Google’s Testament to Political Correctness
1–10 of 48 posts
Re: Google’s Testament to Political Correctness
#2What I found unusual is that many of the initial stories about the memo had no quotes from the memo whatsoever.[1]
Is this SV PR doing a good job, or is it that it was impossible to verify the memo? From what I read, I did not see any mention of attempts to find, verify and link to/quote/distribute the memo in question.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/google-fi...
https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/8/16111724/google-sundar-pic...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/08/08/google-fire...
The Federalist is the only site I found to apparently include the memo, though I did not fact-check the article: https://thefederalist.com/2017/08/08/read-the-google-diversi...
Re: Google’s Testament to Political Correctness
#3Of all the things the author mentions as being propped up by political correctness, this:
> Capitalism is the best economic system
sticks out like a sore thumb. I thought progressivism was more of a market socialism type affair? A disproportionate number of diversity quota advocates are open socialists or communists.
Re: Google’s Testament to Political Correctness
#4What I found unusual is that many of the initial stories about the memo had no quotes from the memo whatsoever .[1] Is this SV PR doing a good job, or is it that it was impossible to verify the memo? From what I read, I did not see any mention of attempts to find, verify and link to/quote/distribute the memo in question. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/google-fi... https://www.theverge.com/2017…
Considering the main version of the memo that was circulated was doctored (and the article stated they had doctored it), I wouldn't put much stock into anyone having bothered verifying it. But I don't think that's the reason nobody has quoted the document, it's because nobody bothered to do their research.
"Professional" journalism really isn't doing it's job well at the moment. Everyone just copies the same article contents and titles, and nobody does any actual research. It's quite apparent if you read two articles by similar publications on the same topic -- they contain effectively the same contents which tells me that very little independent research is done.
There was a particularly striking recent example of this, when the director of the movie "The Red Pill" was being interviewed on Australian TV. The questions being asked of her came from people who clearly had only seen the movie trailer, and upon asking whether they had seen the movie (she had sent them links to stream the movie for free several times) they said they "couldn't get it to work". Which means that they objectively were conducting an interview without the faintest clue what the subject was.
Re: Google’s Testament to Political Correctness
#5What I found unusual is that many of the initial stories about the memo had no quotes from the memo whatsoever .[1] Is this SV PR doing a good job, or is it that it was impossible to verify the memo? From what I read, I did not see any mention of attempts to find, verify and link to/quote/distribute the memo in question. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/google-fi... https://www.theverge.com/2017…
Motherboard (Vice) did it.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/evzjww/here-are-t...
Re: Google’s Testament to Political Correctness
#6I don't think it's safe to comment on these types of articles online. These comments are stored and indexed forever and whatever we say could be used against us at some point in the future.
You may think you are reasonably debating or discussing something, but you have to consider that someone in the next 50 years may review your post history and use it against you.
Theoretically, we would need to make throwaway accounts to have meaningful discussions.
Re: Google’s Testament to Political Correctness
#7I don't think it's safe to comment on these types of articles online. These comments are stored and indexed forever and whatever we say could be used against us at some point in the future. You may think you are reasonably debating or discussing something, but you have to consider that someone in the next 50 years may review your post history and use it against you. Theoretically, we would need to make throwaway acco…
This is why you don't tie your real life identity to your online one. Freedom of expression requires that you can't be persecuted for saying your piece.
Re: Google’s Testament to Political Correctness
#8According to the article some of the things that will "and will get you socially lambasted"
"Any statement that perpetuates female stereotypes is sexist, even an innocuous joke (or even a misconstrued joke in someone else’s private conversation)"
"Prostitution is sexist against women" etc
Um wtf? No these are not appropriate in a work environment. If you want to have a place with meaningful controversial discussion that's not the work environment.
I'm a lady and I honestly would feel uncomfortable if people were discussing these things at work. I really could not care less what other people's opinions are on these issues but I know I'm there to do my job as best as I can no get siderailed into lengthy controversial and highly likely uncomfortable discussions.
Suggesting that Google needs to be a place to comfortably voice off your random ideas is pretty irrational. It really doesn't.
Anyway, what does that even look like tangibly? Unprofessional... uncomfortable. It would not result in people agreeing with each other more just becoming less likely to like one another.
Re: Google’s Testament to Political Correctness
#9Not going into the merits of any particular point of view, but it's amazing to me how few people talking about identity or diversity work to ensure that their arguments aren't perceived as naked self-interest.
In most areas of political life factions work to recruit seemingly nonpartisan entities to advance their agendas. They go to great lengths to compellingly demonstrate how what they want is really good for everyone. Saying "I was elected by X so I'm doing Y" is only used as an argument of last resort.
But on diversity issues people get up on soap boxes and unabashedly advocate for their side. Arguments for diversity as a broader virtue are seldom advanced forcefully, and when they are there's usually not much of an effort made to reconcile that virtue with specific policy prescriptions. It's bizarre.
The end result is that you have a game of tribes and quislings, where facts don't matter and nobody agrees on what appropriate steps are to deal with diversity issues because the only thing people agree on is that everybody else is acting selfishly.
So here you have a guy who wrote a thing advocating for guys. The rest of the world views him as a sexist. Sundar fires him. The guys who agreed with the author of the manifesto view Sundar as a quisling. The rest of the world still views Sundar with suspicion as a member of Tribe Guy. Nothing improved, but lots of anger was generated. Eventually there will be something from Tribe X, and more or less the same thing will occur with roles reversed.
Is it so hard to consensus build on these issues that even bothering to frame the discussion better is a waste? Or is it just easier and more cathartic to be angry and build support that way?
Re: Google’s Testament to Political Correctness
#10I don't think it's safe to comment on these types of articles online. These comments are stored and indexed forever and whatever we say could be used against us at some point in the future. You may think you are reasonably debating or discussing something, but you have to consider that someone in the next 50 years may review your post history and use it against you. Theoretically, we would need to make throwaway acco…
This is why you don't tie your real life identity to your online one. Freedom of expression requires that you can't be persecuted for saying your piece.
Indeed. But I wholly expect that sometime in the next few decades machine learning will be able to identify real people and their online personas based on text patterns and such and not the current method that's based on leakage, or having a handle like "johnasmith" or something.
What you think is discrete today, may not be tomorrow.
Even today I'm sure Google and Facebook could identify you just based on traffic patterns (e.g., "chii" has lots of traffic on hacker news and then from the same location "john a smith" has traffic on facebook). They don't sell that info today, but perhaps in the future.