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I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left

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Re: I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left

#81

Post by Kalium »

untog wrote: post #64
Aperocky wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ethical sense Define that. For regular people in China, does the addition of Google with some censorship make their life better? Does it improve information flow over existing domestic search engines? I think the answer is obvious. People subscribe to overly simplistic thinking - if something is not perfect, it must be the worst. I see a lot of people promoting sanctions on a country because of government. Who gets…

> For regular people in China, does the addition of Google with some censorship make their life better? Does it improve information flow over existing domestic search engines? I think the answer is obvious. What does that have to do with ethics, really? Your argument seems to be that utility should outweigh ethical concerns. > I see a lot of people promoting sanctions on a country because of government. Who gets hurt…

> What does that have to do with ethics, really? Your argument seems to be that utility should outweigh ethical concerns.

Some would argue that denying people the ability to access information easily is unethically harming them. It preserves your own privilege instead of extending it to the less well off.

There are real ethical questions here that can be weighed. It's perhaps not quite as simple for some people as money on one side and every single possible ethical factor on the other.

Re: I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left

#82

Post by ff317 »

Aperocky wrote: post #43
virtuous_signal wrote: post #10

I don't have firsthand knowledge, but my conjecture is that the old Google probably had a significant % of employees who held the belief "We shouldn't censor for China, even if that makes us lose money". But over a period of years, whatever they selected for in hiring led to enough people joining, who don't give a damn about human rights in China, so the censorship went ahead. The only thing that stopped it was bad p…

> ethical sense Define that. For regular people in China, does the addition of Google with some censorship make their life better? Does it improve information flow over existing domestic search engines? I think the answer is obvious. People subscribe to overly simplistic thinking - if something is not perfect, it must be the worst. I see a lot of people promoting sanctions on a country because of government. Who gets…

While it's obvious that some information is numerically greater than no information, it's not obvious that a censored flow of information makes anyone's life better than the alternatives.

When the information flow is all-or-nothing (either you get the full uncensored fire-hose, or you get nothing and whole sites/services are blocked due to censorship), the citizen at least knows they're being censored, and then the ball is in the citizens' court as to whether they want to advocate for a reform of that censorship.

When censorship is selective (e.g. "You can read all of Wikipedia, except for whichever articles the government doesn't currently like this week/year"), citizens are mostly going to be unaware of what they're missing and how selective their worldview might actually be. This is very insidious, stealthy, and difficult for a citizenry to be aware of and politically revolt against, especially given there will commonly be no transparency or oversight as to the banned-topic list at any given moment.

Personally, one of my stronger meta-values is that any state which stands on the side of forcibly hiding information from its citizens is on the wrong side of history and ethics. If you can only defend your government to its citizens by lying to them, there's clearly something wrong with what you're doing.

Re: I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left

#83

Post by travmatt »

fghtr wrote: post #27
travmatt wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also called social benefit corporations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation If the company doesn’t have their values and goals listed in the articles of incorporation, then they have no legal obligation to follow them.

>> Also called social benefit corporations Wikipedia says it's not the same thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_purpose_corporation >> If the company doesn’t have their values and goals listed in the articles of incorporation, then they have no legal obligation to follow them. But Purism afaik does have them listed.

I didn’t know there was a difference, thanks. And I’m not disputing purism’s (I looked at their website), just noting that if a corporation doesn’t list their values in their articles of incorporation, then they aren’t really anything more than lip service when push comes to shove.

Re: I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left

#84

Post by unlinked_dll »

Aperocky wrote: post #43
virtuous_signal wrote: post #10

I don't have firsthand knowledge, but my conjecture is that the old Google probably had a significant % of employees who held the belief "We shouldn't censor for China, even if that makes us lose money". But over a period of years, whatever they selected for in hiring led to enough people joining, who don't give a damn about human rights in China, so the censorship went ahead. The only thing that stopped it was bad p…

> ethical sense Define that. For regular people in China, does the addition of Google with some censorship make their life better? Does it improve information flow over existing domestic search engines? I think the answer is obvious. People subscribe to overly simplistic thinking - if something is not perfect, it must be the worst. I see a lot of people promoting sanctions on a country because of government. Who gets…

I think you're confusing value prop with an ethical question.

Re: I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left

#85

Post by turdnagel »

bduerst wrote: post #71
Aperocky wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ethical sense Define that. For regular people in China, does the addition of Google with some censorship make their life better? Does it improve information flow over existing domestic search engines? I think the answer is obvious. People subscribe to overly simplistic thinking - if something is not perfect, it must be the worst. I see a lot of people promoting sanctions on a country because of government. Who gets…

Censorship is a red herring. It's the Chinese firewall censoring the sites, so even if Google did link the site in the search results, users wouldn't be able to click and access it. The bigger issue with project dragonfly was sharing user search queries with the government. This seems terrifying but pretty much every other tech company (Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, etc.) existing in China does this with their Chinese us…

It's true that users wouldn't be able to go to censored sites. But then they'd know that the highest-ranking site for their search was censored and might ask why, which seems like a net positive.

Re: I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left

#86

Post by [deleted] »

bauerd wrote: post #77
untog wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For regular people in China, does the addition of Google with some censorship make their life better? Does it improve information flow over existing domestic search engines? I think the answer is obvious. What does that have to do with ethics, really? Your argument seems to be that utility should outweigh ethical concerns. > I see a lot of people promoting sanctions on a country because of government. Who gets hurt…

>What does that have to do with ethics, really? The argument seems to be that utility should outweigh ethical concerns. It's called utilitarianism and here it demonstrates nicely that ethics comes in various flavors

[deleted]

Re: I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left

#88

Post by bduerst »

patrickk wrote: post #51
hpoe wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rest of them have been open about the fact they are ruthless profit making centers focused only on money and you shut up and stay in line or else you're toast. Google's model was "don't be evil" and for years went on the image that they are fighting for the public good and that they were an example of the ability to be principle centered, do good for the world, and get stinking rich at the same time. Now that the…

Apple at least somewhat tries to put up an image of caring about environmental issues[1] and privacy (e.g. in the aftermath of San Bernardino attack). (Of course they still have Chinese sweatshops, and who knows how much raw materials comes from child labour in the Congo so of course it's mostly a smokescreen.) [1] https://www.cultofmac.com/268413/tim-cook-tells-profit-obses...

Apple makes Chinese iCloud user data at rest available to the Chinese government. They've come a long ways from fighting the FBI back in 2015.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/03/apple-privacy...

Re: I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left

#89

Post by mrec »

untog wrote: post #64
Aperocky wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ethical sense Define that. For regular people in China, does the addition of Google with some censorship make their life better? Does it improve information flow over existing domestic search engines? I think the answer is obvious. People subscribe to overly simplistic thinking - if something is not perfect, it must be the worst. I see a lot of people promoting sanctions on a country because of government. Who gets…

> For regular people in China, does the addition of Google with some censorship make their life better? Does it improve information flow over existing domestic search engines? I think the answer is obvious. What does that have to do with ethics, really? Your argument seems to be that utility should outweigh ethical concerns. > I see a lot of people promoting sanctions on a country because of government. Who gets hurt…

> Your argument seems to be that utility should outweigh ethical concerns

Not GP, but that seems a bit unfair. Utilitarianism in various flavours is a popular ethical framework; for those who subscribe to it, ethical concerns are properly calibrated and measured in utility.

I suspect your argument (especially the SA comparison) would be better expressed as a tension between long- and short-term utility, but don't want to put words into your mouth.

Re: I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left

#90

Post by patchorang »

bduerst wrote: post #71
Aperocky wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ethical sense Define that. For regular people in China, does the addition of Google with some censorship make their life better? Does it improve information flow over existing domestic search engines? I think the answer is obvious. People subscribe to overly simplistic thinking - if something is not perfect, it must be the worst. I see a lot of people promoting sanctions on a country because of government. Who gets…

Censorship is a red herring. It's the Chinese firewall censoring the sites, so even if Google did link the site in the search results, users wouldn't be able to click and access it. The bigger issue with project dragonfly was sharing user search queries with the government. This seems terrifying but pretty much every other tech company (Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, etc.) existing in China does this with their Chinese us…

Just a bit of a side note, but I was in China last fall, and using Bing there were many search results that you could not click through. However the few sentence description below the search link often had information that would be censored elsewhere.
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