Google Doesn't Do Evil, But It Is Creepy
thepunch.com.au
thepunch.com.au
This is a great quote, and brings up the issue of groupthink. I saw a talk by Ed Catmull of Pixar a couple weeks ago where he talked about how once an idea can be reduced to a slogan, you don't need the idea anymore, just the slogan. His example was architects saying they are designing buildings "from the inside-out," and how it was a good idea for a few years, until he was working with an architect who designed a shitty building and used the phrase "designed from the inside-out" to dismiss criticism.
For Google, if employees get to the point where "do no evil" is a just a slogan that helps them get to sleep at night and they stop constantly questioning their actions, it doesn't mean anything anymore. In fact, it's worse than had it never existed at all, because it's used as a justification for things of questionable evil-ness. "Google stores everything they can about what you do online without asking your permission, but it doesn't matter, because they would never do anything evil with all that information." They can tell themselves that, but it doesn't mean it isn't evil.
Sergey: "Eric, we really wanted to turn on Buzz by default, but realized we have to give users more control, damn it."
Eric: "Ahh, I would have just turned it on by default."
Who wins?
For one to not be evil, does that entail the exclusion of all actions that can be construed as evil, even if it is perceived that doing so is for a greater good?
I'm going to say yes that not being evil means at no time doing evil, no matter what the expected outcome.
The point is that it's an existential judgment -- that they would seek to have the question "Is Google evil?" answered negatively in consideration of all things, not that they need to avoid any blame or transgression.
I think the "DBE" topic has been rehashed about 10^6 times more than necessary, so I think I'll just leave it at that.
The culture, the people, and the company are focused completely on providing an environment where brains and hard work pay off. Smart people always want to be around people smarter then them, to me that is a hallmark of intelligence. Working at Google you are guaranteed to be working with or around several of the smartest people in the industry. Furthermore the practices of engineering and product development do not work like a standard corporate software shop. I mean just reading this article from Steve http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-agile-bad-agile... is likely to get your mouth watering if you are a Software Guy, especially if you are into the sort of startup scene.
The point is if all the food went away, the naps, the pools, the perks and all that was left was the engineering structure I would still want to work there if only to be around the smart people and to avoid(they are everywhere) the politics of corporate software development.*
*Several parallels to startups here.
But, of course, that engineering culture would inherently earn obscene amounts of money and re-invest that money in its talent, thus re-introducing the perks. They're just an emergent behavior of Google-like companies.
For a company it's amazingly hard to actually carry this out.
btw, how do you know that you're evil? does the evilness change? how so?
We see some of this effect in actual stock market data, today, where "sinful" companies like Altria or defense contractors tend to trade at lower P/E ratios than "good" companies like Google or Merck. Of course, this means that sinful companies tend to pay higher dividend yields, and evil investors end up with more money in their pocket. This is the price of not being evil.
If this is even part-way serious as a justification for abuses of corporate power, then what a terrible, glib argument.
No one person has to take the blame for any action. When you are only 1/1,000,000th responsible for something, it becomes easier to justify bad decisions.
A corporation is typically considered evil if any of its employees are evil. If you're feeling generous, maybe you'd relax that to a small group of employees, say 0.1%. For example, AIG employs close to 100,000 people, yet I doubt that more than a few hundred were involved in the mortgage derivative mess. Yet we still pretty much universally revile AIG.
Say that 1% of people are evil. It's totally reasonable to expect an individual to be non-evil; after all, 99 out of 100 (in this model) are.
But then extend that out to a large corporation. The probability that you'll find at least one evil person in a startup of 10 is (1 - .99^10) = 0.095, or about 10%. The probability that you'll find at least 100 evil people in a corporation of 20,000 is (1 - .99^19900), which according to Google calculator is 1, i.e. virtually certain (there's some round-off error there, but you get the point). In order to have any fighting chance at being non-evil, a large organization has to actively seek out evil and eject it from the organization, simply because the organization as a whole tends to be judged by its worst members.
"Never attribute to malice what can be explained by math." - PG
"All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing." -- Edmund Burke
The bigger the group the higher the probability it includes a "good man" (or woman).
I would qualify that by pointing out that it's only true if the worst members are in positions of power. If the evil members of an organization are its janitors, our problem is minimal. Unfortunately, your argument mostly holds true because in any broth, the scum always rises to the top.
It's not just corporations--street gangs, government agencies, churches, political organizations, and other groups have a much harder time than individuals maintaining a moral compass. As much as you want to pin institutional evil on individuals--be it mafia dons, dictators, CEO's, or crooked cops--at the very least, the institutions these people are part of are a necessary element in what happens.
Even if all people have equally strong consciences, some of them will worry more about proximate responsibility ("clean hands") and others about ultimate responsibility ("clear conscience"). In other words, some people would be more okay with ordering a man shot as long as they don't have to pull the trigger, and others would be more okay with joining a firing squad as long as they don't give the orders. Once the former start giving orders to the latter, the group will be able to do worse things than any individual member was capable of, but everyone still feels morally okay.
To put it yet another way, for each morally questionable task that arises, a large group will probably contain someone who doesn't object to that specific task. Division of labor ensures that group morality sinks to the lowest common denominator.
It reminds me of “what would Jesus do?” – it’s not a formula at all, just a reminder to put things in moral terms. It doesn’t say much about what the speaker’s terms actually are.
They have a dinosaur as a leftover of the previous tenant. So what. They won't talk about China on the record because they're just on a tour. Expect anything different?
I would have preferred the journalist ask some interesting questions to the Google staff and then give those answers to the reader.