Ex-Google engineer describing the company's role in China censorship
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This is the really disgusting thing. Are they "just" sucking up to management or are they maybe the only ones who buy the propaganda?
Or is this some kind of self-justification process that protects them from their dying sense of guilt?
I'm not familiar with this case, but if e.g. the reason is "Whatever we do, the Chinese government is going to ensure that any search results its population can see are censored. So our choice is whether they get censored Google search results or censored someone-else search results, and it's hard to see how the first of those can be worse either for us or for them" ... then I don't know whether it's actually a good reason, but it does seem like a reason that some decent and intelligent people might find convincing, even if they have a normally functioning sense of guilt.
For the avoidance of doubt, the opposite position -- "if you do this you're an accomplice to oppression, and 'if we don't do it someone else will' is a lousy response" -- also seems to me one that some decent and intelligent people might find convincing. No one on either side of this needs to be an idiot or a scoundrel. (Though I bet some people on both sides are both, because that's always true.)
That is clearly true for China. It seems to be true for Google as well.
There's a case to be made for providing more net information while being less than 100 percent morally pure in the process.
The choice we're confronted with isn't "uncensored vs censored". It's "more information and access vs less information and access".
It's a practical call. Chinese people are very practical, they'll figure it out.
https://www.cnn.com/2016/06/23/asia/china-organ-harvesting/
As is deliberately killing pedestrians after accidentally injuring them in order to pay a lessor death benefit instead of expensive care.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2...
Im not worried about their practicality but rather that they are culturally morally bankrupt and revealing how morally bankrupt people like Google are.
The government is, for sure. However, it's the legal system's fault for letting the punishment of injury outweigh the punishment of manslaughter.
Furthermore, it's not as if Google has gone out of its way get into a position of censoring search results in China. Those search results are going to be censored no matter what. What Google does, whether they operate in China or not, doesn't effect that. All that changes is how much search-engine-generated money goes to Google or doesn't.
Ban me for calling it.
At the time I posted, the comment explicitly calling all chinese people "morally bankrupt" was 6 hours old and it was not gray.
Apologies for my overheated response.
Moreover, if you post another national or racial slur, like you did here and confirmed below, we will ban you.
Everyone is equal on some level just by being human. They are inherently worth treating well. That includes freedom from death and harm. But that also includes freedom of thought, conscience, and expression.
Docs, Hangouts, YouTube. All very difficult to censor. Its whack a mole, complicated by https. Information wants to be free.
Standing on principle here denies them that 99%. Are you going to make that call for them, or should they make it for themselves?
This is (as I understand it) a deontological, rather than a consequential, argument. So that cannot really be a 'counterargument' because it has a disjoint set of premises. You can argue that the premise for GP's argument (something along the lines of `The decision of whether to operate Google in China should depend on the aforementioned having better outcomes for chinese citizens than otherwise`) is incorrect or you can argue on the basis of his premise, but giving a different argument on a different premise (something like `the rule "don't censor political speech" should never be broken`) does not make a counterargument.
The counterargument is that suppressing truth and speech is indecent, regardless of intent. That is, the lesser wrong is still wrong. Boiling people down to utilitarian guesswork is part of the problem. It is fair to point out that the alleged decency is premised on skipping past established ethical and moral frameworks.
So let's avoid arguing over the definition of "decent" by being more specific. I claim:
It's possible for someone to endorse the position taken by Google management on this even though that person is highly intelligent, is far from indifferent to others' suffering and oppression, and habitually goes out of their way to treat others well, including others who are unlike them and far away.
I do, of course, agree that if you get to define what "decent" means then you can make it so that no decent person disagrees with you. In this case, I think that requires a definition that has built into it either an answer to the specific object-level question at hand, or else a specific position on a subtle philosophical question (consequentialism versus deontology versus virtue ethics versus whatever else) on which smart people who spend their whole lives thinking about this stuff are far from all agreeing.
That is called ideology
"Ideology is the practice of augmenting reality."
http://mitp.nautil.us/feature/271/ideology-is-the-original-a...
IMO, neither. I don't like this purported dichotomy between "management" and "colleagues/employees". I have seen several of my former classmates and colleagues transition into management roles. Their ideology hasn't changed much in the last 20 years. For example, in the Indian context, their view of Kashmir and the army's role there is pretty much the same as the government propaganda. "Management" did not convince them when we were all still in college, and did not convince them when we were all low-level employees. The people just happened to grow up in an environment where a certain ideological bent was considered "right", "virtuous", etc.
Here you had people leaving because of the clash between business ideology and their (as well the outsides) moral values. The company did not only advance and hire people who already had no moral values. They just found out. Now they shift people around until the compatible ones stay.
We can expect that a Google employee working with China will be more favourable to the work, even accounting for factors like selection bias.
My money is on self-justification being at least a part of the explanation, but that doesn't preclude some amount of sucking-up to management as well.
It's just business. Americans has been doing business with China, and the Chinese people for decades. In spite of the fact that the west and China are beholden to very different identities, we can still cooperate on things to the benefit of everyone.
People are 99% the same everywhere, but the 1% that makes us different are matters of identity, and that's what we gripe about and go to war over. It's kind of stupid if you ask me, but then again, no one in the history of the world has ever come up with a reliable solution for human nature.
Yes. What is the benefit of hobbling a world-class search engine so that it intentionally prevents "everyone" (I include Chinese citizens in your "everyone") from accessing free information and news and facts about the world and about China itself?
All countries are guilty of mistakes and atrocities. So what is the benefit of preventing citizens from discovering this, learning from it, and discussing it?
I'll list out some of the issues:
1. The view the censorship is immoral. The argument that "we should help them because we can profit and they'll do it with or without us" has some very serious flaws that can be easily shown by a few thought experiments.
For instance: your colleague is going to rob a bank and there's nothing you can do to stop him, is it right for you to volunteer to drive the getaway car since he'll pay you handsomely if you do? If you don't drive, someone else will, and you'll be leaving money on the table.
> It's just business. Americans has been doing business with China, and the Chinese people for decades. In spite of the fact that the west and China are beholden to very different identities, we can still cooperate on things to the benefit of everyone.
2. Doing business with China gives the Communist Party leverage to influence corporate operations elsewhere for ideological reasons. They've shown increasing willingness to use that influence to push their political views (for a recent example, see the recent situation with how foreign airlines represent Taiwan on their foreign-language websites).
Imagine, ten years from now, Google because popular and profitable in mainland China. The Communist Party wants to manage Western perceptions of an issue (say Tibet) and gives Google an ultimatum: derank all pro-Tibet independence websites from the top 20 results of certain Tibet-related searches, or they'll shutdown their Chinese operations. What choice do you think the shareholder-value maximizing corporation is going to make?
This article tackles the topic from a different angle: https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/10/11/if-the-u-s-doesnt-contr...
You can worry that China could have too much leverage over Google if they become dependent on profits earned in China. It's corroborated in the article you provided:
>a deeply conservative Pence sounded like liberal stalwart Sen. Elizabeth Warren in arguing the Chinese are using America’s own short-term-oriented financial system against it.
Our shareholder value short-term oriented financial system is a problem in our own backyard, something we can do something about rather than fearmongering against China. It remains a strict hypothetical that that Google would kowtow to China's demands and censor it's domestic search engine. I don't think they'll do that, but even if they did, we can cross that bridge when we get to it, until then it's just a hypothetical worst case scenario. If Google has a dangerous amount of control over the flow of information, that's because it's the service that most Americans choose to use, which is kind of the shitty thing about a free and open society. In China if they decide something is a net negative, they can stop it.
Yes some can, it's matter of influence or how powerful you are
The mechanism is already there. The difference is only which part of the model to tweaks and for whom.
There are a lot of posters in HN that are FAANG employees, yet talk big game about Open Source, Data Security, Free Speech, etc yet time and time again these companies fail to uphold these values.
When you are making a 6+ figure salary with vesting options it's really easy to bend your principles and if you are lucky you can become wealthy enough to become a philanthropist somewhere down the line to undo some of the damage you have done.
I'd rather formulate it this way:
I encourage employees of Google who have been asked to work on censored products to take a look from different perspectives, apply their values and morale, make an informed decision on whether they want to support what they're asked to work on - and have the spine to follow through with their decision.
The reason why I disagree with the original statement is that it feels like people are forcing their own moral decisions on others. "I'm convinced it's bad, so you have to agree and act like it".
edit: reformulated it to something less loaded
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingsoc
[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-18/china-social-credit-a...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/07/22/the-talent-myt...
So in the story they found a stronger correlation between tacit knowledge than simply IQ for instance.
Disclaimer: I wrote the post.
Did Google say he was fired because he lacked a moral compass?
The opportunity cost of not getting in on the Chinese market by being complicit in human rights abuses is in the billions, and possibly some direct costs if you generate badwill (so, let's add the cost of keeping up a farce for the employees just to be thorough, which is probably in the millions). As long as you keep everyone in the dark about what you're doing you can reap the benefits.
It is far more likely for such a competitor to turn around and launch a censored version in the US, just changing the censorship criteria. Can you imagine the impact of a partnership between the Murdoch empire and a search engine with ideological censorship built-in?
It sent a message to the entire world that Google is staffed by extremists who systematically cannot be trusted to provide unbiased services or search results for anything involving women or feminism. It caught the attention of conservative politicians. It killed dead the idea that Google is run by logical, data driven people (as Damore's memo was basically a big pile of data and studies), and judging from what my friends who still work there think, it created huge cynicism in the developer workforce too. It very much did not "appease the devs" unless you are naive enough to believe that Damore is some outlier in disliking diversity programmes in tech firms.
That's not an accurate summary of Damore's motives, or the reasons for firing him.
on the other hand bending over backwards to assist an oppressive - but lucrative - dictatorship in implementing a real-life version of Oceania's Ingsoc
Corporations are amoral by design. So I don't find this odd at all, but is an incredibly dangerous development.
What is then?
And here's your boy Dave Rubin:
"In an interview in March 2018, Rubin said he would vote for Donald Trump in the 2020 U.S. presidential election if a progressive like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, or Gavin Newsom is running against him.[29] Rubin also characterized President Trump as a political moderate, saying "he's a Democrat in a lot of ways", and spoke favorably of Trump's cuts in government regulations.[30]". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Rubin
Also, it is not at all surprising that it would be right-wing nut jobs who would approach Damore -- as we can see even here, no one else wants to discuss it, no matter what the merits of the argument, such as they were, might be.
So, she is drastically misrepresenting and misunderstanding ONE point he made in ONE chapter of his book (hardly a foundation of his philosophy), and she openly admits to having never read his book, and that's the example you want to give? Interesting...
Can someone mansplain "hate-reading" to a layman?
The act of reading a piece of writing by someone you dislike for political reasons and mentally discrediting them by refuting their arguments with specious or fallacious reasoning. Primarily undertaken in the conscious pursuit of confirmation bias.
These people will brand fascist those who urge for calm conversation supported by facts and reason. They will deplatform and protest and even violently attack those who speak up about there being more to this stuff than discrimination, namely individual motivation, and whatever the gender influenced magical secret sauce is that forms human motivations and personality especially when you look at population averages.
While there are actual differences between individuals, what is presented as an objective biological fact is often a false projection of someone's subjective biases (i.e. sexism and racism).
Bret Weinstein and Jordan Peterson for example agree and talk about these things, the cultural phenomenon of 'group identity', 'social justice warriors' and 'equality of outcome vs. equality of opportunity' and are generally opposed to this radical movement that tries to tell us that you are defined by what you (must) identify as or what group you belong to, eg. white heterosexual male.
Bret Weinstein, professor of biology, gets attacked and has to resign: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreen_State_College#2017_p...
Jordan Peterson gets protested a lot and labeled a right winge extremist despite being left wing liberal (but an advocate for 'fixing your shit' so you can 'step up your game'): https://www.queensjournal.ca/story/2018-03-06/news/jordan-pe...
imo you've overstated his point, I think he would argue that some of the difference can be explained by biological differences. But if that was the full extent of his assertions I don't think he would have got into so much hot water. As I've argued elsewhere on HN, Damore made several further claims, such as:
1) Hiring practices and funding which aim to counter the gender gap are wrong...
2) ... and Google cannot see this because of its inherent left-wing bias.
For the capitulation to China, though, the scale seems different. I would agree with the parent that this seems to contradict core philosophy -- much of the words espoused in their "Owner's Manual for Google Shareholders" in their IPO (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312504...) now seem hollow (for reasons more than just this). Do they still believe strongly in the "long term" as they claim? How does submitting to one of the world's most repressive places (information wise) "make the world a better place"? You certainly can't claim "unbiased and objective" search results when there is a government telling you certain things you can't include. Companies may be amoral by design (as another poster said) but Google at least in their manifesto certainly seemed to strive to be different. Not anymore, apparently.
The e-mail Larry Page should have written to James Damore - https://www.economist.com/international/2017/08/19/the-e-mai...
But past that it was a pretty reasonable argument. Pruning out the par-for-the-course of accusations that Damore really meant something other than what he actually wrote it made for an interesting and constructive read.
1. "Then you make a giant leap from group differences between men and women on such measures as interest in people rather than things, or systematising versus empathising, to differences in men’s and women’s ability to code"
The author seems to think that ability to code is some inborn talent that must be evenly distributed between men and women. Coding ability (like math, knitting, doctoring and literally every other human skill) is a confluence of natural talent, interest, coaching, and raw time spent. People can have equal talent for a skill, but ultimately have radically different ability due to their chosen paths in life. If Damore's hypothesis is correct and men do have a greater natural interest in coding, then we could expect men to have a greater ability to code, on average, even if men as a whole had less aptitude for coding. Damore didn't clarify because he probably didn't expect anyone to interpret his words with such malice.
2. "You ignore many other gender differences, basing your argument only on a few that you think support your conclusion."
These differences should be cited and used to build a counter argument.
3. "You’re ignoring everything else that could explain the gender gap."
Damore's memo does not take place in a vacuum. It's an alternate view offered in contrast to the popular mainstream view.
4. "The gender differences you cite differ between countries and over time."
Not an argument, or even a rebuttal. More of a confounding factor.
5. "They (gender differences) don’t even support your argument, because you don’t seem to understand what makes a great software engineer...Software engineering requires a broad mix of skills ... Teamwork, in particular... Senior engineers must manage teams—and by your own reasoning that should mean that women, with their greater empathy and interest in people, should be over-represented at that level."
Being a low level software engineer is a prerequisite to being a high level software engineer. If women are underrepresented at the bottom, it's expected they will be underrepresented at the top. You might expect an "enrichment" effect of women in management, but there may be other factors (that I'll talk about later) that result in women leaving the software profession before that point. All of this assumes that high empathy and interest in people are even required to be a good manager. Steve Jobs was often considered a good leader but it doesn't seem like he gave a crap about the people under him.
6. "You clearly don’t understand our company, and so fail to understand what we are trying to do when we hire"
Not an argument.
7. "Even if you are right that more men than women are well-suited to the job of software engineer at Google, you are wrong that taking steps to recruit more women is inherently unfair to men."
Not an argument.
8. "There is plenty of evidence that women in Silicon Valley suffer sexism and discrimination. Read Susan Fowler’s description of the harassment she experienced at Uber before leaving the firm in December. Look at the responses to “Elephant in the Valley”, a recent survey of senior women in tech: among its findings was that two-thirds had been excluded from networking opportunities because of their sex. And beyond our industry, women are less likely than men to be given plum assignments, are given less useful feedback, are seen as pushy when they ask for pay rises (men are seen as ambitious) and, in leadership roles, may be seen as either competent or likeable, but rarely both. “We need to stop assuming that gender gaps imply sexism,” you write. But we know there is sexism! We don’t need to infer it from the existence of gender gaps."
An argument! All of this is certainly true and should be addressed by internal and legal processes. In addition, all of these are potential explanations of the gender gap in software development. However, these points alone are not sufficient to make that argument. What we need here is context. Does the rate of discrimination differ between fields that are lopsided, like computer science, and fields that are more even, like law and medicine?
9. "Finally, let’s look at your contention that by trying to recruit more women Google is discriminating against men. You seem to think that if we stopped paying any attention to applicants’ gender when deciding who to hire, we would naturally converge on the “right” share of men and women, that is, the share that matches the distribution of talent in the recruitment pool. I don’t believe that. Unless we make special efforts, some women will be put off applying by the heavily male culture; those doing the hiring will be influenced in their assessments of candidates’ ability by the stereotypes they’ve formed in that male environment. We should “treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group,” you write. That is what we are doing."
This is so much feeble it hard to figure out where to start. First, no one really cares about talent in the recruitment pool, even if they use the word "talent". What they really care about is ability (see my above definition of ability). If you have solid math skills but can't tell a for-loop from an if-statement, google probably isn't trying to recruit you for a programming job. "Special Efforts" is the problem, not the solution. Harvard makes "special efforts" not to recruit asians. Fifty years ago, companies made "special efforts" to hire white men. "Special Efforts" are discrimination, full stop. Reverse sexism is still sexism.
In this article's quest for "context", they missed all of it. There are a couple of major data points that they glossed over.
1. The paradox of gender ratios in STEM fields by country. Gender ratios in STEM fields are most extreme in countries that are most gender equitable (like the nordic countries) and least extreme in countries known for sexism (software developers in Zimbabwe are 50% women and india has a much higher percentage of women in programming). One explanation is that Software development in these countries is composed of more westernized individuals who have more progressive views than other people in their country. The other explanation is that talented women are basically "funneled" into computer science in those countries because it's even harder for them to enter other professions.
2. The prevalence of women in law and medicine. The stigmas against women entering these was pretty extreme, yet women smashed these barriers to the point where most people entering the medical profession are now women. There are still areas in medicine that are male dominated, but there are also areas that are female dominated.
There's also a philosophical question that needs to be addressed. Is the existence of a gender gap proof of sexism? If yes the forensic science and veteranarian science have a lot to answer for. Those professions are more lopsided in favor of women then computer science is in favor of men.
Obviously the issue is complicated, but it's not clear that the discrimination that women face in computer science is greater than they face in other fields where representation is more equitable. My biggest takeaway from Damore's memo was that Google was 110% committed to the idea that the gender imbalance is due to sexism. And since it can't find particular instances of sexism to punish or stop, everyone must be so guilty that they can't see it. Google's response to the Damore memo says quite a lot.
It wasn't an open honest discussion.
He wrote some memo and it was pass around the Google until some people found out and got offended.
If he wanted an honest discussion he shouldn't be passing notes around like it's highschool. The memo apparently ended up being pass by more and more people. That's not how you approach this or many topics that are sensitive. I think his lack of common sense and clarity screwed him over really.
This is my understanding base on this article:
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kzbm4a/employees-...
Gizmodo have the full letter:
https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-di...
This is before we even approach this sensitive topic, regardless how anybody feel about it, he have already messed it up from the get go.
Because I've sourced my stuffs and showed how I base my discussion and form my thoughts on my subject with those sources. If I am wrong I would like to learn from it. Otherwise just posting this means I have to take your word for it without any evidence and I don't do that.
You are making the perfect the enemy of the good here. Your idea of "honest discussion" and claim that how not to approach topics that are sensitive is completely subjective. You are trying to silence his voice (just like google is silencing many chinese voices). You dont make the rules about how someone gets to speak.
I dont think he was productive in his desires but I do believe that he was candid , genuine and I would never tell someone they dont get to epxress their honest thoughts.
Think of the past decades with gay rights , trans rights and you want to tell someone they cant express their thoughts and need to keep their ideas in the closet. Is bigotry from the LGBTQ crowd allowed but we cant be bigoted against them? This double standard keeps us all back from making a truly free society. It seems google and and from your argument that this freedom is subjected and carefully tailored from elite that designate what voices should be heard and silenced.
I don't have to make any rules. I'm saying how he did it got him fired. If you think how he did it is correct go ahead and do it in all of those tech companies. You think you won't be risking getting fire doing the way he did it?
Whether you like it or not. Just like his memo trying to be slapping hard truth down. I'll give this unpopular opinion down. There is always rules on how to sell your idea and say things especially sensitive matter. If you're going to go blunt about it, don't get mad if you're going to get fire. Actions have consequences. He could have gone about it many ways and if you think his ways is the best go ahead and do it at your company with his memo. I wouldn't be surprise you get fire.
Rules? Ha. I just have to point to what happened to him. He got fire cause his way got him fire. Rules? You think this idealist thought of yours work with people? Try managing people with many different ideas and being blunt all the time.
You're the same as the people that didn't like his memo. You can't handle the blunt truth and got angry.
Also here's a thought experiment. Why don't you use your real name instead of a username handler and post the same thoughts online.
I'd like to see if you act the same way with your real name as a username.
This is some top-tier trolling, right here. Thanks for the laugh.
Most Google employee that didn't like the China or Pentagon collab protest by leaving.
His memo from the get go divided people into groups. Is that really how to sell an idea? So the people reading this either going to like it or not. It made it so easy for the reader to fall into a group because it did it for them. Is being blunt a good thing at all? The things he said about women, whether or not I agree with it, being blunt about it is such a bad way of presenting his idea. Bringing up negative stuff over and over instead of positive is not a good way about trying to convince people to your side. You can just focus on whatever strength/positive your solution on your side and address little to none of the other side negative. There are books out there for persuasion; it's not some evil technique, it teaches you how not to come across as a social lunatic when talking about sensitive subject.
If you don't agree with it's fine because for me, it's not a mole hill worth dying for.
Damore might have considered it an "honest" discussion from his perspective, but there was no chance that it was actually an even handed analysis. The memo was poisoned by his words from the start.
He claimed that writing the memo would put his career at risk because left wing opponents would attempt to purge him. In fact the memo wasn't even primarily about gender, it was about anti-conservative bias at Google. This claim was proven entirely correct by what happened next.
The reason he used the phrase "cultural Marxists" is because Marxists have historically relied heavily on purging institutions or ideological opponents, suppression of speech, insistence on conformity and relentless lying about people they dislike. Given that all these things have happened to Damore it appears to be an apt analogy.
To give an example outside technology, think of prisons - largely staffed by and filled with men.
A democratic socialist or a libertarian would want to close prisons.
A neoliberal wants the prison to hire more female guards.
Yes, as I said, they're neoliberals ;)
Either way, I laughed.
I think it depends how you define social progressivism. They buy into basic tenets - for example, gay marriage. Basically, progressive when displayed alongside a far right party.
> A neoliberal wants the prison to hire more female guards.
afaik, a neoliberal wants the prison to be able to hire whoever it wants without meddling regulations causing inefficiency and putting more strain on the hiring process.
I mean, that's precisely what people disagreed on. One side thinks his way is the best and most obvious way of getting to the truth, and the other side thinks he's a deliberate provocateur who's loose with his facts. There's nothing wrong with being on a side, but at the same time we shouldn't paper over that it is A Side.
The resulting meltdown and repetitive lying about his memo just goes to show how right he is. Nobody has successfully defeated his arguments which aren't even complicated, they're obvious and common sense. Instead they just try to shoot the messenger.
This is kicking the can down the road on noticing the disagreement. Some people think he wrote in a perfectly reasonable, rational way. Other people think he wrote in a deliberately provocative way, to cause a stir. It's certainly possible to use polite-sounding language in deliberately provocative ways.
Just to go with the most extreme possible example, if I wrote an article about any conceivable version of "was the Holocaust really as bad as people say?", it wouldn't be enough to just word the whole thing politely. I'd have to be extremely considerate of my audience audience to write something like that, and of the real world context in which my audience was going to read the article, and what it would mean in light of their experiences. My motivations for choosing that topic would be under intense scrutiny, since everyone has heard heard similar-sounding things before from horrible people. If I'm not extraordinarily considerate about those things, I'm either an idiot, or I'm deliberately causing trouble. Anyone can see that, right?
Some people feel that way about Damore's arguments. They feel the content is inherently hurtful, such that starting an "even-keeled, rational-sounding debate" about it is inherently rude, at least without doing a lot of work to acknowledge the feelings context. And then obviously lots of other people feel differently. That's a big disagreement, and you don't have to be an insane person to be on either side of it.
But as others have said, the common denominators are profit, social credits, employee demands (only a few people resigned b/c of the china initiative), suppression of individual opinions and elevation of collective opinions, corporate leadership, corporate power, innovation and culture that leads to innovation, etc.
Anyone else care to identify other parallels between these two actions?
Except when standing on a moral pedestal does not hurt your bottom line. Then apparently it's ok to dictate what is moral and what is not, what is good and what is evil and use your power to force your agenda. It's not google's (or any company's) version of morality that gets me, it's always the hypocrisy
- create bilateral trade agreements that promote ethical standards (instead of finding ways around them)
- lobby for more ethical laws globally (instead of lobbying for maximum legal freedom)
Then, why do it at all?
You want to tell the world what is right and wrong, fine, do it as an individual, write a book, found a religion or something. Enforcing your moral values inside the company and even worse, using the company's power to force them to the world - only to abandon them when it hurts profits - is perverse IMO.
The same could be said about executives and their lack of moral values. Except the C-level actually wields the power to control the company.
"It's okay to censor Alex Jones because it's done by a private industry".
"Presumption of innocence doesn't apply to Judge Kav because this is a 'job interview'".
I feel what's lacking here is core principles.
Such as...?
If you're worrying about Chinese people, you're improving their access.
If you're worrying about your own moral purity, I suppose you'll have to balance that against above mentioned access.
If you want, you can find some people who live in China and ask them how much Google's "consecration" moves the needle for them.
It's "Google minus political topics" vs "no Google whatsoever".
If you enable more connectivity, however imperfect, you're improving things and you're enabling contact between cultures. Maybe that even enables more political information via side channels. It's a slam dunk net positive compared to not engaging at all.
I appreciate your passion here but I'm going to resist my urge to offer overly definitive statements in the other direction for the sake of further argument. But no, it is not a slam dunk IMHO.
You cannot even quantify the information people would get additionally on market deployment. Because the assumption is pretty baseless to begin with. Therefore I have nothing to balance against besides Google's bottom line.
Believing alternative explanations is heavily naive.
On the contrary: If said bottom line is established, you can be very sure Google would be very open for suggestions by the respective government. Logically.
Nobody wants to listen to people who've actually lived in China.
What else? People living in the US are consecrating the politics of Donald Trump?
To quote Tim Cook: Your choice is: do you participate, or do you stand on the sideline and yell at how things should be, [...] And my own view very strongly is you show up and you participate, you get in the arena because nothing ever changes from the sideline.
1) You honestly believe Google couldn't create better connections between the Chinese internet and the Anglo internet?
2) Could you give me a link to English Baidu?
Oh, sorry, bonus question:
3) Do you consider this fragmentation to be a positive?
So without Google the chinese people can't access the internet? Or you imply that Google is the only search engine that can find things?
Do Chinese people need Google or Google needs the Chinese people?
Considering the history of their actions against even their own people, and the words they say, 'evil' is not an understatement.
Yes, other states are also evil, but their evil is deeper and more fundamental. For example, they actively censor the history of their own misdeeds, including massacre of their own people from a few decades ago in 1989, and because of the strong censorship, who knows what else they are doing nowadays that's hidden?
A concrete example of what may happen is that after making a huge investment in China, Google gets a request to do more than just censor, an offer it cannot refuse. It is asked to spread malware to dissidents, or extend the censorship to other countries like Taiwan, or something nefarious like that. If it refuses, it'll be kicked out of China for some bullshit reason. Getting kicked out means incurring a big loss because of the huge investment. What will it do then? If it can't say 'no' now, it will not be able to say 'no' then. This country does not have "rule of law", but it has "rule by law". There is no independent judiciary. The state can say F U and there's nothing you can do about it.
It's possible that the opposite could happen too. China's leverage over Google is that they can pull the plug on google.com, but I don't know (correct me) if there are a lot of employees that they can throw in jail. So if Google builds up a lot of brand capital over 5 or 10 years, and pulling the plug becomes an unpopular move for the government, it could be that Google ends up with some leverage of its own about what to do with search results.
This isn't my area, so I'm just making all this up, but I notice that the tone of the thread is "something something I thought they said don't be evil," and I'm imagining that the reality is more complicated.
Censoring search results creates a false impression about the world. People assume that if google doesn't return results on something, that thing doesn't exist.
Imagine you are a professor of history. You are allowed to travel to china, give a tour, where people will ask you questions about history, most of which you'll be allowed to answer, however if someone asks you about the Tiananmen Massacre, you'll have to say that you never heard of such a thing. Would you travel to china under these conditions?
I have switched to DDGG 3 weeks ago and I am seriously testing Firefox.
It's an dead end for Google and any other search engine business. Even China's domestic search engine Baidu is dead long ago and pivoted to AI strategy
> If you address yourself to an audience, you accept at the outset the basic premises that unite the audience. You put on the audience, repeating cliches familiar to it.
> Utilizing existing channels can wipe out a statement. There is a widely accepted misconception that media merely serve as neutral packages for the dissemination of raw facts. Photographers once thought that by getting their photographs published in Life, they wo9uld thereby reach large audiences. Gradually they discovered that the only message that came through was Life magazine itself and that their pictures had become but bits & pieces of that message. Unwittingly they contributed to a message far removed from the one they intended.
Twitter may actually be a useful tool for reaching large audiences for some messages, but "the medium is the message" and using Twitter as your medium clearly involves diluting your message with the "Twitter style".
[0]: https://tedium.co/
1. Block those mirror sites from accessing Google search results, but this may be technically difficult.
2. Do nothing. Effectively a censored Google becomes available in China but people can hardly blame google for not blocking the mirror sites.
3. Work with the mirror sites (e.g. require them to display Google ads). This is pretty much dragonfly.
It seems that Dragonfly doesn't really change anything about China's censorship after all?
Just as Twitter has cycled through its founders as CEO, after their serious mis-steps and failed initiatives.
Dear digital spin doctors of HN,
What are the likely online tactics that will be used to neutralize Brin's on-the-record statements and previous action regarding China?
It must be a drag to practice those dark arts of digital public manipulation in secret all the time. So c'mon, make some public predictions with a throwaway and let us follow along at home!
Edit: wording
Were the dates in the emails faked? What's going on?
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/vijayboyapati
[2] https://twitter.com/real_vijay/status/1051725529512964096
[3] https://twitter.com/wiretapped/status/1051739819121016832
LOL. This video is not available in your country.
China is just a giant corp intranet with a huge ass firewall.
Why is it OK to have all our devices, etc. manufactured in China, but it's not OK for Google to offer services there?
> Why is it OK to have all our devices, etc. manufactured in China, but it's not OK for Google to offer services there?
Because manufacturing our devices there does not directly enable their oppressive practices, such as political censorship. But offering services there does, since China demands that all such services come with censorship tools built-in, and (per this guy's Twitter), actually wants the companies to take down content on demand.
TL;DR: it's the difference between doing business with a known criminal, and assisting them in commission of their crimes.
So, it's OK to give them trillions of dollars in business because we benefit even though they're going to use those trillions to further their agenda? Directly or indirectly, the results are the same.
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it" - Alan Kay
This is a great angle. I have no idea, why there is such a huge disparity there, but I have three possible explanations:
1. People do not understand supply chain management (myself included). There is nothing inherently evil about employing people in a foreign country, and not many people are aware that cost of production is lower in China because of (sometimes) horrible working conditions.
2. Google branded itself on "Don't be evil". More or less everyone in western countries would agree that facilitating censorship on a massive scale for the benefit of government officials is "bad".
3. Hypocrisy. Our way of life depends on low wage labour (read: explotiation of the poor) in foreign countries. Our morals follow our wallet.
Clearly the US government has the power to decide the destiny of less powerful countries.
Compared to that, setting up trade agreements with China to ensure human rights, worker safety, environment protection and so on is pretty doable.
In some sense this is true, but manufacturing in China is not just about low wage labour.
The lowest minimum wage in China is 12 RMB/hour. In the US the federal minimum wage is 7.25 USD/hour. Now, 12 RMB ≈ 1.75 USD, but considering purchasing power parity (1), 12 RMB * 3.506 ≈ 6 USD.
The average factory worker wage in China is considerably higher than the minimum wage. In fact it is higher than in some eastern European countries.
Of course the above doesn't tell the whole picture as we haven't looked at for example work and environmental safety. But the lower cost of manufacturing in China can only partly be attributed to lower wages. It also an effect of their industrial network clusters, supply of raw materials, and export subsidies.
Adding to that, manufacturing in China is not just about cost, it is also about the immense scale of their manufacturing capabilities. If you need to churn out half a million iPhone X per day, where else can you get that capability?
(1) Using 2017 value for China from https://data.oecd.org/conversion/purchasing-power-parities-p...
That might not be OK either. People are questioning the wisdom of having "all our devices, etc. manufactured in China."
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/10/11/if-the-u-s-doesnt-contr...
Google news and google search is also censored in the US, Europe, Middle East and everywhere.
Why is it that so many vocal ex-employees are against censorship in china, but demand censorship in the US?
I'm against censorship everywhere but the self-righteousness of these people when it comes to china is getting to be unbearable.
These ex-employees are saying google has to censor news and search because the internet is "too toxic" and causing too much division. This is precisely what the chinese authorities say to justify censorship.
And with the recent revelations of how politically driven and manipulative google is ( and has been ), I highly doubt the chinese or any country would allow google in without certain restrictions.
https://www.businessinsider.com/words-china-banned-from-sear...
This is different from us how?
> That is different entirely from what the typical Western country censors: advertising illegal drugs, child porn, hate speech, etc.
China also censors illegal drugs, child porn, "hate speech", etc.
You are right. China censors for the good of their own citizens and our censors do so for the good of us. Oh wait, that sounds exactly the same.
I love people who conflate "hate speech" with child porn and illegal drugs. Is physics "hate speech" to flat earthers? Should we censor physics? What's next? Hate thought? Should we monitor people's brain for hate thought. Science itself is hate speech to religious people. Should we censor science?
There are lots of facts that people on both sides consider "hate speech". For example, I consider your support of censorship hate speech. Should you be censored?
Just as I said, these people love censorship in the US but hate censorship in china. Makes me wonder who and what is pushing and funding such anti-liberal and anti-western "hate speech" in the US. In all my time on the internet, I haven't come across such openly fascistic and anti-liberal "hate speech" until fairly recently.
If it's somehow an incitement to an immediate illegal action then it may be. Otherwise it's not.
In the US, hate speech isn't like being offended, it's not in the eye of the beholder. It's been covered a number of times by the Supreme Court.
And China is quite different from the US wrt free speech. US courts take a very dim view of restrictions to political free speech. It's quite a stretch to say the same about China. In fact, I'd argue that there are plenty of Western democracies who are less lenient in that regard than the US.
So it's not.
> In the US, hate speech isn't like being offended, it's not in the eye of the beholder. It's been covered a number of times by the Supreme Court.
I know. The point is that these people want hate speech to be illegal like it is in many other western nations. They want more censorship for the US, less in china.
When have google employees demanded censorship in the US?
I wonder if Twitter will eventually branch out into more long form content like this.
"Will anyone do anything about it" is classic bystander effect by the way - what are you doing about it?
By reverse-effect, I mean, let's say Google is hugely successful in China. It proves a censored search engine works and is good business, first of all. So economic arguments about the harm will be delegitimatized. Other states will ask for more censorship, and Google can't reply 'this is too costly or harmful to our business' because China would be an example of how to make it work. So the end result might be that Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, and Indonesia, Brazil, Zimbabwe, etc will all of a sudden be asking for their own forks of Dragonfly. (I just picked those countries at random, with no specific example of censorship in mind)
Secondly, if they become hugely successful in China, it compromises them just like Apple. The revenue stream will become a golden goose and too valuable to risk the anger of the government. So you'll have Google executives having to embarrass themselves like Tim Cook by praising China's "open" internet (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/12/04...)
Third, Google made one of the few brave moral decisions leaving China. Perhaps you don't believe Brin did it for the reasons claimed, but your belief isn't important, what is important is what many people believe this, especially politically repressed people who need to believe in heroic actions. This undercuts that decision. If the world's most popular company for organizing information not only fails to fight censorship, but actively helps regimes that wants to implement state level censorship, it will be a big loss of a beacon in the constant struggle between censorship and anti-censorship forces. Having the world's largest companies, even if they're only doing it for economic reasons, on the side of anti-censorship is better than having the world's largest companies on the side of censorship (for economic reasons)
And fourth, Google can't change China. The idea that a SV tech company can trigger improvements in the politics and openness of a powerful country like China is quite simply hubris. We're not smart enough to do this, and intelligence isn't even the factor. China's future will be written by its people and internal events.
If they want an uncensored search engine, then one day, the political winds will change, and they will demand it. But until they do so powerfully enough for the current government to change its behavior, the actions of foreign firms won't do anything. I'm not sure we should involve ourselves in this fight other than through NGOs that already fight these things (e.g. Amnesty International) or offering anti-firewall/anti-censorship tools.
There's only one argument for doing business in China as a search engine, and it is a legitimate one, just not a moral one: the shareholder argument.
To follow up on your quote:
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." - Giovanni Gentile
The communism vs fascism question is always though. Soviet Russia can easily be described as both communist and strongly fascistic.
What does this even mean? The government and the people who run it are the direct political descendants of Mao and the Communists who overthrew the Chinese government in the '40s. They are Communists. Full stop. If the people who call themselves "Communist" and have run the most populous nation in the world for the last 75 years can't be the very definition of "communist," then words have no meaning.
North Korea confirmed to be a democracy?
And since we were originally talking about Chinese communists, it's interesting to note that they have been the chief supporters of North Korea's government.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/world/asia/china-maoists-...
The reason why China isn't meaningfully communist is because their economy isn't communist, or even socialist, in any meaningful sense. There are a lot of govt-owned companies, yes, but they're run as capitalist enterprises. Again, what this resembles most is fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, just less bloodthirsty. What it does not resemble is the USSR, or China under Mao.
baldingsworld.com @BaldingsWorld scholars-stage.blogspot.com @Scholars_Stage
Check out his father's background and 'the labour activism'...
Google and the US are better off being present in China that being left out.
From the perspective of the US (Google is an American company) it is obviously tactically and strategically important to have the best information possible on what is going on in China. This is much, much easier to achieve when American companies are present "on the ground". For example, I am sure that this project gives the US a pretty good insight on what the Chinese government does. It would be much more difficult to ask Tencent how the Chinese system works, wouldn't it?
Foreign companies face different rules in China when compared to Chinese ones via selective enforcement of law. They will not be exposed to the same real Chinese system.
Edited my origins comment for clarity.
Likewise, search is increasingly less relevant as time goes on, so longer term vision likely drifts away from it anyways (which is more likely the real reason why google wants back into China).
Suppose that Chinese-born-and-bred search-engine-and-advertising-company, through virtue of having access to a massive economic resource, succeeds broadly and then enters the western markets. What then?
Not trying to justify any of this, but it's worth discussing.
Someone with less skills and expertise, who will hopefully make more mistakes implementing censorship? Or maybe someone with more skin in the game (e.g. locals) who might actually be more motivated to sabotage it?
But, conversely, Google implementing such a thing in China - and justifying it as moral there by these arguments - would also give them skills and expertise to do it US in the future, and a canned excuse as to why it's okay.
> Suppose that Chinese-born-and-bred search-engine-and-advertising-company, through virtue of having access to a massive economic resource, succeeds broadly and then enters the western markets. What then?
Then we engage in protectionism ourselves.
This is eerily reminiscent of arguments that people have used around Project Maven (cloud compute for drone footage). At this point I am starting to wonder if this style of argument has a fundamental weakness. E.g. if immoral act "X" is going to be done by someone, is it logical that the most moral actor "A" must do this? In the limit, this has the most moral actors doing the most evil. In fact, it has the most moral actors being the first to jump in to do evil, before anyone else even gets a chance to. That seems totally backwards.
So while Google might benefit, humanity would suffer.
Blackrock[1] has said social responsibility is important to them.
Companies looking for investment need to operate with principles aligned with investors or investors will look for alternatives.
[1] - https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/23/blackrocks-push-for-social-r...
Of course, I'm also a bit wrong w.r.t. the structure of Alphabet. Where's Alphabet's leadership on this?
Shareholders select the board members. The board members determine the overall plan and direction of the company. The C-Suite ( CEO, CTO, CFO, etc ) execute the plan of and follow the directions of the board.
If the board members want to make drastic changes, they can ask the shareholders to vote on it. If the shareholders don't like certain board members or the changes or direction of the company, then can vote to remove board members and put in members they want.
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/040315/what-can-sha...
Normally, the CEOs do what the board wants and the board have a fiduciary duty to make money for the shareholders. So unless we have a rogue CEO going against the wishes of the board or shareholders, it's highly likely that most of the shareholders will support google's ambitions in china.
Do you think shareholders would have voted for Apple to leave china and leave tens of billions in revenue and profits on the table?
If anything, shareholders are probably asking google's board why google isn't doing business in china already.
Shareholders > Board of Directors > C-Suite ( CEO, CTO, CFO, etc ) > Management > Employees
Also, fiduciary duty doesn't mean that the CEO has a duty to bring in the profits. It means that he shouldn't dip in the till.
Think of shareholders like voters in a not-very-well-functioning democracy. They hold ultimate power, but don't get to vote on things that often and certainly not on every decision. So their power gets exercised on big lumpy things like restructuring the cap table or executive appointments. Big shareholders may well be informed or even consulted about big decisions though, and have informal opportunities to make their general feelings known by meeting senior management. If the shareholders are unhappy they might orchestrate a rebellion and block executive comp or vote on some independent board members or whatever.
The board is like the legislature in a parliamentary democracy. They are accountable to the shareholders because they are appointees, so if the shareholders don't like what they do they can give them the boot and appoint someone else. Likewise they can fire the executives if they need to, and also get a vote about a wider range of issues than the shareholders. They therefore have more direct control than the shareholders, but its still not at a very granular level of detail typically. Or if they are going super granular on one topic they are really zoomed out from everything else (and giving the executives more latitude in those areas). So I have been at board meetings where there is a 100 page board pack and the entire conversation has revolved around a microscopic discussion of one page, with everything else being skipped over.
Then the c-suite are like the executive branch. They deal with the day to day and actually have to get things done. On a daily basis shareholders and the board will generally leave them alone unless things are going poorly (in which case the eye of sauron is on you).
So hopefully it follows from that model that you actually have a lot of leverage as an executive and a lot of latitude to make decisions within a general strategic direction that has been agreed by board and shareholders. Secondly, shareholders are not a uniform blob of faceless avaricious beasts who care only about profit - institutional shareholders will have their respective shareholders and issues like reputational risk etc to consider. As an exec, you can often use credibility you have built up to persuade them of a particular strategic direction and they may or may not give you leeway depending on how much you have delivered in the past etc.