
Google Doesn't Want What's Best for Us - Eduardo3rd
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/08/12/opinion/sunday/google-tech-diversity-memo.html
======
bhauer
> _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.

~~~
humanrebar
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.

~~~
kristianc
> 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.

People encouraging a 'charitable' reading of the memo have argued that the
memo says that Google shouldn't aim for 50/50 diversity as a goal (or that
increasing gender representation as an end in itself is likely to lead to sub-
optimal outcomes), and that women and men are biologically different in their
suitability for different roles. I'm really trying quite hard to think where
the misrepresentation comes in, or indeed, if it's not about that, what the
memo is actually about.

~~~
TheAdamAndChe
> ...and that women and men are biologically different in their suitability
> for different roles.

_Here_ is where they misrepresent what he said. He didn't suggest that men and
women differ in their suitability for different roles, but rather that men and
women _generally_ differ in their suitability for different roles. There will
always be deviations from the norm, and given the fact that there are known
physical and psychological differences between the sexes[1], I don't see why
those differences wouldn't lead to differences in career choice overall.
However, there are plenty of women suited to be engineers and plenty of men
not.

Edit: To those downvoting me, can you please explain why? If I am
misinterpreting something, I would love to know the flaw in it.

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

~~~
Simon_says
My reading of the memo was that Damore's hypothesis was mostly centered around
differences in population averages of interest, and not necessarily innate
ability. Once you've had several decades of heightened interest in a subject,
it's understandable that differences in effective ability would result just
from that.

~~~
humanrebar
That's my reading as well. He tries to distinguish between "women can't be
technologists" and "women can be technologists if they want to, but they don't
generally want to".

I'm honestly not sure how one could in good faith make that case given the
current climate. A couple weeks ago, I would have bet on his memo being
generally derided but not anathematized.

~~~
unityByFreedom
Eh? He mentions abilities in the memo here:

> "I'm simply stating that the distribution of preferences and _abilities_ of
> men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these
> differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in
> tech and leadership."

He also mentions this in one of his interviews [1].

[1]
[https://youtu.be/TN1vEfqHGro?t=30m13s](https://youtu.be/TN1vEfqHGro?t=30m13s)

------
wffurr
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
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
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
> 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.)

~~~
Analemma_
They're not anywhere near as common as Silicon Valley's detractors claim, but
they do exist. They tend to cluster, which is maybe why you haven't seen
(m)any. I would cite the early Rails community (from maybe 2005 to 2009, but
don't pin me down on exact dates) as one that had a very high concentration of
"brogrammers", which lead to all kinds of nastiness; most infamously, the
deliberate sexism at their conferences.

Fortunately, once Rails grew up and put on a suit and tie, they kicked out
most of the toxic people and the situation got a lot better... and Rails even
became a better framework at the same time to boot. Just one example of the
axiom that "rock stars" and "brogrammers" don't actually produce better code.

------
QAPereo
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.

------
zygga
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
Google fired him, and his supporters seem to have responded...poorly.

* [https://www.facebook.com/myiannopoulos/photos/a.599546946849...](https://www.facebook.com/myiannopoulos/photos/a.599546946849871.1073741829.423006854503882/987587484712480/?type=3&theater)

* [https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/10/16128518/google-town-hall...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/10/16128518/google-town-hall-meeting-canceled-online-harassment)

Sounds pretty toxic to me.

Most professors?

* [https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-bio...](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)

~~~
humanrebar
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
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.

~~~
humanrebar
> Someone inside Google took screenshots of the internal G+ discussion of his
> document...

Well, that establishes a culture of leaking and doxxing, especially when you
count that it happened to Damore.

> ...to groups that have a history of lighting off internet shitstorms.

Well, this whole thing was a kerfuffle until Damore was fired. That's when the
shitstorm started.

This is why people need to be careful about taking the "nuclear option" in an
argument. People tend to retaliate in kind.

To be clear, I detest all of the above in an intelligent discussion. But I
think the people piling on Damore for cultural issues aren't seeing the forest
for the trees.

------
russdpale
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
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
> 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.

------
wbillingsley
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...

------
humanrebar
> 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?

------
cflewis
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? :)

~~~
throwaway7547
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.)

~~~
cabalamat
> I am not sure I want to return it.

If you are white or Asian male, I wouldn't bother. Google don't like your
sort. Sad but true.

~~~
tpallarino
That is absolutely untrue.

~~~
cabalamat
It is not obvious to me that some sections of the community will not face
discrimination, both in terms of recruitment and also in promotion once they
have joined.

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

~~~
zygga
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)

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

------
khazhoux
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
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
Indeed, this plays into their narrative of hippy-dippy Berkeley liberal
feminist handouts entitlement cosmopolitan California.

~~~
mcguire
"Fired Google engineer compares high-paid tech job to Soviet forced labor":
[https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/10/16127968/fired-google-
eng...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/10/16127968/fired-google-engineer-
compares-high-paid-tech-job-to-soviet-forced-labor)

------
ilaksh
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
> ...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
My own proposal is basically to replace those companies with versioned,
modular software or protocols/smart contracts. See my history for the comment
I just made prior to this one about Bannon and competition.

~~~
humanrebar
On some level that sounds good, but how does that protocol come into
existence?

Does the government write the protocols? Wouldn't they just design what
relevant (i.e., Google, Amazon, et. al.) lobbyists tell them to? Who penalizes
companies to aren't compliant with the protocols?

What about the data? Data management isn't free and you can have a pristine
protocols that are worthless due to garbage data.

~~~
ilaksh
The existing government absolutely does not write the protocols. Rather the
ecosystem around the protocols (or more accurately maybe something like
versioned semantic modules) becomes a new paradigm that supercedes traditional
government.

How or whether that type of thing comes into existence is obviously extremely
challenging and isn't determined.

I believe that useful governments will support some structures that enable
these types of systems, but must not be allowed to directly control them -- we
have too much evidence of how poorly that works out. That will be the
remaining utility that allows the existence of traditional government, until
these new systems are fully deployed.

Yes, data management isn't free, and there are severe challenges related to
that. But we have technologies that give us hope that we can find better ways
to do data management than just letting Facebook or Google track everything we
click on and store them in their own data centers.

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

