Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

> When the industry is only 20-25% female, such a target is effectively impossible without discrimination.

This type of discrimination has a name, it’s called “affirmative action”. This argument that fixing an imbalance is discrimination and therefore somehow worse seems to be really common but I think it’s a little misguided to say we shouldn’t use it, and here’s why.

The imbalance we have is an imbalance that was caused by cultural discrimination against women, and it’s a type of discrimination that is often unseen and is hard and time consuming to fix. (Not to mention, nobody actually knows how.)

The idea for affirmative action is to provide a counter-acting force to the already existing discrimination. Furthermore, the idea is to use this force gently and, most importantly, temporarily, until some balance is restored.

We already know what happens if we take no action at all: we get discrimination against women. The industry used to be a much higher percentage of women 40 years ago. Why has it declined? It’s obviously cultural because it used to be higher in the recent past, and just before that it was near zero and women weren’t allowed to vote. The numbers have been swinging all over the map in just 100 years, so it clearly has not settled from the perspective of history.

So what would you do to fix an imbalance? What is your suggestion? Doing nothing already has a known, negative outcome. There are other ideas besides affirmative action. How well have they worked in the past?

>Building a new censored search engine only seems to have started after Pichai took over and Brin/Page checked out.

>The employee backlash phenomenon only seems to have started recently.

Yes and concurrent with the executive change, Google employees have started becoming openly more liberal. I am saying that its just as plausible that the change in tone from the employees as a group, was a reaction to the managerial decisions that were themselves a change in tone.

>As for "started surreptitiously tracking everyone", that was a media attack that started around the time Google News took off. Nothing had actually changed about privacy policies of tech firms, and users were clearly very happy with the ads-for-services arrangement given the rapidly rising usage numbers.

That's three separate ideas that are not coupled together. Nothing has to change about the privacy policies if they were always tracking, and most users can be happy with the product even with the privacy intrusions.

I will disagree with you that they were happy though. It seems more like a matter of ignorance as there has been a rise in ad blockers and deleting Facebook since the privacy violations of major tech companies has become more widely known

Also for this claim specifically

>As for "started surreptitiously tracking everyone", that was a media attack that started around the time Google News took off.

Are you really trying to claim that Google does not track user data? That it does not suck up every bit of data it can from all the traffic they have access to? How exactly does Google target their ads and make their revenue then?

Edit: Literally at the top of the front page as I am writing this comment

https://www.pulse.ng/bi/tech/google-exec-says-nest-owners-sh...

The USA. We've had white supremacist politicians for hundreds of years, and in many parts of the us they carry more than 10% of the vote. As recently as 2016, the former head of the Ku Klux Klan received 3% of election day votes (58,000 people) for a United States Senate seat for the state of Louisiana.

Here's an article from 2018, "All The White Supremacists Running For Office": https://www.huffpost.com/entry/white-supremacists-running-fo... There are 12 candidates listed.

Here's a white supremacist running unopposed for Congress in 2018: https://www.npr.org/2018/02/08/583993705/a-white-supremacist...

In Germany there has recently been an alarming rise in white nationalist political sentiment in large swaths of the country. Here's a list of European white supremacy groups: https://www.counterextremism.com/european-white-supremacy-gr...

> If someone from $ORGANIZATION made it clear that people that work for them and don't like Nazi's aren't welcome to be clear they don't like Nazis, I'd certainly consider dropping $ORGANIZATION.

This is shifting the goalposts and not an answer to my question. Allowing Nazis does not imply disallowing anti-Nazis. You can allow both.

Laws are for lots of things, but they are for imposing morality, yes. I mean, I'm a consequentialist, so morality and "good outcomes" are synonymous for me. The law is to create incentives that make people cooperate in prisoners' dilemma type situations, at the societal level.

You personally avoiding Nazis is one thing - you are entitled to it and it has nothing to do with the law. However, if you are taking part in activism to exclude them from society, not just your part of society but payment systems, social media, things where them taking part has no effect on you, then I don't know why you don't go the whole way and make their views illegal. Also, being excluded from society in the ways that people think Nazis should be is a consequence so harsh that I would want it to have legal oversight. As the past has shown, "I don't like people x" plus mob rule is not a good way to decide people's fates.

Avoid them in your personal life, sure, but it sounds like you're talking about activism to exclude them from places where you could just not interact with them.

Just don't contribute to Nazi gitlab projects. If you're boycotting gitlab to try and get them to exclude Nazis, then I think you are using the private sector to enforce what you think should be a general rule, and I think companies and mobs are the wrong tool for the job. Take it to the voting booth, that is what democracy is for.

> The flurry of downvotes is telling.

Im not sure I understand the comment?