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Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces

businessinsider.com

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Re: Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces

#581

Post by oh_sigh »

slim wrote: post #569
lalaland1125 wrote: post #403

The main thing I find odd about that person's blog post ( https://web.archive.org/web/20210601160519/https://www.kamau... ) is that it also doesn't really make any sense mechanically. The first five paragraphs are all comments on how it must be difficult for a progressive Jew to simultaneously support progressive values and Israel > If I were a Jew today, my sensibilities would be tormented. I would find it increasin…

He was angry. Feeling the injustice of what was happening in Lebanon at that time.

Original post, please don't read: Weird - I've been angry before, but it never made me racist.

Updated post after getting dang-slapped: Is being angry an acceptable justification or mitigating factor for racism? Does anyone care, or should anyone care, whether a white person may just be angry when they are racist against a black person?

Re: Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces

#582

Post by danShumway »

JPKab wrote: post #468
honkycat wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? I can think of plenty of reasons why google would want a head of diversity. - They may find diverse teams to perform better - or maybe highly qualified people prefer to work on diverse teams so it helps with recruitment - or their leadership value creating a more equitable society by giving people in under-represented groups the opportunity to work at google. If any of the above are true why should they not…

Companies are diverse as a side effect of hiring for competence. They aren't competent as a side effect of hiring with diversity as a goal. The statistically illiterate HR minions who preach the correlation between diversity and performance don't get this, because they aren't even educated enough to understand correlation/causation fallacy.

Totally disagree.

Even ignoring that diversity can be a goal in and of itself, and ignoring that a lack of diversity can be a useful metric for identifying other problems, there's also plenty of reason to believe that targeting diversity directly can yield performance improvements. If you're building a product for women, you should have some women on your team. If you're building a product for the general population, you'll get better results if your team has a variety of life experiences and viewpoints.

It's the same exact reason why it's good for a CEO to have experience in the industry that they're targeting with their products, and why managers who know at least a little bit about code works tend to do a better job of managing programmers. Perspective and life experiences absolutely help with decision-making processes and can help you avoid certain pitfalls in your product.

Diversity increases your available breadth of input into decisions and planning; it's like the human version of increasing code-coverage in your QA department.

Re: Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces

#583

Post by dragonwriter »

koheripbal wrote: post #528
dragonwriter wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Less so today than they did before BLM highlighted the way they repeatedly did so. EDIT: I mean, two people actually think the recent spate of prosecutions of white law enforcement officers for unjustified killings of blacks is because in the last few years American law enforcement officers have just become violently racist in ways they previously weren't, and not a change in accountability resulting from public atte…

Do you honestly believe that you could have murdered a black coworker without criminal justice ramifications prior to BLM?

> Do you honestly believe that you could have murdered a black coworker without criminal justice ramifications prior to BLM?

Well, no, but that’s not germane to the issue being discussed.

Your asking that question in this context embeds several assumptions, at least one of which is incorrect.

Re: Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces

#584

Post by oh_sigh »

libria wrote: post #494
duxup wrote: post #293

>will be reassigned to a STEM research role Not fired, just reassigned. I'm ok with that as a policy. Presumably he isn't ok with those old statements and can move on. At the same time the folks who need to post some general statements about a whole group of people, religion, or whatever ... As far as I can remember I've never felt a reason to talk about a whole category of people and "insatiable appetite for war and…

> Not fired, just reassigned. I don't even get how that's gonna work. Inevitably, he'll work alongside/under/oversee Jewish colleagues. That'll be an awkward Hangouts meeting. "Oh hey there's the guy that thinks I'm violent, I wonder if he'll judge my work/team interaction impartially..."

Not just Jewish, but also gay people. His other blog posts talk about how he is completely disgusted by homosexuality and wants nothing to do with it.

Re: Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces

#585

Post by amadeuspagel »

rufus_foreman wrote: post #335
literallyWTF wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is by design. Israel and spent years associating the _state_ of Israel with Judaism. That way you can’t criticize Israel without being labeled and anti-Jewish semite. Nothing he posted was offensive. Israel is an apartheid state

>> Israel is an apartheid state Definition of apartheid: "a rigid former policy of segregating and economically and politically oppressing the nonwhite population" Arabs and Jews are both white but I am guess that in your analogy you are referring to segregation of those groups, correct me if I misinterpreted your specific version of propaganda. In apartheid South Africa, whites and blacks didn't live in the same are…

> Definition of apartheid: "a rigid former policy of segregating and economically and politically oppressing the nonwhite population"

I find this a very curious definition. Why should the skin color of the oppressed population matter? Googling it returns this dictionary entry[1]:

> (in the Republic of South Africa) a rigid former policy of segregating and economically and politically oppressing the nonwhite population.

> any system or practice that separates people according to color, ethnicity, caste, etc.

So the definition you quoted only applies in the context of South Africa, in general apartheid refers to any system or practice that separates people according to color, ethnicity, caste, etc..

[1]: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/apartheid

Re: Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces

#586

Post by xdennis »

antisemtexism wrote: post #322
zpeti wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the correct answer. The amount of anti-semitism shown during this recent Hamas Israel conflict in the woke left has been very worrying. We are likely to see a big resurgence of anti-semitism in the next period. It's more and more socially acceptable on the left.

Criticism of Israel's apartheid policies isn't antisemitism. It's such nonsense how the two have been conflated in recent years.

Arabs in Israel have the same rights (and more than Arabs in Arab countries).

Where is the apartheid? Is letting the Palestinian Authority govern Gaza and the West Bank apartheid?

Re: Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces

#587

Post by genericone »

HelloNurse wrote: post #371
ericd wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the most striking things when reading about the French Revolution is seeing some of the original key agitators for Revolution being eventually denounced as insufficiently revolutionary, and some of them even being killed for being considered counter-revolutionary.

In revolutionary France the self-destruction process was fast, less than 10 years. What historical lessons can be applied to the current situation?

Extreme violence against leadership figures makes conflicts end sooner because leadership is incentivized not to be a target. True believers die in the tumult, compromisers rise up and rebalance.

Re: Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces

#588

Post by duxup »

capableweb wrote: post #580
ehsankia wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a post from 14 years he's apologized for. I'm sure everyone has plenty of beliefs from 14 years ago that no longer fits their current beliefs.

But if Google thought he was now benign, wouldn't he just remain at the post? Moving him to a different department seems to indicate that Google think he did wrong, but not that much wrong as to fire him. I'm not sure how to reconcile that.

Isn't there space in the sense that "this role isn't right for you because you did a thing" and "let's try here"?

Re: Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces

#589

Post by shadowgovt »

jaywalk wrote: post #523
jms55 wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think purposely hiring X group is a bad practice? From what I understand, it's not enough to say "we'll hire X if they're better than Y". When you don't actually have any X at the moment, your company might not be very welcoming to X, and so they won't join. So you purposely go out of your way to hire extra X, to account for the lower acceptance rate. The common response is "that's not fair to Y, you should be…

Beyond your handwaving absurdity, is there any empirical evidence at all that lowering the quality bar for X ends up actually raising quality in the end? Because it sounds like a bunch of unicorn fairytale nonsense to me.

This may be of value.

https://blog.capterra.com/7-studies-that-prove-the-value-of-...

Re: Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces

#590

Post by throwaway894345 »

acituan wrote: post #502
germinalphrase wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe the acknowledgement of race or racial difference to be intrinsically bigoted?

> acknowledgement of race or racial difference Acknowledgment of race is inherently an essentialist position; that there is an essence to being a certain race that sets it apart from other races. Doesn't matter if that position casts the purported essence in a positive or negative light, it is bigotry in one way or the other.

You can acknowledge that there is a social construct called "race" that some people believe is useful for predicting things about individuals without subscribing to those beliefs yourself.

E.g., some people argue that white people are unfit for certain roles because they haven't endured the sufferings of people of color which is clearly expressing a belief that (1) race is real and (2) race is useful for predicting things about individual white and non-white people. This is racism, race essentialism, etc. But I can also acknowledge that those people are more likely to treat white people (i.e., the people that they put into their "white" category) differently than nonwhite (i.e., the people they put into their "people of color" category). This is not racism or race essentialism or etc.

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