Google’s first all-hands after 2016 election [video] • Hacker News Board

Re: Google’s first all-hands after 2016 election [video]

#141

Post by monochromatic » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 4:05 AM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #64

rsj_hn wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not surprising at all. Every company has a preferred candidate in pretty much every election, at least the CEO and top leadership certainly does. What is surprising is turning an all hands into a kind of mass grieving funeration for all of their 90K employees, replete with publicly weeping executives and the entire executive leadership being vocally outraged. Turning an all hands into a political event like…

To add some context: remember that Google has employees who felt personally threatened by election results (immigrants and transgender employees). Nobody knew what Trump would do. The worst fears turned out to be overblown, but it was hard to make the case for not worrying at the time. Telling people they had nothing to worry about would have simply been offensive. There are few election results that employees would…

[flagged]

Re: Google’s first all-hands after 2016 election [video]

#142

Post by dmitrygr » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 4:06 AM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #123

dmitrygr wrote: post #93

I have no comment on the content of this, since I don't want to get fired for saying anything remotely close to what I think. I am kind of curious how this video was obtained however.

After the Damore thing, Breitbart posted several anonymous interviews with conservative Googlers and Xooglers, so it seems like they've cultivated a group of contacts there. One of them specifically even discussed this exact TGIF and what it was like. I suspect one of those contacts leaked this to them as well.

Officially, the penalty for leaking is termination. I cannot imagine anyone who'd risk that.

Re: Google’s first all-hands after 2016 election [video]

#143

Post by jayd16 » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 4:06 AM UTC

nodesocket wrote: post #127

nkurz wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that fair to employees at Google that are conservative? What obligation do you think that a company should have to respect the political leanings of its employees? While it might be in a company's self-interest not to alienate talented employees with minority political beliefs, do you believe it should be forbidden for the company to "choose sides"?

Just as liberals like to promote social justice, I think it's not fair to conservatives that are harassed, outed, and unfairly represented. Since when is it ok for a company to hold a political rally?

Not that I agree but certainly since the Citizens United ruling.

Re: Google’s first all-hands after 2016 election [video]

#144

Post by tinkerteller » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 4:06 AM UTC

tcbawo wrote: post #6

Is it really surprising that a multinational company would have a preferred candidate? Although, I'm sure they lobbied extensively for all major candidates. It is interesting that both major parties seem to want to have their cake and eat it too when it comes to free speech, "common carrier", and antitrust issues.

It is surprising that those people put in charge to run business by stockholders are picking sides in front of employees who they have subordinate powers over them. This is big no no. Imagine being an employee who believes in conservatism and being forced in to group think, suppress your personal political speech and view. There is no difference in boss pitching himself as politically left vs boss pitching Christianity vs boss pitching male superiority over females. Business should never take sides in politics, race, gender or religion to make sure they are fair to all employees. Leaders needs to keep their view in these subject personal just as they keep their religious identity personal. Not doing this allows businesses to essentially hijack democracy by enforcing their political will on employees. Businesses should not be wielding their leverage of paychecks in to bending anybody’s political will and opinions.

Re: Google’s first all-hands after 2016 election [video]

#145

Post by beachy » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 4:07 AM UTC

gizmo686 wrote: post #57

throwaway_trust wrote: post #53

To be honest so much corporate speak. Only Sergei's voice seems to be authentic. Everyone else trying to be extremely careful with their language of comments even though it's not a public event. And "misinformation" and "fake news" will be combatted by AI? Seriously? That is like saying, "I have no clue but I will use some buzzwords". Pichai/GOOG knows AI better than everyone. I think they still don't have plan for c…

I think they are being genuine when they say their plan is to combat fake news with AI; their business is built around AI. It is one of their core competencies. I think they are going to fail, and quietly increase the human involvement once they realize that their AI isn't good enough. Then they will slowly scale back the humans as their AI improves, until the next controversy when they realize that they still need h…

That's a tragic view.

How did we get to the state where the "truth" is such an elusive concept?

Is it so hard to determine whether basic statements are true or false? And to build larger, higher constructs out of those building blocks? That's basically what science has been and is.

It seems comically easy to identify fake news in most cases. Was this inauguration crowd larger than that one? That's a simple question to answer.

Re: Google’s first all-hands after 2016 election [video]

#146

Post by aikinai » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 4:09 AM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #64

rsj_hn wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not surprising at all. Every company has a preferred candidate in pretty much every election, at least the CEO and top leadership certainly does. What is surprising is turning an all hands into a kind of mass grieving funeration for all of their 90K employees, replete with publicly weeping executives and the entire executive leadership being vocally outraged. Turning an all hands into a political event like…

To add some context: remember that Google has employees who felt personally threatened by election results (immigrants and transgender employees). Nobody knew what Trump would do. The worst fears turned out to be overblown, but it was hard to make the case for not worrying at the time. Telling people they had nothing to worry about would have simply been offensive. There are few election results that employees would…

Seems everyone's down-voting you, but considering the huge number of immigrants and international employees at Google, it'd be crazy to expect a Trump win to be treated neutrally when the foundation of his platform was antagonism of immigrants and other countries.

And it wasn't completely overblown, there were many Googlers trapped inside or outside the US immediately after Trump took power; one, for example, had no way for her parents to meet her newborn baby as they were all banned from travel. [0]

[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/one-google-employee-on-trump-or...

Re: Google’s first all-hands after 2016 election [video]

#147

Post by unsatchmo » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 4:11 AM UTC

wyldfire wrote: post #139

gizmo686 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is literally what Google was founded on. Their core technology behind their initial success was pagerank, an algorithm whose sole purpose is to manipulate what people see. They have stayed dominant through a combination of market forces, and keeping their algorithm near (or, IMO at) the top of the market for generalized search [0], and have leveraged this competency in other markets (video, ads, etc). Beyond jus…

> That is literally what Google was founded on. Hooray! Pre-Google search sucked. It was really bad. > The alternative is to go back to human gatekeepers. I don't know what this means. Humans have never audited/controlled what gets indexed by crawlers. It's always automata unleashed on the data. It would be terribly unproductive to prune or tune the index with humans. However, using humans as a part of a feedback loo…

The post you’re replying to is talking about pre-internet means of distributing information like magazines / newspapers and television which are 100% controlled by human decision makers.

Re: Google’s first all-hands after 2016 election [video]

#148

Post by wyldfire » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 4:12 AM UTC

Digory wrote: post #138

dragonwriter wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only disturbing if you reject the premise of the question in advance—that the concern is addressing inaccurate factual information. Connecting users with good information is literally the function on which Google wad founded, and applying AI to that mission has been a Google vision from very early on. It would be weird and worrying if Google selectively choose not to do that with information that might have poli…

Right, but google’s premise is/was that it is feeding you the unfiltered view of the crowd. If not the world, at least of American computer users. That’s some signal about invariably qualitative judgments on facts. “Hillary Emails” should give you results based on global pagerank, whether or not you agree with the subjective assessments about the importance of Hillary’s emails. Silently substituting the pagerank of N…

> Right, but google’s premise is/was that it is feeding you the unfiltered view of the crowd.

Actually, I don't think that's the case. Google has for a very long time considered a web site's reputation as part of a page's weight among search results.

IMO Google wasn't a primary transmission medium for fake news -- not like Facebook et al. So if you got to a fake news article from Google.com, you probably went looking for it.

To your point -- if you go searching for unique terms from the fake news articles, it seems reasonable/appropriate to show you the fake news websites from whence they came. It would be odd for Google to omit those sources that are likely the best/primary source of those terms. It might be reasonable to highlight the search results as coming from a source known to publish falsehoods. Like the "This site may harm your computer" warnings, it could be a clear flag for people to be skeptical. Unfortunately, it seems like they would be inheriting a morass of subjective or difficult to maintain criteria.

Re: Google’s first all-hands after 2016 election [video]

#149

Post by wyldfire » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 4:13 AM UTC

unsatchmo wrote: post #147

wyldfire wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is literally what Google was founded on. Hooray! Pre-Google search sucked. It was really bad. > The alternative is to go back to human gatekeepers. I don't know what this means. Humans have never audited/controlled what gets indexed by crawlers. It's always automata unleashed on the data. It would be terribly unproductive to prune or tune the index with humans. However, using humans as a part of a feedback loo…

The post you’re replying to is talking about pre-internet means of distributing information like magazines / newspapers and television which are 100% controlled by human decision makers.

I see. Yes, that's clear to me now.

Re: Google’s first all-hands after 2016 election [video]

#150

Post by ocdtrekkie » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 4:16 AM UTC

dmitrygr wrote: post #142

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After the Damore thing, Breitbart posted several anonymous interviews with conservative Googlers and Xooglers, so it seems like they've cultivated a group of contacts there. One of them specifically even discussed this exact TGIF and what it was like. I suspect one of those contacts leaked this to them as well.

Officially, the penalty for leaking is termination. I cannot imagine anyone who'd risk that.

There's been a large number of leakers at Google over the last year, so there's definitely people who find Google's misdeeds worth publicizing, even at personal risk. And that's on both sides of the political spectrum.

As I mentioned, several conservative Googlers have already talked about internal matters with Breitbart. Damore's memo was an internal-only document that was leaked on the liberal side. There were leaks about Project Maven and the censorship program Google's developing for China.

Though I would have to wonder how much easier this leak would be to catch. Google would "merely" need to identify who has somewhat-recently accessed this video file, and as an older recording, the number of viewers has certainly tapered off significantly.

To be honest, I'm seriously curious, are you saying your employment with Google is more important than what you think is right or good? While personally, I wouldn't leak from an employer I felt was doing bad things, I also wouldn't need to be terminated: I'd walk out the door.