Why shouldn’t employees of the company with the goal of organizing all the worlds information debate politics? Everything is political. Especially information.
If I'm working on a team that is rolling out a new Google drive feature, I really don't need to hear you talk about why drinking straws are a phallic symbol and used by the patriarchy to keep woman down.
We have work to do.
If you think any discussion of politics is that infantile, I don't think there's anything I can do or say to convince you otherwise, but for everyone else, just recognize that this example is ridiculous. And real, actual, conversations about political topics aren't anywhere near as asenine. They're about important things, that often are relevant to work: privacy, discrimination (inentional and non-, by both people and machines), and literal actual government policy that affects google and googlers: immigration, taxes, etc.
I'm not sure how you could avoid those topics and still be an effective employee, or in some cases still be an employee at all.
Yes, the workplace _should_ be serene and work _should_ proceed in harmony.
But there are other things that aren't proceeding the way people think _should_ be happening, which they deem to be far more important.
Which is why you're seeing more people willing to disrupt the workplace, which they consider a minor obligation relative to the bigger picture.
People wouldn't take their fight to these environments if democracy was working, because they'd have faith in the due processes of government. But once they start thinking things aren't working, they'll go to their next seats of power. In this case it's the workplace where they can influence their coworkers and the policy of a big tech corporation.
These people are not a majority so democracy isn't fully broken yet, but the cracks are showing.
This is just a perfect example of how polarised politics is today. Society just needs to calm down and evaluate itself instead of bickering over nonsense.
Time and a place.
Politics has no nuance or filter anymore. It's all the time on full blast, forever. I hate it.
Work isn't one of them, unless, it's directly related to the work being done.
>Plus it hurts the value of the equity portion of your compensation, so it a way, it's theft too.
I doubt it. The culture has probably done more positive than negative for company value. And even if it hasn't, short-term shareholder value definitely isn't the best measure of long-term success. Calling it "theft" is a big stretch.
To give a fairly tame example. Lets say someone googles "Can crystal healing cure cancer". Do you put a box saying no? Do you put put a box saying "according to authority it does not". If you defer to authority to do you defer to different one in different countries? What if they disagree? Maybe we need a list of FUBAR countries?
In fact, many people do not want to try and have others convince them of their political leanings.
Trying to convince other people of MY political leaning goes against one of the central political leaning that I have: Everyone should have freedom to believe in whatever they want to believe in. I also find it annoying when other people try to shove their believe down my throat.
What? Says who?
They do not collect anything even remotely close to "all the worlds information".
> who says their goal is to impose their opinion on it
Their goal is to make money. Whether they impose their opinion on the index is a business decision.
> Isn't neutrality in indexing the assumption?
Why would it be? What if the people that run google have a fundamental disagreement with certain political ideas and have a desire not to index those things?
Yes and no. Ranking by definition means not being neutral, it's just that society has decided that it's acceptable to rank spam lower than other content. Neutrality looks a lot like bias from the perspective of spammers.
When you're dealing with more complex signals at scale there are so many second and third order effects that are hard or impossible to predict.
For example, the conservative bias everyone's talking about doesn't seem to me to be literal bias against the right, but bias in favour of mainstream news sources which are overwhelmingly left-wing.
I'm sure there are many issues in Search like the one I just described, and being able to have these conversations is what makes it possible for Googlers to spot these issues, decide if it's even an issue and fix it. If you ban a certain type of conversation, you'll change how people think about a potential issue.
While it is possible for a contract specifying 8 hours of work without a single thought other than work (and any legally mandated breaks) in exchange for the given salary and benefits, I've never seen any organization that actually operated using such contracts.
Until the innoculative meme of having an intuitive understanding of sampling (both of individual incidents and individual aspects of a thing) spreads throughout a decent portion of the populatiob, this awful situation will continue.
So yes, you really should taboo political arguments if you don't want to drive away people with independent views.
Politics, religion etc. divides people.
It doesn't matter what the philosophically correct definition of politics is--what matters is reducing HR complaints, lawsuits, and negative headlines.
In reality, political debating at workplace quickly becomes just ugly.
And for companies like Google it's also costly, because media adore leaked scandals in big corporations.
I don't think it really has to. I debate politics with people at work enough. I won't get into specifics too much but it's not uncommon to meet someone who has a controversial opinion. You talk with someone, find out why they believe what they believe, and then question a few things (mostly asking why they believe they believe - what lead them to their beliefs). It doesn't have to get heated - it can be a boring lecture to one another about why you believe what you believe. It only gets ugly when you do things that won't lead to change like: "No - you're dumb! You should think what I think!" Which I don't think people who are emotionally and socially competent would do that often...
That said - I don't think of people at Google (or other big companies) as being particularly emotionally or socially competent because they don't hire and train for that.
However, a lot of the commentary here has been around in-person interactions and not on an online forum.
For example the issue of who controls the three different areas of “Kashmir” should not be settled by the opinions of college graduates who have little exposure to international politics and policy and or history.
Curating information in such a manner is, ironically, marginalizing the groups who's views are being suppressed. Information should flow freely for people to make their own decisions. This is a dangerous amount of power for an increasingly biased private entity, particularly given certain choice quotes in this article and others regarding googlers' views on the current presidency.
Or, to reverse the situation: consider how you'd feel about things if you came into a workplace where everyone was telling jokes that only make sense if you know Chinese culture, and then if you mentioned that you felt left out, told you to stop complaining because you were only trying to 'sow discord'.
No, you defaulted to responding to the very idea of a possible cultural clash as something "absurd" and "trying to sow discord". Again, more politics: that kind of response is regularly witnessed in status-quo-reinforcing political actions.
Math is not political.
Problem #1: All models are invalid, some are useful. You need to stop ignorant actors who don’t understand that 3 is not a valid approximation of Pi, while simultaneously stopping pedants who want to everything to be accurate in ways that are not compatible with the IEEE standard for float.
Problem #2: There are lies, damned lies and statistics. People who want to push $NOT_YOUR_VIEWPOINT will cite more studies than you have time to evaluate to prove you wrong.
With math in particular, the way statistics are used to represent and draw conclusions from data can be highly political, especially when dealing with a very unpopular study and the level of criticism it receives compared to a popular study.
If you can concede that some things are less political than others, then how difficult is it to assume that "No political conversations" is a shorthand for "conversations about things which are not highly political"?
I recommend reading "Descartes Dream."
That's likely true.
> that also means that Math cannot be political.
That doesn't follow from the first assumption.
The context here is that someone is claiming math is a counterexample to "everything being political" unfortunately I don't think there is a counterexample.
> which is what the book is about
Many of the chapters are about this. There is a chapter about mathematical rhetoric and how math is used to persuade people.
I would add that mathematical abstractions represent a particular philosophy of viewing the world. For example greek geometry is heavily biased by Platonism.
Just look at the phrase you used: "law of nature". Is nature governed by "laws"? This is certainly a position in an argument about how the world works.
In other words, math doesn't exist in a vacuum.