably arguing, as many others have, that simply increasing voter turnout does not necessarily lead to better governance. Can the New York Times point to any quote from Thiel that justifies the implication they have made here: that Thiel believes women should not have the right to vote? Perhaps there is one; I really don't know much about Thiel. But this quote alone isn't it.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  The quote given clearly requires one of three things be true: (1) Thiel opposes capitalism, (2) Thiel opposes democracy, (3) Thiel opposes women holding the franchise. The piece in question seems to choose #3, which is the most natural reading, but I think #2 is plausible as well. Thiel clearly supports capitalism, so it's not #1.
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    Or Thiel likes all three and sees that they can work against each other.
    - CalChris 9y ago
      As a self-described libertarian that would be impossible to square with Thiel's rather famous quote: I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.
      - benchaney 9y ago
        It may be true that Thiel doesn't believe one of the three things dragonwriter listed, however: 1. The quote being discussed doesn't require this. 2. If Peter Thiel doesn't like democracy (and therefore would like no one to vote) it would be misleading (although technically accurate) to describe that as Peter Thiel not wanting women/minorities to vote.
        CalChris 9y ago
        If you want to interpret what Thiel says then you have to take into consideration everything that he says. So yeah, the quote being discussed does require this. That would be the case if you consider Thiel as some sort of libertarian intellectual. If he's just a whatIsaywheneverIsayitmeaningwhateverIwantittomeanwheneveritsuitsme-arian then I see your point.
        benchaney 9y ago
        Way to ignore half of my post. It is completely reasonable to take context into account when doing this sort of interpretation, but it is important to be explicit about what context is included in the analysis. The article we are discussing is being criticized for being dishonest in this regard, which is why the distinction between "implied by this quote" and "implied by something else he said" is important.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  Also: > Last week, Google fired a software engineer for writing a memo that questioned the company’s gender diversity policies and made statements about women’s biological suitability for technical jobs. This is a huge misrepresentation of the ideas of the memo. This level of journalism, both from the writer and from the editors, is disappointing.
  - vernie 9y ago
    How would you summarize the memo in one line?
    - abtinf 9y ago
      How about: Google's current programs are ineffective and discriminatory, so alternative programs and work culture should be considered to achieve higher diversity.
      - oddlyaromatic 9y ago
        That may summarize the goal of the memo, but it does not adequately summarize the content, which has a large focus on biological differences between the sexes being this Big Factor that is not yet "priced in" to diversity programs. In reality he was probably way, way off on the impact of biology, but he confirmation biased his way forward regardless, then peppered the memo with hedges to offset the backlash.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
        mjevans 9y ago
        I agree with abtinf about the best interpretation of ideas within the memo. It is a result that the author of that memo should have reached after counseling and seeing evidence supportting of /equality/ programs actually being about equal treatment (or at least fair, as in having multiple possible measurements and a consistent policy of utilizing the best scores to reach a determination.). I feel like a lot of animosity was allowed to fester among all parties due to a lack of intelligent, open, and respectful discourse about problems and perceived problems.
- confounded 9y ago
  > Reading the quote with a reasonable level of charity suggests Thiel would prefer to convince these voters of the appeal of limited-government policy, not revoke their right to vote. Where are you getting this from? He says nothing of the sort; simply that women and poor people have destroyed capitalist democracy, by attaining the right to vote. There are a great many on HN who rush to Theil's defense, who seem unfamiliar with his very public, very outspoken politics. He's also said that "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." His solution to the fact that democracies may disagree with him is to weaken and destroy democracy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment
  - gaurav_v 9y ago
    He clarified that he didn't want to revoke rights to vote explicitly as an addendum to the essay (see bottom): https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio... Seems like an open and shut case of bad journalism.
    - studentrob 9y ago
      > Seems like an open and shut case of bad journalism. Hmm.. Seems like an open and shut case of a conservative saying words that mean one thing, then saying more words that are directly contradictory. We've seen enough of this "subtlety" in 2017 to recognize it. He could, in the future, also claim that he only made that correction in order to be PC, and that he felt censored and shamed.
  - TimPC 9y ago
    To put the quote in context it was in an essay that addressed people leaving countries through seasteading. So I think it's pretty much in evidence his view is not to deny people the right to vote, but to allow departure from societies one radically disagrees with for new ones.
    - Analemma_ 9y ago
- pavlov 9y ago
  There's something callous in the tone of the quote that rubs people the wrong way. Thiel seems to mourn the extension of the franchise, and makes it sound like USA would be better off if this error of the past could somehow be fixed.
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    > There's something callous in the tone of the quote that rubs people the wrong way We have to leave room for "insensitive" tones if we are going to be truly inclusive. Having a uniform book of dog whistles and manners doesn't mesh with actual diversity. That being said, if someone approaches Thiel about the offense and implications and he doubles down, he's on his own.
    - pavlov 9y ago
      This is what he said in response to the controversy: "It would be absurd to suggest that women’s votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us." A rather non-committal answer to the question of whether women's right to vote was a positive development. To my ears, he is basically saying "Well, too late to do anything about it now, isn't it?"
      - humanrebar 9y ago
        Full text: """ It would be absurd to suggest that women’s votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us. While I don’t think any class of people should be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make things better. Voting is not under siege in America, but many other rights are. In America, people are imprisoned for using even very mild drugs, tortured by our own government, and forced to bail out reckless financial companies. I believe that politics is way too intense. That’s why I’m a libertarian. Politics gets people angry, destroys relationships, and polarizes peoples’ vision: the world is us versus them; good people versus the other. Politics is about interfering with other people’s lives without their consent. That’s probably why, in the past, libertarians have made little progress in the political sphere. Thus, I advocate focusing energy elsewhere, onto peaceful projects that some consider utopian. """ ...in context it doesn't seem so bad to me. Though YMMV, I guess.
- gaurav_v 9y ago
  Not only that; in response controversy arising from the 2009 essay he explicitly stated that "It would be absurd to suggest that women’s votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us." See addendum to the essay at bottom: https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio... Lazy editing by the NYT.
  - ucaetano 9y ago
    > Lazy editing by the NYT. This isn't an article by the NYT. It's an opinion piece by someone unrelated to the newspaper: Jonathan Taplin is the director emeritus of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab and the author of “Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy.”
    - masonic 9y ago
      ... which is why the comment said, "lazy editing". The NYT chose to publish this in full. They bear responsibility for what they choose to put on their pages.
      - ucaetano 9y ago
        > The NYT chose to publish this in full. They bear responsibility for what they choose to put on their pages. No. Newspapers don't "bear responsibility" for opinion sections or letters to the editor. They publish them because they find the opinions relevant, not because they condone or support the content. The NYT frequently published highly opposing opinions together.
        usegolang 9y ago
        It feels pretty ironic that this article takes a jab at FB with the fake news comment and then NYT, which arguably should be held to a higher bar for pieces like this, gets a pass on fact checking.
- parenthephobia 9y ago
  "the extension of the franchise to women ... [has] rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron" Thiel either opposes capitalist democracy, or regrets the franchisement of women. (Edit: Or both.) Reading those words otherwise is, IMO, not charitable but delusional. --- Having said that, the impression I get is that Thiel opposes democracy, rather than specifically democracy for women. He probably regrets extending the franchise to women not because they are women but simply because he regrets extending the franchise at all.
  - ericd 9y ago
    It's possible to think that capitalist democracy is a good thing, but that expanding the vote had positives that outweighed the negative. People who spend a lot of time thinking, as Thiel clearly does, tend to have more nuanced views than the one you're ascribing to him. I guess believing that would make it harder for people to sort everyone onto teams, though.
- psyc 9y ago
  People either don't read, or can't read. They just hear sounds that rhyme with thoughts that make them angry, and then get angry.
  - adrianratnapala 9y ago
    I upvoted you, because this rings true. But you are unfailry stereotyping "people".
    - dom0 9y ago
      Is such a thing even possible?
  - cookiecaper 9y ago
    Yes, this is a very important thing to understand and internalize. People, in the abstract sense, will not read and do not care about what you wrote. "Refer to line ABC-123..." is thus a futile defense (in most contexts).
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    In a civilized discussion, this happens: -------------- Alice: I think A, B, and C. Bob: Did you say you think A, B, C, and D? Alice: No, I said A, B, and C, but now that I think of it, I misspoke about the C part. I think A, B, and C(2). I don't know where you got D. I don't think that. Bob: OK. C(2) makes more sense, and let's forget about D. Here's why you're wrong about B. --------------- Here's what seems to happen a lot these days. Alice: I think A, B, and C. Bob: I hate your thoughts. We're done here. If I were your boss, you'd be fired. --------------- People would be a lot less angry and a lot smarter if they actually dialogued more.
    - gnaritas 9y ago
      Most people don't want to dialogue more with people who don't share their values, they'd much rather find people who do share their values. We are tribal animals, the current dissent in this country is a symptom of our tribalism not scaling up to 300 million people. There are tribes in this nation who are not going to get along, ever; the country is too big. Diversity doesn't scale.
- g09980 9y ago
  An analogy would be someone writing a statement as follows: "Abolishment of slavery led to economic ruin in the Confederate states." -Author Bob And a not-so-well-meaning reader TLDR'ing it as: "Author Bob claims that abolishing slavery was a bad thing." / "Author Bob is a supporter of slavery."
  - scottmf 9y ago
    Not quite. It's more like: "since 1865, the huge decrease in black slaves—something notoriously tough for capitalists—has rendered the notion of a "productive economy" into an oxymoron". Followed by the non-denial: "It would be absurd to suggest black people will be re-enslaved".
- ucaetano 9y ago
  > Can the New York Times point... This isn't an article by the NYT. It's an opinion piece by someone unrelated to the newspaper: Jonathan Taplin is the director emeritus of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab and the author of “Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy.”
- yahna 9y ago
  > Think what you may about Peter Thiel, but the quote does not say or even suggest that "women should not even have the vote." Said by a rather notorious libertarian venture capitalist it comes off a pretty big criticism of women getting the vote.
- bww 9y ago
  More importantly: I would argue that holding up Peter Thiel as some kind of moral representative of the entire technology industry is pretty ridiculous. Has he been a prominent figure and thinker? Sure. I think that most would agree, however, that his political views and eccentricities are extreme, have been long satirized, and are not generally representative of people in technology.
- rayiner 9y ago
  Peoples' reaction to the Thiel quote drives me bonkers. If I complain that evangelical christians as a demographic make it tougher to achieve comprehensive abortion rights, does that mean I think we should disenfranchise them? Of course not. Women and minorities are tough for libertarians; it shouldn't be controversial to point that out. It's also not surprising why that's the case. It's hard to sell a world view predicated on the concern for protecting people from the government to demographics who have since the 1950s relied heavily on government for protection from other people.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    That's not at all a perfect analogy: * You're not saying evangelical Christians make your preferred form of government impossible. * You'd be arguing in pursuit of a narrow policy goal, unlike Thiel. * People choose to be evangelical Christians; they're in part defined by their opposition to abortion. Women don't choose to be born women. * When you say "evangelicals make reproductive rights more challenging", you're not directly alluding to a franchise those people won within living memory.
    - unityByFreedom 9y ago
      > When you say "evangelicals make reproductive rights more challenging", you're not directly alluding to a franchise those people won within living memory. Pretty sure us Americans feel pretty strongly about freedom from England :-). Pilgrims and Puritans formed the roots of increased religious freedom in America, which led to other freedoms, etc.
    - euroclydon 9y ago
      Yeah, a better analogy would be if someone were to remark that, "legalized interracial marriage makes it more challenging to keep the Scandinavian bloodline pure."
  - unityByFreedom 9y ago
    > If I complain that evangelical christians as a demographic make it tougher to achieve comprehensive abortion rights, does that mean I think we should disenfranchise them? No. But that's not a full parallel. Consider the Treaty of Paris, signed in 1783, when American Christians were first recognized by their former rulers to have their own state. If, in 1798 during the Franco-American war, a prominent British person had written: "since 1783, negotiating alongside American Protestants - a group notoriously difficult for England - has severely limited our ability to colonize and trade across the globe" Then he too might find some critics at his doorstep. Probably some supporters as well, but England didn't have the strength for another war with America. However innocent, that comment wouldn't have been mainstream. Understandably so, in my opinion.
russdpale 9y ago
Fairly disappointing article title, but it is true. Google executives and other management personnel from other tech giants have internal and external fiduciary responsibilities to uphold inside their own organizations. Google firing the engineer is, unfortunately, what many companies would choose to do when faced with the same public dilemma. And while it sucks, one has to wonder if our outrage at the termination of an outspoken engineer is somehow spawned from an unrealistic expectation placed upon google as the 'good guy'? Or is it from an unrealistic optimism born in the late twentieth century and early twenty first that the internet, and its leading companies, would somehow chart themselves on morally superior course? In my humble opinion, I am not totally sure google qualifies as a truly private enterprise, and as such they should have a greater interest in the stakeholder. And in that context, our outrage makes much more sense, and is more justified.
- bad_user 9y ago
  Oh I wouldn't jump to conclusions so fast. I actually like them more for firing that guy. That whole manifesto was wrapped in scientism, using facts selectively to advance the author's viewpoint, with the conclusion being a non-sequitur. More aggravating however and the reason for why you shouldn't be outraged is that, regardless of any truths mentioned, it's inevitable for such an essay to not cause outrage within the targeted groups. This is because we are only human. Now think of the company. Google and Apple are the most powerful and rich companies in the world. And one of their employees writes an essay under the pretense that "it's bad for business" and that: (1) outrages many of their other employees (2) hurts their public image, no matter what they do next Of course they fired him. It's unreasonable to expect otherwise. Repeat after me: a company is not a democracy, a company isn't a meritocracy either, a company is property and that property ain't yours, unless it's your company. Also, you know what's really, really funny? The right wanting companies to be able to fire anybody for any reason, except for this particular reason. That smells like a double standard.
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    > The right wanting companies to be able to fire anybody for any reason, except for this particular reason. The conservative columnists I've read on this think that Google was legally entitled to fire Damore, but they failed their eithical obligations to follow the golden rule, promote a culture of honest discussion, and actually promote diversity of thought in their organization. There may be some alt-right columnists saying other things, but they don't really follow logical principles as much as fight as partisans in the culture war. So you're right that they're hypocritical. To them it's beside the point since the left is already being unfair, etc. But if you can figure out a way to get them to care, let me know. There could be an interesting argument invoking the prisoners' dilemma and game theory saying conservatives should use liberal laws while they exist. Maybe they're getting at this with the "but SJWs" stuff.
cflewis 9y ago
I'm a Googler. The way you decide whether to trust someone or something is whether someone you already trust trust them. So the question is: who do you trust and how far does your chain of trust go? For me, I need to trust my coworkers. And I do. And I trust that those coworkers will report misbehavior internally such that I can see it. And from what I know, I trust them to look after my data. They have everything: search history, location history, email, photos of my daughter. I am not a product. I am a leaf on a human-indecipherable neural net that shows me a particular ad. Companies don't care about people. Companies aren't people. People care about people. I do not think Google The Company "wants" anything in any way you can moralize good or bad. Google The People want to do right by users. So, the question is, do you trust me? :)
- QAPereo 9y ago
  If your only standard for trust was previous trust then you would never trust anyone and your chain of trust would never grow, but you know that right? More realistically you establish trust through a process over time and you repeat that process to some degree ad infinitum.
  - brightball 9y ago
    I don't think he was implying that it was his only standard for trust, but as you establish trust in certain people over time you also grow to trust their judgement and part of that is giving a benefit of the doubt level of trust to people who have earned their trust (without having to invest in the direct development as much).
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- throwaway7547 9y ago
  Up until now Google has been the one company that I have trusted with all my secrets. "They" pretty much know everything about me. The reason I trusted Google with this is that they know their shit, technically speaking. And it wouldn't make economical sense to try to make money from e.g. blackmailing me using my darkest secrets. Where I have my doubts though, is in their neutrality of Search. What I have read the past week does not fill me with confidence that Google will be a politically neutral search engine e.g. 5 years from now. This is the real risk. Edit: A Google recruiter has been trying to recruit me for some position during all of this. The ball is currently in my court. I am not sure I want to return it. (And now I am paranoid about that recruiter having access to my Google search history, or perhaps more likely, some algorithmic summary of it.)
QAPereo 9y ago
Of course not, they want the best return for Google, and you'd have to be deluded or knee deep in KoolAid not to know that. Google isn't a public service or charity, even if we want to pretend that it is or use it that way. What Google is, even more than Facebook or Twitter, a massive exercise in gathering personal information and then attempting to monetize it.
khazhoux 9y ago
My own controversial opinion on this, borrowing words from Peter Griffin: "Oh my god, who the hell cares?!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFZrzg62Zj0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFZrzg62Zj0 Googler wrote a document which was widely derided internally and externally. Sundar took the conservative option and let him go, due to his toxic effect on work environment. Shouldn't that be the end of the story? Maybe a googler can explain how and why this has exploded into the zeitgeist, because I fail to see it. It seems there were some number of bad actors inside google besides the original author, but a small number. If Google has a mono-culture that's not open to debate about gender and diversity issues, it's neither my business nor my concern, and all the bloggers and Ezra Klein and NYT who are trying to frame a megacorp-sized story about this, are stretching. EDIT: Instead of downvote, maybe an explanation on WHY this incident shows (as the posted article claims) Google's bad intentions for us?
- btian 9y ago
  In the conservative circle, this is considered a "crusade" against "conservative values". That's why you see tweets from the likes of Kellyanne Conway. Conservative Googlers have been leaking people's names and locations to known white supremacists to harass and threaten people they disagree with, and the snowball is still growing.
  - khazhoux 9y ago
    Indeed, this plays into their narrative of hippy-dippy Berkeley liberal feminist handouts entitlement cosmopolitan California.
    - mcguire 9y ago
      "Fired Google engineer compares high-paid tech job to Soviet forced labor": https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/10/16127968/fired-google-engineer-compares-high-paid-tech-job-to-soviet-forced-labor https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/10/16127968/fired-google-eng...
  - sheepmullet 9y ago
baq 9y ago
Peter Thiel understands Special Circumstances. don't know whether existing SC-like organisations understand Peter Thiel.
humanrebar 9y ago
> The rise of Google and the other giant businesses of Silicon Valley have been driven by a libertarian culture that paid only lip service to notions of diversity. > The effects of the darker side of tech culture reach well beyond the Valley. It starts with an unwillingness to control fake news and pervasive sexism that no doubt contributes to the gender pay gap. I'm inferring that instead of "lip service", the technology sector should "control" news and ideology. > The future implications of a couple of companies’ having such deep influence on our attention and our behavior are only beginning to be felt. This concerns me, not because Google isn't on "my side". It concerns me because I don't think it's healthy for anyone to have this sort of invisible influence. > By giving networks like Google and Facebook control of the present, we cede our freedom to choose our future. Right. But the answer isn't to pick a better authority to win fights for "our side". The answer is to give individuals freedom (in practice, not just in theory) to stay away from bullies and fools. Even if you set up perfect rules and systems, eventually someone you think is foolish and/or dangerous will be in charge: Thiel, Pichai, Jobs, Gates, Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, Sanders, Cruz, Maduro, Castro, Kim, Gaddafi, and the list goes on. You may not mind some of them, but everyone would be at least dismayed by some of them. The author ends up on the path to this conclusion, that freedom of choice is essential, but doesn't really lay it out clearly. There's is some praise of EU's data privacy laws (conveniently leaving out "right to be forgotten" rules), but it seems to me that the goal for the author is more government control over technology, not necessarily true freedom for the individual. How many of the above leaders would you trust with your data?
zygga 9y ago
The claims of sexism in this article are shaky, at best. A programmer created a memo about how the small proportion of women in programming is likely to be due to biology, Google fired them, and that's somewhow supposed to prove that there's a "toxic bro culture"? A memo, which most professors of the subject matter seem to mostly agree with... which makes its vilification questionable.
- mcguire 9y ago
  Google fired him, and his supporters seem to have responded...poorly. * https://www.facebook.com/myiannopoulos/photos/a.599546946849871.1073741829.423006854503882/987587484712480/?type=3&theater https://www.facebook.com/myiannopoulos/photos/a.599546946849... * https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/10/16128518/google-town-hall-meeting-canceled-online-harassment https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/10/16128518/google-town-hall... Sounds pretty toxic to me. Most professors? * https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-biological-claims-made-in-the-document-about-diversity-written-by-a-Google-employee-in-August-2017/answer/Suzanne-Sadedin?amp&share=1&srid=2n17 https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-bio...
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    How are Twitter and bretbart.com part of Google company culture? Twitter (the company) counts as Silicon Valley culture, but I don't see how all of its users do. Besides, unless Damore has organized all this somehow, it's just a big guilt by (AFAIK unasked for) association argument.
    - mcguire 9y ago
      Someone inside Google took screenshots of the internal G+ discussion of his document and passed those screenshots, along with identifying information about the users, to groups that have a history of lighting off internet shitstorms. It is, I assume, extremely unlikely that Damore organized any of this. On the other hand, his document did assert that the issues were intrinsically aligned with the United States' left/right political spectrum as well as making his stance towards that particular dichotomy known.
wffurr 9y ago
What does anything Peter Thiel says have to do with Google? The writer calls him "an ideological leader in the Valley". That's a pretty tenuous connection. And the contrast with Drexel and Milken? Come on, those people went to jail for fraud! This is fact-free dreck that's just adding to the noise.
- dunkelheit 9y ago
  Agreed, the author seems not very knowledgeable and just lumps everything together - Silicon Valley brogrammer culture (is there a brogrammer culture at google? Haven't heard of one), Peter Thiel's political writings, surveillance capitalism and junk bond traders. As if he wanted to implant a vague "these people are bad" thought into the mind of a reader without diving much into the specifics.
  - RealityNow 9y ago
    I never really understood this loaded/gendered "brogrammer" term. In my experience programmers tend to be shy, introverted, soft spoken, and more socially awkward than average - the exact opposite of the type of person "bro" typically refers to. I've never worked at a company where the programmers are the extroverted outspoken machismo ex-fraternity type who regularly lift weights and play beer pong at their bachelor pads before hitting the bars/clubs. Martin Shkreli (the pharma CEO who gained fame after jacking up the price of a drug by 5000% overnight) is referred to in the press as "pharma bro". What makes him a "bro"? He's awkward, unpolished, and more resembles the overcompensating nerd from high school than the binge-drinking football-playing jock who got invited to the parties. Tech has never had a "brogrammer" culture. The term is just used to paint the picture of programmers as being misogynistic.
    - dunkelheit 9y ago
      > I never really understood this loaded/gendered "brogrammer" term. Me neither. I'm not Silicon Valley-based so when the articles started to appear about some guys who pop their polo collars and work out between writing lines of code I just assumed that this is a quirky new meme that is based on a few eccentric characters existing in real life. And a stereotypical google engineer in my mind is polite to a fault and not in any way a brogrammer (I wonder, is this grounded in reality or are my stereotypes off the mark?) Evidently, the word "bro" is convenient: it is short; it is vaguely pejorative; you can seamlessly attach it to other words to mark the specific bro (pharma bro, google bro etc.)
stirner 9y ago
A lack of diversity is among the least terrifying of Google's many evils.
- zygga 9y ago
  Almost half of Googlers are non-white, more so than the general population of the USA. How is Google lacking diversity? (I know the answer, but that kind of blanket statements are ridiculous)
ilaksh 9y ago
I think that this professor is correctly relating the recent sexism episode with other critiques of Google, culture, it's place in our society, and previous monopolies. We should take advantage of his perspective. They are all related problems. In a way, getting down to the uglier sides of the people involved in the organizations with unchecked control over our society is a way to bring the point home that no, we cannot place this much trust in these people. But whether people are buying that angle or not, listen to the professor when he connects it to the larger problem of technopolies. Really this is just a new variation of the overblown corporate power that has been around forever. These companies like Google, Uber, and Amazon are so powerful they are basically supplanting aspects government in many countries. It's sort of like the giant corporations the cyberpunk authors envisioned, but worse because they don't have competition. It does seem to basically be working to most people's benefit -- as long as you don't have a business that tried to compete with these companies. This is just the core problem with both cooperative and competitive approaches to society -- without adequate structural prevention they tend towards over-centralization. If we can realize that this over-trusting relationship is unacceptable, that will motivate structural changes to improve it. I believe the next big revolution will be mass deployment of truly decentralized, open, easily evolved, and public, platforms that have some similar features to the closed for-profit monopoly technology giant services. This includes things like search indexing and advertisement Google, retail indexing and logistics (Amazon), transportation (Uber), etc. And probably even banking, which is not quite as centralized but has things like PayPal etc. Because high-tech economies of scale are great, but centralization of control by private companies over the public at large with fixed platforms that don't evolve are not.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  > ...listen to the professor when he connects it to the larger problem of technopolies... Well, I was already on board with that thesis. I'm not on board with (I assume) the proposed solution, which would be relying on new regulatory powers to resolve the issue. It doesn't help with other corporate oligopolies, so I'll need some convincing that this time it's different.
  - ilaksh 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
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wbillingsley 9y ago
Ah, the dear old NYT. Yesterday one of the NYT columns posted to HN was on how even sex was better under socialism. Not that they wear their politics on their sleeve or anything...
ece 9y ago
non-mobile link: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/12/opinion/sunday/google-tech-diversity-memo.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/12/opinion/sunday/google-tec...

177 points by Eduardo3rd 9y ago

> Peter Thiel, one of the ideological leaders in the Valley, wrote in 2009 on a blog affiliated with the Cato Institute that “since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” > If women should not even have the vote, why should we worry about gender diversity in the engineering ranks? These two paragraphs read as a microcosm of this whole episode. Think what you may about Peter Thiel, but the quote does not say or even suggest that "women should not even have the vote." It merely points out that as the voting public has been broadened, it has been broadened to include sectors that are not (historically) as amenable to limited-government policies. Therefore, the relative popularity of limited-government policy among the totality of voters has diminished, suggesting that democracy and capitalism are presently at odds. Reading the quote with a reasonable level of charity suggests Thiel would prefer to convince these voters of the appeal of limited-government policy, not revoke their right to vote. Simultaneously, he is also presumably arguing, as many others have, that simply increasing voter turnout does not necessarily lead to better governance. Can the New York Times point to any quote from Thiel that justifies the implication they have made here: that Thiel believes women should not have the right to vote? Perhaps there is one; I really don't know much about Thiel. But this quote alone isn't it.

dragonwriter 9y ago
The quote given clearly requires one of three things be true: (1) Thiel opposes capitalism, (2) Thiel opposes democracy, (3) Thiel opposes women holding the franchise. The piece in question seems to choose #3, which is the most natural reading, but I think #2 is plausible as well. Thiel clearly supports capitalism, so it's not #1.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  Or Thiel likes all three and sees that they can work against each other.
  - CalChris 9y ago
    As a self-described libertarian that would be impossible to square with Thiel's rather famous quote: I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.
    - benchaney 9y ago
      It may be true that Thiel doesn't believe one of the three things dragonwriter listed, however: 1. The quote being discussed doesn't require this. 2. If Peter Thiel doesn't like democracy (and therefore would like no one to vote) it would be misleading (although technically accurate) to describe that as Peter Thiel not wanting women/minorities to vote.
      - CalChris 9y ago
        If you want to interpret what Thiel says then you have to take into consideration everything that he says. So yeah, the quote being discussed does require this. That would be the case if you consider Thiel as some sort of libertarian intellectual. If he's just a whatIsaywheneverIsayitmeaningwhateverIwantittomeanwheneveritsuitsme-arian then I see your point.
        benchaney 9y ago
        Way to ignore half of my post. It is completely reasonable to take context into account when doing this sort of interpretation, but it is important to be explicit about what context is included in the analysis. The article we are discussing is being criticized for being dishonest in this regard, which is why the distinction between "implied by this quote" and "implied by something else he said" is important.
humanrebar 9y ago
Also: > Last week, Google fired a software engineer for writing a memo that questioned the company’s gender diversity policies and made statements about women’s biological suitability for technical jobs. This is a huge misrepresentation of the ideas of the memo. This level of journalism, both from the writer and from the editors, is disappointing.
- vernie 9y ago
  How would you summarize the memo in one line?
  - abtinf 9y ago
    How about: Google's current programs are ineffective and discriminatory, so alternative programs and work culture should be considered to achieve higher diversity.
    - oddlyaromatic 9y ago
      That may summarize the goal of the memo, but it does not adequately summarize the content, which has a large focus on biological differences between the sexes being this Big Factor that is not yet "priced in" to diversity programs. In reality he was probably way, way off on the impact of biology, but he confirmation biased his way forward regardless, then peppered the memo with hedges to offset the backlash.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - mjevans 9y ago
        I agree with abtinf about the best interpretation of ideas within the memo. It is a result that the author of that memo should have reached after counseling and seeing evidence supportting of /equality/ programs actually being about equal treatment (or at least fair, as in having multiple possible measurements and a consistent policy of utilizing the best scores to reach a determination.). I feel like a lot of animosity was allowed to fester among all parties due to a lack of intelligent, open, and respectful discourse about problems and perceived problems.
confounded 9y ago
> Reading the quote with a reasonable level of charity suggests Thiel would prefer to convince these voters of the appeal of limited-government policy, not revoke their right to vote. Where are you getting this from? He says nothing of the sort; simply that women and poor people have destroyed capitalist democracy, by attaining the right to vote. There are a great many on HN who rush to Theil's defense, who seem unfamiliar with his very public, very outspoken politics. He's also said that "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." His solution to the fact that democracies may disagree with him is to weaken and destroy democracy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment
- gaurav_v 9y ago
  He clarified that he didn't want to revoke rights to vote explicitly as an addendum to the essay (see bottom): https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio... Seems like an open and shut case of bad journalism.
  - studentrob 9y ago
    > Seems like an open and shut case of bad journalism. Hmm.. Seems like an open and shut case of a conservative saying words that mean one thing, then saying more words that are directly contradictory. We've seen enough of this "subtlety" in 2017 to recognize it. He could, in the future, also claim that he only made that correction in order to be PC, and that he felt censored and shamed.
- TimPC 9y ago
  To put the quote in context it was in an essay that addressed people leaving countries through seasteading. So I think it's pretty much in evidence his view is not to deny people the right to vote, but to allow departure from societies one radically disagrees with for new ones.
  - Analemma_ 9y ago
pavlov 9y ago
There's something callous in the tone of the quote that rubs people the wrong way. Thiel seems to mourn the extension of the franchise, and makes it sound like USA would be better off if this error of the past could somehow be fixed.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  > There's something callous in the tone of the quote that rubs people the wrong way We have to leave room for "insensitive" tones if we are going to be truly inclusive. Having a uniform book of dog whistles and manners doesn't mesh with actual diversity. That being said, if someone approaches Thiel about the offense and implications and he doubles down, he's on his own.
  - pavlov 9y ago
    This is what he said in response to the controversy: "It would be absurd to suggest that women’s votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us." A rather non-committal answer to the question of whether women's right to vote was a positive development. To my ears, he is basically saying "Well, too late to do anything about it now, isn't it?"
    - humanrebar 9y ago
      Full text: """ It would be absurd to suggest that women’s votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us. While I don’t think any class of people should be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make things better. Voting is not under siege in America, but many other rights are. In America, people are imprisoned for using even very mild drugs, tortured by our own government, and forced to bail out reckless financial companies. I believe that politics is way too intense. That’s why I’m a libertarian. Politics gets people angry, destroys relationships, and polarizes peoples’ vision: the world is us versus them; good people versus the other. Politics is about interfering with other people’s lives without their consent. That’s probably why, in the past, libertarians have made little progress in the political sphere. Thus, I advocate focusing energy elsewhere, onto peaceful projects that some consider utopian. """ ...in context it doesn't seem so bad to me. Though YMMV, I guess.
gaurav_v 9y ago
Not only that; in response controversy arising from the 2009 essay he explicitly stated that "It would be absurd to suggest that women’s votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us." See addendum to the essay at bottom: https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio... Lazy editing by the NYT.
- ucaetano 9y ago
  > Lazy editing by the NYT. This isn't an article by the NYT. It's an opinion piece by someone unrelated to the newspaper: Jonathan Taplin is the director emeritus of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab and the author of “Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy.”
  - masonic 9y ago
    ... which is why the comment said, "lazy editing". The NYT chose to publish this in full. They bear responsibility for what they choose to put on their pages.
    - ucaetano 9y ago
      > The NYT chose to publish this in full. They bear responsibility for what they choose to put on their pages. No. Newspapers don't "bear responsibility" for opinion sections or letters to the editor. They publish them because they find the opinions relevant, not because they condone or support the content. The NYT frequently published highly opposing opinions together.
      - usegolang 9y ago
        It feels pretty ironic that this article takes a jab at FB with the fake news comment and then NYT, which arguably should be held to a higher bar for pieces like this, gets a pass on fact checking.
parenthephobia 9y ago
"the extension of the franchise to women ... [has] rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron" Thiel either opposes capitalist democracy, or regrets the franchisement of women. (Edit: Or both.) Reading those words otherwise is, IMO, not charitable but delusional. --- Having said that, the impression I get is that Thiel opposes democracy, rather than specifically democracy for women. He probably regrets extending the franchise to women not because they are women but simply because he regrets extending the franchise at all.
- ericd 9y ago
  It's possible to think that capitalist democracy is a good thing, but that expanding the vote had positives that outweighed the negative. People who spend a lot of time thinking, as Thiel clearly does, tend to have more nuanced views than the one you're ascribing to him. I guess believing that would make it harder for people to sort everyone onto teams, though.
psyc 9y ago
People either don't read, or can't read. They just hear sounds that rhyme with thoughts that make them angry, and then get angry.
- adrianratnapala 9y ago
  I upvoted you, because this rings true. But you are unfailry stereotyping "people".
  - dom0 9y ago
    Is such a thing even possible?
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  Yes, this is a very important thing to understand and internalize. People, in the abstract sense, will not read and do not care about what you wrote. "Refer to line ABC-123..." is thus a futile defense (in most contexts).
- humanrebar 9y ago
  In a civilized discussion, this happens: -------------- Alice: I think A, B, and C. Bob: Did you say you think A, B, C, and D? Alice: No, I said A, B, and C, but now that I think of it, I misspoke about the C part. I think A, B, and C(2). I don't know where you got D. I don't think that. Bob: OK. C(2) makes more sense, and let's forget about D. Here's why you're wrong about B. --------------- Here's what seems to happen a lot these days. Alice: I think A, B, and C. Bob: I hate your thoughts. We're done here. If I were your boss, you'd be fired. --------------- People would be a lot less angry and a lot smarter if they actually dialogued more.
  - gnaritas 9y ago
    Most people don't want to dialogue more with people who don't share their values, they'd much rather find people who do share their values. We are tribal animals, the current dissent in this country is a symptom of our tribalism not scaling up to 300 million people. There are tribes in this nation who are not going to get along, ever; the country is too big. Diversity doesn't scale.
g09980 9y ago
An analogy would be someone writing a statement as follows: "Abolishment of slavery led to economic ruin in the Confederate states." -Author Bob And a not-so-well-meaning reader TLDR'ing it as: "Author Bob claims that abolishing slavery was a bad thing." / "Author Bob is a supporter of slavery."
- scottmf 9y ago
  Not quite. It's more like: "since 1865, the huge decrease in black slaves—something notoriously tough for capitalists—has rendered the notion of a "productive economy" into an oxymoron". Followed by the non-denial: "It would be absurd to suggest black people will be re-enslaved".
ucaetano 9y ago
> Can the New York Times point... This isn't an article by the NYT. It's an opinion piece by someone unrelated to the newspaper: Jonathan Taplin is the director emeritus of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab and the author of “Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy.”
yahna 9y ago
> Think what you may about Peter Thiel, but the quote does not say or even suggest that "women should not even have the vote." Said by a rather notorious libertarian venture capitalist it comes off a pretty big criticism of women getting the vote.
bww 9y ago
More importantly: I would argue that holding up Peter Thiel as some kind of moral representative of the entire technology industry is pretty ridiculous. Has he been a prominent figure and thinker? Sure. I think that most would agree, however, that his political views and eccentricities are extreme, have been long satirized, and are not generally representative of people in technology.
rayiner 9y ago
Peoples' reaction to the Thiel quote drives me bonkers. If I complain that evangelical christians as a demographic make it tougher to achieve comprehensive abortion rights, does that mean I think we should disenfranchise them? Of course not. Women and minorities are tough for libertarians; it shouldn't be controversial to point that out. It's also not surprising why that's the case. It's hard to sell a world view predicated on the concern for protecting people from the government to demographics who have since the 1950s relied heavily on government for protection from other people.
- tptacek 9y ago
  That's not at all a perfect analogy: * You're not saying evangelical Christians make your preferred form of government impossible. * You'd be arguing in pursuit of a narrow policy goal, unlike Thiel. * People choose to be evangelical Christians; they're in part defined by their opposition to abortion. Women don't choose to be born women. * When you say "evangelicals make reproductive rights more challenging", you're not directly alluding to a franchise those people won within living memory.
  - unityByFreedom 9y ago
    > When you say "evangelicals make reproductive rights more challenging", you're not directly alluding to a franchise those people won within living memory. Pretty sure us Americans feel pretty strongly about freedom from England :-). Pilgrims and Puritans formed the roots of increased religious freedom in America, which led to other freedoms, etc.
  - euroclydon 9y ago
    Yeah, a better analogy would be if someone were to remark that, "legalized interracial marriage makes it more challenging to keep the Scandinavian bloodline pure."
- unityByFreedom 9y ago
  > If I complain that evangelical christians as a demographic make it tougher to achieve comprehensive abortion rights, does that mean I think we should disenfranchise them? No. But that's not a full parallel. Consider the Treaty of Paris, signed in 1783, when American Christians were first recognized by their former rulers to have their own state. If, in 1798 during the Franco-American war, a prominent British person had written: "since 1783, negotiating alongside American Protestants - a group notoriously difficult for England - has severely limited our ability to colonize and trade across the globe" Then he too might find some critics at his doorstep. Probably some supporters as well, but England didn't have the strength for another war with America. However innocent, that comment wouldn't have been mainstream. Understandably so, in my opinion.

russdpale 9y ago

Fairly disappointing article title, but it is true. Google executives and other management personnel from other tech giants have internal and external fiduciary responsibilities to uphold inside their own organizations. Google firing the engineer is, unfortunately, what many companies would choose to do when faced with the same public dilemma. And while it sucks, one has to wonder if our outrage at the termination of an outspoken engineer is somehow spawned from an unrealistic expectation placed upon google as the 'good guy'? Or is it from an unrealistic optimism born in the late twentieth century and early twenty first that the internet, and its leading companies, would somehow chart themselves on morally superior course? In my humble opinion, I am not totally sure google qualifies as a truly private enterprise, and as such they should have a greater interest in the stakeholder. And in that context, our outrage makes much more sense, and is more justified.

bad_user 9y ago
Oh I wouldn't jump to conclusions so fast. I actually like them more for firing that guy. That whole manifesto was wrapped in scientism, using facts selectively to advance the author's viewpoint, with the conclusion being a non-sequitur. More aggravating however and the reason for why you shouldn't be outraged is that, regardless of any truths mentioned, it's inevitable for such an essay to not cause outrage within the targeted groups. This is because we are only human. Now think of the company. Google and Apple are the most powerful and rich companies in the world. And one of their employees writes an essay under the pretense that "it's bad for business" and that: (1) outrages many of their other employees (2) hurts their public image, no matter what they do next Of course they fired him. It's unreasonable to expect otherwise. Repeat after me: a company is not a democracy, a company isn't a meritocracy either, a company is property and that property ain't yours, unless it's your company. Also, you know what's really, really funny? The right wanting companies to be able to fire anybody for any reason, except for this particular reason. That smells like a double standard.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  > The right wanting companies to be able to fire anybody for any reason, except for this particular reason. The conservative columnists I've read on this think that Google was legally entitled to fire Damore, but they failed their eithical obligations to follow the golden rule, promote a culture of honest discussion, and actually promote diversity of thought in their organization. There may be some alt-right columnists saying other things, but they don't really follow logical principles as much as fight as partisans in the culture war. So you're right that they're hypocritical. To them it's beside the point since the left is already being unfair, etc. But if you can figure out a way to get them to care, let me know. There could be an interesting argument invoking the prisoners' dilemma and game theory saying conservatives should use liberal laws while they exist. Maybe they're getting at this with the "but SJWs" stuff.

cflewis 9y ago

I'm a Googler. The way you decide whether to trust someone or something is whether someone you already trust trust them. So the question is: who do you trust and how far does your chain of trust go? For me, I need to trust my coworkers. And I do. And I trust that those coworkers will report misbehavior internally such that I can see it. And from what I know, I trust them to look after my data. They have everything: search history, location history, email, photos of my daughter. I am not a product. I am a leaf on a human-indecipherable neural net that shows me a particular ad. Companies don't care about people. Companies aren't people. People care about people. I do not think Google The Company "wants" anything in any way you can moralize good or bad. Google The People want to do right by users. So, the question is, do you trust me? :)

QAPereo 9y ago
If your only standard for trust was previous trust then you would never trust anyone and your chain of trust would never grow, but you know that right? More realistically you establish trust through a process over time and you repeat that process to some degree ad infinitum.
- brightball 9y ago
  I don't think he was implying that it was his only standard for trust, but as you establish trust in certain people over time you also grow to trust their judgement and part of that is giving a benefit of the doubt level of trust to people who have earned their trust (without having to invest in the direct development as much).
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
throwaway7547 9y ago
Up until now Google has been the one company that I have trusted with all my secrets. "They" pretty much know everything about me. The reason I trusted Google with this is that they know their shit, technically speaking. And it wouldn't make economical sense to try to make money from e.g. blackmailing me using my darkest secrets. Where I have my doubts though, is in their neutrality of Search. What I have read the past week does not fill me with confidence that Google will be a politically neutral search engine e.g. 5 years from now. This is the real risk. Edit: A Google recruiter has been trying to recruit me for some position during all of this. The ball is currently in my court. I am not sure I want to return it. (And now I am paranoid about that recruiter having access to my Google search history, or perhaps more likely, some algorithmic summary of it.)

QAPereo 9y ago

Of course not, they want the best return for Google, and you'd have to be deluded or knee deep in KoolAid not to know that. Google isn't a public service or charity, even if we want to pretend that it is or use it that way. What Google is, even more than Facebook or Twitter, a massive exercise in gathering personal information and then attempting to monetize it.

khazhoux 9y ago

My own controversial opinion on this, borrowing words from Peter Griffin: "Oh my god, who the hell cares?!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFZrzg62Zj0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFZrzg62Zj0 Googler wrote a document which was widely derided internally and externally. Sundar took the conservative option and let him go, due to his toxic effect on work environment. Shouldn't that be the end of the story? Maybe a googler can explain how and why this has exploded into the zeitgeist, because I fail to see it. It seems there were some number of bad actors inside google besides the original author, but a small number. If Google has a mono-culture that's not open to debate about gender and diversity issues, it's neither my business nor my concern, and all the bloggers and Ezra Klein and NYT who are trying to frame a megacorp-sized story about this, are stretching. EDIT: Instead of downvote, maybe an explanation on WHY this incident shows (as the posted article claims) Google's bad intentions for us?

btian 9y ago
In the conservative circle, this is considered a "crusade" against "conservative values". That's why you see tweets from the likes of Kellyanne Conway. Conservative Googlers have been leaking people's names and locations to known white supremacists to harass and threaten people they disagree with, and the snowball is still growing.
- khazhoux 9y ago
  Indeed, this plays into their narrative of hippy-dippy Berkeley liberal feminist handouts entitlement cosmopolitan California.
  - mcguire 9y ago
    "Fired Google engineer compares high-paid tech job to Soviet forced labor": https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/10/16127968/fired-google-engineer-compares-high-paid-tech-job-to-soviet-forced-labor https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/10/16127968/fired-google-eng...
- sheepmullet 9y ago

baq 9y ago

Peter Thiel understands Special Circumstances. don't know whether existing SC-like organisations understand Peter Thiel.

humanrebar 9y ago

> The rise of Google and the other giant businesses of Silicon Valley have been driven by a libertarian culture that paid only lip service to notions of diversity. > The effects of the darker side of tech culture reach well beyond the Valley. It starts with an unwillingness to control fake news and pervasive sexism that no doubt contributes to the gender pay gap. I'm inferring that instead of "lip service", the technology sector should "control" news and ideology. > The future implications of a couple of companies’ having such deep influence on our attention and our behavior are only beginning to be felt. This concerns me, not because Google isn't on "my side". It concerns me because I don't think it's healthy for anyone to have this sort of invisible influence. > By giving networks like Google and Facebook control of the present, we cede our freedom to choose our future. Right. But the answer isn't to pick a better authority to win fights for "our side". The answer is to give individuals freedom (in practice, not just in theory) to stay away from bullies and fools. Even if you set up perfect rules and systems, eventually someone you think is foolish and/or dangerous will be in charge: Thiel, Pichai, Jobs, Gates, Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, Sanders, Cruz, Maduro, Castro, Kim, Gaddafi, and the list goes on. You may not mind some of them, but everyone would be at least dismayed by some of them. The author ends up on the path to this conclusion, that freedom of choice is essential, but doesn't really lay it out clearly. There's is some praise of EU's data privacy laws (conveniently leaving out "right to be forgotten" rules), but it seems to me that the goal for the author is more government control over technology, not necessarily true freedom for the individual. How many of the above leaders would you trust with your data?

zygga 9y ago

The claims of sexism in this article are shaky, at best. A programmer created a memo about how the small proportion of women in programming is likely to be due to biology, Google fired them, and that's somewhow supposed to prove that there's a "toxic bro culture"? A memo, which most professors of the subject matter seem to mostly agree with... which makes its vilification questionable.

mcguire 9y ago
Google fired him, and his supporters seem to have responded...poorly. * https://www.facebook.com/myiannopoulos/photos/a.599546946849871.1073741829.423006854503882/987587484712480/?type=3&theater https://www.facebook.com/myiannopoulos/photos/a.599546946849... * https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/10/16128518/google-town-hall-meeting-canceled-online-harassment https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/10/16128518/google-town-hall... Sounds pretty toxic to me. Most professors? * https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-biological-claims-made-in-the-document-about-diversity-written-by-a-Google-employee-in-August-2017/answer/Suzanne-Sadedin?amp&share=1&srid=2n17 https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-bio...
- humanrebar 9y ago
  How are Twitter and bretbart.com part of Google company culture? Twitter (the company) counts as Silicon Valley culture, but I don't see how all of its users do. Besides, unless Damore has organized all this somehow, it's just a big guilt by (AFAIK unasked for) association argument.
  - mcguire 9y ago
    Someone inside Google took screenshots of the internal G+ discussion of his document and passed those screenshots, along with identifying information about the users, to groups that have a history of lighting off internet shitstorms. It is, I assume, extremely unlikely that Damore organized any of this. On the other hand, his document did assert that the issues were intrinsically aligned with the United States' left/right political spectrum as well as making his stance towards that particular dichotomy known.

wffurr 9y ago

What does anything Peter Thiel says have to do with Google? The writer calls him "an ideological leader in the Valley". That's a pretty tenuous connection. And the contrast with Drexel and Milken? Come on, those people went to jail for fraud! This is fact-free dreck that's just adding to the noise.

dunkelheit 9y ago
Agreed, the author seems not very knowledgeable and just lumps everything together - Silicon Valley brogrammer culture (is there a brogrammer culture at google? Haven't heard of one), Peter Thiel's political writings, surveillance capitalism and junk bond traders. As if he wanted to implant a vague "these people are bad" thought into the mind of a reader without diving much into the specifics.
- RealityNow 9y ago
  I never really understood this loaded/gendered "brogrammer" term. In my experience programmers tend to be shy, introverted, soft spoken, and more socially awkward than average - the exact opposite of the type of person "bro" typically refers to. I've never worked at a company where the programmers are the extroverted outspoken machismo ex-fraternity type who regularly lift weights and play beer pong at their bachelor pads before hitting the bars/clubs. Martin Shkreli (the pharma CEO who gained fame after jacking up the price of a drug by 5000% overnight) is referred to in the press as "pharma bro". What makes him a "bro"? He's awkward, unpolished, and more resembles the overcompensating nerd from high school than the binge-drinking football-playing jock who got invited to the parties. Tech has never had a "brogrammer" culture. The term is just used to paint the picture of programmers as being misogynistic.
  - dunkelheit 9y ago
    > I never really understood this loaded/gendered "brogrammer" term. Me neither. I'm not Silicon Valley-based so when the articles started to appear about some guys who pop their polo collars and work out between writing lines of code I just assumed that this is a quirky new meme that is based on a few eccentric characters existing in real life. And a stereotypical google engineer in my mind is polite to a fault and not in any way a brogrammer (I wonder, is this grounded in reality or are my stereotypes off the mark?) Evidently, the word "bro" is convenient: it is short; it is vaguely pejorative; you can seamlessly attach it to other words to mark the specific bro (pharma bro, google bro etc.)

stirner 9y ago

A lack of diversity is among the least terrifying of Google's many evils.

zygga 9y ago
Almost half of Googlers are non-white, more so than the general population of the USA. How is Google lacking diversity? (I know the answer, but that kind of blanket statements are ridiculous)

ilaksh 9y ago

I think that this professor is correctly relating the recent sexism episode with other critiques of Google, culture, it's place in our society, and previous monopolies. We should take advantage of his perspective. They are all related problems. In a way, getting down to the uglier sides of the people involved in the organizations with unchecked control over our society is a way to bring the point home that no, we cannot place this much trust in these people. But whether people are buying that angle or not, listen to the professor when he connects it to the larger problem of technopolies. Really this is just a new variation of the overblown corporate power that has been around forever. These companies like Google, Uber, and Amazon are so powerful they are basically supplanting aspects government in many countries. It's sort of like the giant corporations the cyberpunk authors envisioned, but worse because they don't have competition. It does seem to basically be working to most people's benefit -- as long as you don't have a business that tried to compete with these companies. This is just the core problem with both cooperative and competitive approaches to society -- without adequate structural prevention they tend towards over-centralization. If we can realize that this over-trusting relationship is unacceptable, that will motivate structural changes to improve it. I believe the next big revolution will be mass deployment of truly decentralized, open, easily evolved, and public, platforms that have some similar features to the closed for-profit monopoly technology giant services. This includes things like search indexing and advertisement Google, retail indexing and logistics (Amazon), transportation (Uber), etc. And probably even banking, which is not quite as centralized but has things like PayPal etc. Because high-tech economies of scale are great, but centralization of control by private companies over the public at large with fixed platforms that don't evolve are not.

humanrebar 9y ago
> ...listen to the professor when he connects it to the larger problem of technopolies... Well, I was already on board with that thesis. I'm not on board with (I assume) the proposed solution, which would be relying on new regulatory powers to resolve the issue. It doesn't help with other corporate oligopolies, so I'll need some convincing that this time it's different.
- ilaksh 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

wbillingsley 9y ago

Ah, the dear old NYT. Yesterday one of the NYT columns posted to HN was on how even sex was better under socialism. Not that they wear their politics on their sleeve or anything...

ece 9y ago

non-mobile link: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/12/opinion/sunday/google-tech-diversity-memo.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/12/opinion/sunday/google-tec...