Virtue signal noted
Why I'm Forced to Say Farewell: Google Management Has Lost Its Moral Compass
151–160 of 292 posts
Re: Why I'm Forced to Say Farewell: Google Management Has Lost Its Moral Compass
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
In isolation, it's a very naive, oblivious, and incurious stance. Taken alongside the rest of the content, it's a rejection of the idea that there is systemic bias, and much of his memo is dedicated to ways in which that bias can be propagated and solidified. At best, the memo paints Damore as someone who is radically uninformed and parroting old and invalid talking points that others have given to him. At worst it i…
So merely contesting the notion that systemic bias is the main driver of the gender disparity in tech is grounds for instant termination? Well, that's rather troubling given that the empirical evidence on the bias in tech company hiring doesn't support the narrative of anti-female bias: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3672484 Hn discussion of the paper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2506964…
Not at all. A good faith discussion in the right forum is fine.
That's not what the memo was. It ignored the evidence we have that there is systemic bias, it relied on tired and debunked tropes, and has explicit goals about preserving and elevating the privilege that perpetuates that systemic bias. That done in front of a large company filled with people personally affected by it is just a terrible idea. I'm open to discussion about this, but from the right people (those affected, with the experience) in the right context. James Damore was neither.
But honestly, if you read the memo and think it sounds reasonable, I'm not going to be able to change your mind. These biases are deeply rooted and take decades of introspection to overcome. I've been on that journey for probably 15 years and I've still got blind spots.
Re: Why I'm Forced to Say Farewell: Google Management Has Lost Its Moral Compass
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
No he was kind of unhinged. That wasn't the first weird thing he did. Should've been fired.
What other things did he do to make you believe he was “kind of unhinged”? I know about the memo thing, but I think it was covered in an inflammatory way because the press loves to play up a controversy. What else besides the memo incident did he do that merits his firing?
Damore had been aggressively arguing about this stuff internally for some time in advance of his doc. The doc was consistent with a pattern of "makes a huge stink of things in every training and refuses to back down."
Re: Why I'm Forced to Say Farewell: Google Management Has Lost Its Moral Compass
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of them I refer to is "race essentialism" [1] which led to the long-discredited pseudoscience known as scientific racism[2], and its political associated program of eugenics, and the other is "gender essentialism"[3] which has also been rejected by mainstream scholars across fields from biology to medicine to sociology to gender studies, and which acts in culture as a similarly pseudoscientific popular rationale…
What sorts of scientific racism (or gender essentialism) have Jesse Signal and Deborah Soh propagated? To be clear, I'm not asking for a primer on scientific racism, I'm asking you to substantiate the allegations you made against specific individuals.
You ought to read my comment carefully. Singal (not Signal) and Soh are "major figures in transphobia", and Molyneux is a pro-fascism campaigner. The former two (Singal, Soh) are advocates of "gender essentialism", and the latter travels internationally campaigning for the "race essentialism" and policies based on that.
As you're aware of both of (Singal,Soh)'s first names already, is it a fair guess that you're already familiar with some of their transphobic work? Perhaps then, that is a good place to start. As just one example, Soh is actually so committed to gender essentialism that it's led her to advocate the approach that: your assigned male at birth teenager who tells you that they're trans and requests to transition is actually gay in my opinion so being affirming to them about that is homophobic ( from her article in reactionary online journal "Quillette").
Soh will of course try to dress that horrific construction from her article up in professional-sounding language, but our duty is in fact to address the thrust of her argument, not whether she attempts to frame it in polite language. You might also recognize Soh from her work in the atrocious Matt Walsh "documentary" that pretends to be about women but is entirely about invalidating trans people.
To make this more clear: Soh's need to provide an explanation for femininity in a person who is assigned male at birth while denying the validity of trans people is only necessary for a person operating from a bioessentialist lens. The need in Soh is so strong that it leads her to make totally unfounded and ridiculous claims in that article, and it also drove her promotion of the discredited (and retracted!) pseudoscientific 'Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria)' invented by Lisa Littman.
Re: Why I'm Forced to Say Farewell: Google Management Has Lost Its Moral Compass
#155I’m not in the minority anymore it seems. The general attitude in this thread, “negative” though it may be, represents a far more grounded and blunt truth of the matter.
I’d just like to add, as always: this person should give back all the money Google paid them. Of course, that has not once happened in the history of these pious pieces, and so the meme endures.
Re: Why I'm Forced to Say Farewell: Google Management Has Lost Its Moral Compass
#156Not that I care in particular But claiming that google lost it's "moral compass" just now is a claim only rich people can make because they retire, not quit. Google is literally the largest, most organized, tracking and profiling company in the world. Which they tend to grow even larger with the rise of LLMs. Turning a blind eye of that for the opportunity or whatever, and than claim that _just now_ they lost their m…
Right. I have respect for Rene, but going by the "HN quitting manifestos" like this, Google has lost its moral compass at least 50 times at various points in the last 20 years. The company is constantly changing, but also hasn't changed all that much. It always talked the talk and was eager to tell others how to behave, but was almost never willing to give up any real revenue to do the right thing. The usual justific…
Agreed, the Google the author described arriving at probably didn't exist in 2017 like stated. It probably was dead by then. But since the author agreed with the politics at the time, they ignored this. Now that things continued to degrade and political winds changed and they have to deal with the negative consequences of some of those decisions, they are taking their ball and going home.
Its really hard to take such articles seriously. Its borderline gaslighting and says a lot more about the author than Google or US politics. In fact, even though I have no idea who this person is, I don't have a good opinion of them after reading this. And that ironically was the exact opposite of the intended effect of writing this for the author.
Re: Why I'm Forced to Say Farewell: Google Management Has Lost Its Moral Compass
#157[flagged]
The virtue signal is definitely true.
However its the statement that "Google lost its moral compass" has never really been true.
Its pretty clear at this point that companies solely respond to economic tides, which are governed by what people truly want. And Id argue that people in general have lost their moral compass (in the sense of how they vote, in politics and with their wallet, not what they say)
Re: Why I'm Forced to Say Farewell: Google Management Has Lost Its Moral Compass
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you have respect for Rene?
He doesn't. People start off with that when they're scared of voicing their actual opinion and it softens whatever they have to say a touch.
Or it could be that they want to give people they don't know the benefit of the doubt. I don't really consider it a sign of good character to not do this and the vast majority of people would too. That you didn't even consider it...
Re: Why I'm Forced to Say Farewell: Google Management Has Lost Its Moral Compass
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you have respect for Rene?
He doesn't. People start off with that when they're scared of voicing their actual opinion and it softens whatever they have to say a touch.
I do. I'm familiar with his research from the pre-Google era, and that's that.
Re: Why I'm Forced to Say Farewell: Google Management Has Lost Its Moral Compass
#160I don't understand the negativity here.
He is a top expert on a security topic. Running Android platform security gives him an opportunity to have incredible positive impact for many people---which he did for a decade.
People weigh trade-offs.
At the beginning, he may have had high ambitions to deploy interesting, research-forward ideas to Android; at this point, he has accomplished a lot of that. Maybe now, he is considering other factors.
Guessing that people are only money-driven or have made some decision because of threshold personal wealth is awful, especially if you do not know them.
Almost all academics I know (I am one also) are driven by personal curiosity, intellectual ambitions, a need to identify and solve problems, and a strong desire for positive contribution. I know Rene and believe this to be true of him.