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Yishan Wong: "Google's Gemini issue is not about woke/DEI"

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Re: Yishan Wong: "Google's Gemini issue is not about woke/DEI"

#101

Post by reaperman »

ein0p wrote: post #100
reaperman wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which group/area did you work in? For context. I mean I'm sure in a company of 140,000 people there's probably many cohesive groups of 100 people that will be super right-leaning. Like, most of the crew at the Jackson County, AL or Montgomery County, TN or Mayes County, OK datacenters. I'm sure there's areas of Google where you can express very right-wing opinions to your team and adjacent teams and still get promoti…

In data centers maybe, but in software even moderate conservative positions are inadvisable. I don’t consider myself to be in any way “right leaning” by the way. I’m in favor of universal healthcare and gay marriage yet against allowing biological males in female sports, for example. Don’t like it? Not much I can do about that, I’ll stick to my guns no matter what derogatory label you assign. I’m not overly attached…

So, which area/group were you in? Also would you say that expressing your view that "AMAB people shouldn't be allowed to compete in female sports" would get you ostracized at Google during the time you were there? I'd think that's a pretty milquetoast position to hold.

Re: Yishan Wong: "Google's Gemini issue is not about woke/DEI"

#102

Post by ein0p »

reaperman wrote: post #101
ein0p wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In data centers maybe, but in software even moderate conservative positions are inadvisable. I don’t consider myself to be in any way “right leaning” by the way. I’m in favor of universal healthcare and gay marriage yet against allowing biological males in female sports, for example. Don’t like it? Not much I can do about that, I’ll stick to my guns no matter what derogatory label you assign. I’m not overly attached…

So, which area/group were you in? Also would you say that expressing your view that "AMAB people shouldn't be allowed to compete in female sports" would get you ostracized at Google during the time you were there? I'd think that's a pretty milquetoast position to hold.

In one of the ML groups, working on LLM training/serving infra, though not in Brain or GDM.

And yes, you’d get some quality time with HR for saying something like that there, and you’d get fired if you keep saying it. People don’t quite appreciate the extent of this insanity there. The internal discourse is completely devoid of anything that challenges even the most insane of DEI tenets.

Re: Yishan Wong: "Google's Gemini issue is not about woke/DEI"

#103

Post by cherrycherry98 »

ein0p wrote: post #90

Xoogler here: pointing out such things internally is incompatible with continued employment at Google (see eg Damore’s “echo chamber” essay, the echo chamber got even more airtight since then). So the end result is quite predictable. Moreover, this will continue, and i don’t see how they get out of this hole without firing a bunch of internal “activists” who spend their entire days stirring the pot on Memegen rather…

"Bring your whole self to work" is a joke unless you hold progressive opinions. Antifa and "resistance" stickers on laptops or backpacks are fine, as is openly wishing for the death or bodily harm of sitting politicians from the "wrong" party. Diversity groups for just about everyone except you know who. Meetings on work time openly pushing progressive agendas.

God forbid you display MAGA swag or even a Gadsden. Diversity is supposed to yield benefits of expanded opinions. Now there is no diversity. Everyone looks a bit different but the only opinions expressed are in one direction.

Re: Yishan Wong: "Google's Gemini issue is not about woke/DEI"

#104

Post by meowfly »

ethanbond wrote: post #99
woooooo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd have to isolate the political bias changes from all of the other changes, including loudly antagonizing advertisers.

But that was part of “the shift” that GP is crediting for moving toward broader appeal. Agreed on the general point, this stuff can’t really be disaggregated in a meaningful way, but of course it doesn’t need to be disaggregated: the overall set of Musk’s decisions have been extremely destructive to the company (so far).

Sorry. I wasn't claiming Elon made Twitter more appealing, but rather was trying to point out that when management changed so did the bias.

I realize my poor grammar made it difficult to fully capture what I was trying to say.

My core argument is that I have now seen twice what looks like Yishan making excuses for moderation decisions that fall outside most people's discourse window.

I also am not making claims about what makes more money. It could possibly be true that people with a particular political pursuasion are more likely to convert.

Re: Yishan Wong: "Google's Gemini issue is not about woke/DEI"

#106

Post by rescbr »

Tiktaalik wrote: post #68

> First, to recap: Google injected special instructions into Gemini so that when it was asked to draw pictures, it would draw people with “diverse” (non-white) racial backgrounds. I just love how this "solution" to their problem of their training set being deeply flawed is such a hilariously bad kludge hack of the sort a jr programmer would make and it's amazing that they went with it.

Boss said to write a stupid prompt, employee knew better than to argue.

Re: Yishan Wong: "Google's Gemini issue is not about woke/DEI"

#107

Post by DonsDiscountGas »

> Google originally did this because they didn’t want pictures of people doing universal activities (e.g. walking a dog) to always be white, reflecting whatever bias existed in their training set.

If the results were actually proportional to the training set I think that would be fine (assuming the training set had some reasonable amount of diversity, which I bet it does; one could always do biased resampling too). I'd be concern about mode collapse, where it would just show the most common class (eg white American women) and nothing else. But I thought we had solved that issue.

Re: Yishan Wong: "Google's Gemini issue is not about woke/DEI"

#108

Post by rayiner »

meowfly wrote: post #44

Yishan did this same sleight of hand trick with twitter before Elon bought it[1]. Then his point was that twitter doesn't have a bias, it's simply a normal moderation problem (noise-signal ratio). Now that twitter is owned by Elon, everyone can see it obviously moved right. What normies are fairly noticing in these corps is moderating not by the overton window of the normal consumer, but by the overton window of the…

> What normies are fairly noticing in these corps is moderating not by the overton window of the normal consumer, but by the overton window of the managerial class who run the business

Now the question is, why is the managerial class so weird and creepy? The Gemini images didn’t come out of left field—that’s what Hollywood movies look like these days too. Random non-white people in contexts where it makes no sense, or racially balanced friend/family groups that don’t map onto how people actually associate in real life.

My family looks like one of those Gemini images—my brother and I are south Asian, my wife is British American, her brother is Samoan/black/Asian, his girlfriend is Filipino, and my sister in law is Taiwanese. But it’s a fluke—you don’t see that much mixing organically pretty much anywhere. The overwhelming majority of people are in same-race marriages and have homogenous circles of friends. The world still looks like Friends or Seinfeld, not whatever Hollywood is showing recently. So it’s very creepy to me that there are a bunch of people in Hollywood deliberately making casting choices with these unrealistic representations—or, as in the case of Gemini, inserting hidden text into prompts to achieve that effect—as if somehow my family is better than one that’s all white or all Filipino. The contrived nature of it makes race seem like a big deal, instead of something irrelevant, and it’s creepy and weird.

Re: Yishan Wong: "Google's Gemini issue is not about woke/DEI"

#109

Post by hax0ron3 »

smoothjazz wrote: post #65
bodiekane wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would anyone disagree with fundamentalist Christianity? Why would anyone disagree with Wahhabist Islam? Why would anyone disagree with Maoism? People have different opinions on politics, religion, society. The more extremist a certain group/movement/ideology is the more concerned about it people will become.

"Wokeness" as defined by the people who use it is not a religion (and it's not extreme). It's just pejorative word for diversity used by people who believe in white supremacy.

I very much dislike woke-ism and I don't support white supremacy, and I'm also not super-rich. I very much dislike woke-ism because it's a political movement that tries to get people to ignore reality in favor of its dogmas and it often uses authoritarian tactics to do so.

Yes, when I say "woke-ism" I'm of course not using the word "woke" in its original non-pejorative meaning. But I can't think of a more precise, widely-understood word to use to refer to this social movement.

Re: Yishan Wong: "Google's Gemini issue is not about woke/DEI"

#110

Post by AlexeyBelov »

cherrycherry98 wrote: post #103
ein0p wrote: post #90

Xoogler here: pointing out such things internally is incompatible with continued employment at Google (see eg Damore’s “echo chamber” essay, the echo chamber got even more airtight since then). So the end result is quite predictable. Moreover, this will continue, and i don’t see how they get out of this hole without firing a bunch of internal “activists” who spend their entire days stirring the pot on Memegen rather…

"Bring your whole self to work" is a joke unless you hold progressive opinions. Antifa and "resistance" stickers on laptops or backpacks are fine, as is openly wishing for the death or bodily harm of sitting politicians from the "wrong" party. Diversity groups for just about everyone except you know who. Meetings on work time openly pushing progressive agendas. God forbid you display MAGA swag or even a Gadsden. Dive…

Why would you want to display MAGA swag?
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