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Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His Story

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41–50 of 211 posts

Re: Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His Story

#41

I wonder how much I would lose if my Gmail was deleted... Everything I have is behind that address. What would be my best bet to move to if I'm too much of a bad to host my own email?

I've had good experience with Riseup and VFEmail. Even cock.li ;) I've always used separate accounts for personal, work, etc. For stuff that really matters, it's best to own your own domain. That way, if you lose an account, you can just reroute mail to the new account.

Re: Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His Story

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This type of behavior + AMP has pushed me off google completely. I'm determined to cut them out of my technical life entirely, I've even switched myself and everyone I know/support off their DNS. I can't support their shady practices anymore.

Sorry for being that guy, but what is AMP in this context?

> The Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP) is an online publishing format, created by Google

Re: Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His Story

#43
post #36
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because one of them fits in a narrative of Google being politically censorious and the other doesn't. I don't know exactly what caused it but Peterson definitely tests boundaries a lot more than this guy. It's no insult, I'm sure he would say the same of himself.

Even if this was an accident of some algorithm, that no person at Google had any idea this would happen, it is still problematic. Algorithms and data sets can be biased just as much as people are. It's a wake-up call for all of us who entrust too much of our digital lives with Google. It's putting all our eggs in one basket.

I entirely agree, the only thing I use Google for is search and I stay logged out. Not perfect but their search is still the best for me.

Re: Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His Story

#44

It seems that his ban may be political in nature according to his tweet. https://twitter.com/salilstatistics/status/89891222812829696... Salil Mehta: "Shameful: if you show probability work like Hillary having lower election odds, then this is new definition of hate speech. @JulianAssange"

Clearly, he claims that it is tied to 2016 political campaign position. No substantive evidence for that is presented, though.

Re: Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His Story

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This type of behavior + AMP has pushed me off google completely. I'm determined to cut them out of my technical life entirely, I've even switched myself and everyone I know/support off their DNS. I can't support their shady practices anymore.

Sorry for being that guy, but what is AMP in this context?

https://www.ampproject.org/

(first hit on DDG.gg for '"amp" google')

Re: Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His Story

#46
post #7
post #2

No idea what all was on his blog and other google accounts, but according to the article they were used for his work at the university. Also some credible sites like the NYT linking into the disabled blog: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/19/business/the-stock-market... Google may have had some good reasons or it may have just been an example of ML discriminating against a name like Salil. Either way, it's very distur…

Jordan Peterson, the "Canadian psychology professor" you mention, agree or disagree with him, clearly has political motivations and is explicitly politically active. He's an entirely different case from this.

Yeah, Peterson is clearly politically active. For those who don't know, he rose from complete obscurity because he opposed an anti-transgender-discrimination bill in Canada. His argument was that it was a serious threat to free speech and would force him to use pronouns he didn't want to use, despite nothing like that being on the bill and despite numerous respectable legal scholars informing him that you could never get in trouble for not using a person's preferred pronoun because of this bill.

But because of his "brave" fight against the bill, he's become a hero to alt-right and other people worried about transgendered people forcing everyone to use pronouns, and this is a lucrative market to attract. So lucrative that he now gets over $40,000 a month through Patreon alone for his classes, where he praises Carl jung, criticises post-modernism, the supposed infiltration of Marxism into culture and ideas like White Privilege and Cultural Appropriation

He's also a regularly featured on r/badphilosophy(https://www.reddit.com/r/badphilosophy/comments/64rg9i/jorda...) while there is a good discussion about him on r/AskPhilosophy(https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/673zy2/dr_jo...).

Re: Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His Story

#47
post #2

No idea what all was on his blog and other google accounts, but according to the article they were used for his work at the university. Also some credible sites like the NYT linking into the disabled blog: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/19/business/the-stock-market... Google may have had some good reasons or it may have just been an example of ML discriminating against a name like Salil. Either way, it's very distur…

I strongly recommend everyone to look into hosting your own mail server. DigitalOcean will rent you a Linux VM for $5 a month or something crazy like that. You can figure out how to install postfix/dovecot/squirrelmail it in a few hours.

If nothing else, it keeps critical functionality decentralized, and you learn something and $5 a month for career insurance is pretty damn cheap.

Re: Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His Story

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This type of behavior + AMP has pushed me off google completely. I'm determined to cut them out of my technical life entirely, I've even switched myself and everyone I know/support off their DNS. I can't support their shady practices anymore.

Sorry for being that guy, but what is AMP in this context?

I'm not the parent but I'm sure they mean Accelerated Mobile Pages[0]

[0] https://www.ampproject.org/

Re: Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His Story

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This type of behavior + AMP has pushed me off google completely. I'm determined to cut them out of my technical life entirely, I've even switched myself and everyone I know/support off their DNS. I can't support their shady practices anymore.

Sorry for being that guy, but what is AMP in this context?

Accelerated Mobile Pages It's a weird accelerator thing for mobile. I've never quite figured out its use case except to hoover up more metrics for Google.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages

Re: Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His Story

#50

I wonder how much I would lose if my Gmail was deleted... Everything I have is behind that address. What would be my best bet to move to if I'm too much of a bad to host my own email?

One idea:

Use Google email but from a custom domain -- it doesn't back-up your email, but you can update the DNS to a new provider if you get locked out of Google's services. This means you can still recover accounts, use the same email, etc after a brief disruption, instead of totally hosed.

It's not a total solution, but it does mitigate some problems, which makes Google's policies easier to swallow. (If you do separate email back-ups, then you'll only lose the emails since the last back-up.)

I'm in the process of switching to that set-up (partly because of these antics; partly because of other concerns).

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