
Sundar Pichai: Let’s not let fear defeat our values - jamsc
https://medium.com/@sundar_pichai/let-s-not-let-fear-defeat-our-values-af2e5ca92371#.z9ib1meul
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jeffjose
Nicely written! Also interesting how this essay is on medium and not on a
Google owned property. Medium has become a place for serious long form essays.

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sanatgersappa
exactly. Wonder when Blogger is getting can'd.

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lsc
I mean, obviously, I may be wrong, I am bad with people, etc, etc... but my
feeling on the matter is that this isn't really fear. It's hate. We use the
language of fear, the language of defense, because that's how you do war these
days, but this isn't about safety, not even a little bit.

After the far more serious 9/11 attack, we decided to attack a country full of
people who.... looked a little bit like the people who perpetrated the attack
on us.[1] To the best of my knowledge, there was no evidence that Iraq had
anything to do with the 9/11 attack, and most of the justifications at the
time seemed to focus on "weapons of mass destruction" \- something that I
don't think is traditionally a legitimate casus belli. Even before it was
shown that said weapons were largely fantasy, I don't think there was a
coherent non-race based reason to attack Iraq. In spite of this, the move had
extremely broad public support at the time.

A lot of people conflate hate and fear, probably out of some attempt to make
those who hate look "less manly" or something equally ridiculous, but I think
you have a better handle on what is actually going on if you call a spade a
spade. Maybe it's just me not being able to understand normal people, but I
don't think we're actually afraid of something that kills fewer Americans than
sharks most years.

I think that a lot of the American political landscape makes a lot more sense
if you understand that for many people, _how_ someone dies is way more
important than how long they live.

Both sides of the isle do this. Cars kill more people than guns, and _way_
more people if you remove the obvious suicides from the statistics[2], but
while the left goes on about guns forever, they never talk of, say, increasing
the requirements for operating a far more dangerous motor vehicle.

All that said, I don't have anything like a solution. I'm just saying that I
don't believe that it has anything to do with fear. Fear is what I feel when I
bicycle on the same road as cars. This is different. There's very little
danger actually involved, from the American side.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War)

[2]I think you can't really understand the "pro" side of the gun debate until
you understand that for many people, the right to own a gun is actually the
right to a suicide they control; the right to death on their own terms. It
puts "From my cold, dead hands" in a whole new light, doesn't it? The
difference between suicide with a gun and doctor-assisted suicide is an
interesting example, because in America, the people who think one should be a
right usually think the other should be illegal and vis-a-vis

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placebo
I suggest that hate is an emotion generated by fear and for every scenario
involving hate, you'll find one or more fears it owes it's existence to. This
is why the underlying fear is what needs to be addressed to eliminate hate.

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lsc
I don't believe that the two are as connected as people think.

I mean, we're talking about hatred of "the other" here, right? I could argue
that this supposed fear is nothing more than a rationalization to try to make
the hate more palatable, more excusable...

(you may point out that it's the opposite of the rationalization I used in my
previous comment. but my point is just that people relate hate and fear, when
I think that the strongest hates have little to do with fear.)

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digi_owl
Nope, we seem to be hardwired from the monkey inheritance to fear the "other"
or "stranger".

It may be harder to notice in a more "metropolitan" society though, as the
definition of "other" depends on childhood experiences.

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lsc
> Nope, we seem to be hardwired from the monkey inheritance to fear the
> "other" or "stranger".

again, hate is different from fear. It's similar, I know. but it's not the
same emotion. I think we're wired to _hate_ the other, not to fear them.

Fear is the emotion I feel when I'm bicycling on a busy street. I'm afraid
that one of the giant trucks six inches from my left shoulder will make an
error and leave me as a thin, red, road-paste, or as a head with no functional
arms.

Fear, it has to do with danger.

Hate, well, I think I kind of understand the in group out group hate, but my
out group is a little different. I hate salespeople. I know they pose zero
physical threat to me, and they only pose a monetary threat when I talk with
them, but I still feel hatred and anger that they are in my industry, that I
need to see them every day.

If you want to analyze it, it probably has to do with growing up as a nerd
when that was something you really didn't want to be. Generally speaking, I
have a mild negative reaction to anyone who seems too smooth, too socially
skilled, anyone who seems to fit in too well.

Hate, hate is an irrational emotion you feel when you see someone you don't
like.

Now, I could write a paper about how salespeople have negatively impacted my
life, and how they are destroying everything good, rational and beautiful
about Capitalism, but it would all be a post-hoc rationalization; Hate of the
other is a fundamentally irrational emotion, and while it's usually not hard
to graft on some post-hoc weak-sounding fear, it's still post-hoc
rationalization. If I actually want to understand my feelings on the matter, I
think that they are shaped more by my idea of who "my people" are, by who I
felt was oppressing and/or threatening me during my childhood.

Now, I also think that having an irrational feeling and recognizing that the
feeling is irrational is way better than having an irrational feeling and
coming up with a rationalization for that feeling, and I think most people
disagree with me there; most people would much rather come up with a
rationalization for the feeling they are having, and that's probably where
this confusion of hate and fear comes from.

(to be clear, I recognize my feelings here are irrational, and I try pretty
hard to look past it. Any remaining effects that get past my filter, I'm sure,
are smallish. I'm just giving it as an example, because I believe it's very
similar to the way racist people feel. Hell, I even have that one salesperson
friend who is a really good guy even though he is in sales.)

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placebo
In my earlier response, note that I didn't say that hate doesn't exist or that
it isn't real. Neither did I say that it was the same as fear. I said it is an
emotion that is _derived_ from fear. Usually the connection is easy to see.
Other times it is more subtle and concealed - but I argue it's always there. I
don't believe in irrational behaviours. People behave the way they do for a
reason.

When you hate someone, it's always because they represent something that you
can't remain at peace with. Usually because of something that you are
threatened by in one way or another (either physically or psychologically). Of
course, I might be wrong, but I think that in the same way there's no smoke
without a fire, there's no hate without fear.

This is a theory though, and one counterexample is all it takes to bring it
down.

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lsc
>I don't believe in irrational behaviours. People behave the way they do for a
reason.

I'm assuming you are speaking of evolutionary psychology; personally, I think
that most evolutionary psychology explanations are post-hoc rationalizations;
it's usually difficult to actually test.

That doesn't mean that it's valueless or uninteresting, just that evolutionary
psychology should be treated more the way we treat history and less the way we
treat experimental psychology or neurology or what have you[1]. Yes, we can
come up for reasons why the crusade happened, and we can come up with
historical evidence for and against it, and that can be really interesting,
but we're still building a narrative from the bits of history that remain, and
have a bunch of obvious biases (in history, the biggest is that the surviving
written evidence is usually, well, written by someone with their own narrow
biases.)

I thought I gave a pretty good example of hate without fear (or hate where the
fear is pretty secondary to the hate) from my life, which you seemed to
ignore? I'm not going to come up with another example, because I work pretty
hard to remove my own irrational hates, and speculating about other people's
irrational hate is, well, it's much less likely to produce reasonable results.

[1] neurology and experimental psychology have their own, very different
problems, of course, but it's a different sort of thing from history.

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mwhuang2
Wonderful message. I agree 100% with Pichai's stance on diversity.

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jeffehobbs
Lovely essay.

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spenvo
Written as Google eases its stance on operating in China [1],[2].

It's not ok when fear erodes our values, but, by the same token: it's not ok
for profit/growth-potential to erode our values.

"That is why it’s so disheartening to see the intolerant discourse playing out
in the news these days — statements that our country would be a better place
without the voices, ideas and the contributions of certain groups of people,
based solely on where they come from, or their religion."

^^ China's "toleration" of Tibetan monks, the truth (just Baidu 'Tianamen
Square' (from a Chinese IP)), and basic encryption/privacy [3], etc manifests
in ways that land countless people in political prison or worse - and should
inform Pichai's stance on (not) working with that government.

Google is the flag-bearer when it comes to keeping the web (and information at
large) open and accessible: let's hope it doesn't cave for a third of the
world's population. We'll see in 2016.

[1] -
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/miguelhelft/2015/02/26/exclusive...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/miguelhelft/2015/02/26/exclusive-
sundar-pichais-plan-to-keep-google-almighty/3/) [2] -
[http://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-china-
idUSKCN0T91...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-china-
idUSKCN0T91K420151120) [3] -
[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/24/business/international/chi...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/24/business/international/china-
cuts-mobile-service-of-xinjiang-residents-evading-internet-filters.html?_r=0)

