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Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His Story

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

#151

Post by jack9 »

otalp wrote: post #46
jolux wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnIAAkSNtqo

As mentioned, his employer's lawyers did think so. The Adversarial Model (legal system) doesn't consider that some parties come to other conclusions. It would be ill-advised to listen to "experts" that are not part of a case, taking the advice of pundits* or other unconnected parties is not compelling evidence of legal finding.

*It's primarily in the US, that the mass media promotes education pundits as corroboration in legal matters.

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

#152

Post by psyc »

alexdowad wrote: post #116

Why doesn't he say which of Google's terms of service he supposedly violated? He just spends the whole 3 pages saying that he hasn't done anything wrong, without even once saying what he is alleged to have done wrong. Seems a bit dishonest.

They don't tell you. My whole YouTube channel was removed 2 years ago, and the only auto-mail I got said "TOS violation". I have no idea what the problem was. When I followed the instructions on how to reinstate, I got a page saying the channel wasn't recoverable. There was no indication of how to get any other resolution.

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

#153

Post by jrs95 »

gragas wrote: post #60
otalp wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>the supposed infiltration of Marxism into culture and ideas like White Privilege and Cultural Appropriation You can't argue that "white privilege" hasn't infiltrated culture. An alarming amount of people have openly disparaged white people when talking to me, even though I am white myself. If you're not white, it's almost socially acceptable to say "fuck white people" in cities like SF, NYC, and Chicago. I think it'…

Even in Columbus, OH this is acceptable and common. People would say this relatively frequently at a startup I worked at (where nearly everyone was white, except a couple Asians), in addition to making really lame “white people” jokes. The only person to ever call anyone out for this was our black chef. Probably because his views on race were based in realty instead of some dystopian political fashion. Well, that, and I think anyone else saying anything about it would have been immediately accused of being racist and probably given some sort of formal warning.

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

#154

Post by nbanks »

Clubber wrote: post #47
xiaoma wrote: 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.

I've been using my own kimsufi server for years, and live in Montréal so the latency to their Canadian location is superb. The low end servers are often sold out, but become available every couple months. I went for one with a spinning disk for the extra storage. The server's dedicated so performance is much better than a storage VPS where people share a spinning drive.

However I still end up forwarding everything to to my gmail account and using it as en e-mail client because it makes e-mailing searching and filtering so fast and easy. Outgoing mail sent through my own SMTP server and typically gets through, so I could set up dovecot later.

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

#155

Post by glitcher »

nxc18 wrote: post #84
b4ux1t3 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, they have _millions_ of users that have never had a problem. It's far more likely this is a mistake than any kind of malicious act, just given the sheer number of customers they have.

We've had multiple people prominent enough to make the front page of hacker news in the last few months. Maybe we should get some statistics on how many people are prominent enough and controversial enough to land on the front page of hn, then work back to how many of their millions of customers are actually affected. Its probably a lot more than just 1.

Well there is now at least one highly motivated statistician out there to analyze the data you suggest. But how do you get the data to him?

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

#156

Post by Clubber »

throwaway613834 wrote: post #136
Clubber wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't had any issues but I've been hosting my own mail server since 2000 or so. I've been blacklisted by spamhaus? before years ago but I submitted a request to remove and they did. Google has a page to help with this though. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126?hl=en&vid=0-107... Also, I personally host at home and have Comcast business internet. I have a 5 IP block of which one is a mail server. I have…

Your IP is leaked to everyone you email (and if you receive mail, to everyone who emails you), which is a privacy hole since it ties your IP directly to your identity. I assume you don't mind, or did you not realize this?

The whois shows my company name. I mean since I run a company, I don't really want that private. Also, those IPs are accessible through a simple DNS lookup of the sender domain, so I'm not really losing any security.

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

#157

Post by columbia_prof »

Columbia prof here.

He is not a professor at Columbia nor even an adjunct professor. He is a lecturer in the school of professional studies:

https://search.sites.columbia.edu/people/sm786

The school of professional studies at Columbia offers "certificate" and "professional degrees" with minimal academic standards. Within the university, it is considered an embarrassment.

Advertising this credential is very misleading. This is a far cry from being, for example, a professor in the world class statistics department at Columbia.

I don't know the gentleman nor the facts of this case, but I'd be very suspicious of someone advertising a Columbia SPS affiliation.

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

#158

Post by fweespeech »

theWatcher37 wrote: post #8
xiaoma wrote: 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…

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.

I'll admit I still use them but only on my own domain as a non-free account. Its just not safe w/o any kind of support channel.

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

#159

Post by nbanks »

weberc2 wrote: post #140
Clubber wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How good are open source spam filtering tools? Besides not having to maintain my own infrastructure, spam filtering is probably the biggest value add for Gmail, or so it was when I got my account 10 years ago.

They used to be remarkably good. Shortly after PG wrote his A Plan for Spam essay, I set up a customized system that used my own spam e-mails as training data. I can't remember the tool I used, but it involved a script on top of maildir which is sure to be far more kludgy than what you could do now. The technique is powerful enough I suspect it still works remarkably well today because it's tuned to your own corpus of spam messages. Nonetheless, for the last decade I've been too lazy to do this and just forward everything to gmail, though gmail does give me a few false positives every couple years.

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

#160

Post by Clubber »

brianwawok wrote: post #118
CaptSpify wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to add another voice to this: I host my own email myself out of my house, and I've never really had any problems with it either. AFAIK I've never been marked as spam, even after I've sent a couple of mis-configured emails that should have probably been marked as spam.

Have you ever done mailing list work? Like run a mailing list with a few tens of thousand users?

I host some people's notification emails, so it will send a few hundred a month. I highly recommend putting a single email recipient per email.
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