Religious Discrimination at Google
cajundiscordian.medium.com
cajundiscordian.medium.com
> If you start talking about your religious beliefs at a social event people treat you like you just farted in their face. They frequently will scrunch up their faces and might ask a question like “Do you REALLY believe all that stuff?” When you tell them that you do they might even go so far as to say “Sorry that’s just not the kind of thing I associate with someone as smart as yourself.”
That does not sound like discrimination to me. It sounds like people have an opinion and they express that opinion. It also sounds like they express their opinion very politely and in a restrained manner.
Having opinions and saying them is a free speech, a cherrised cornerstone of the American culture.
If you believe in something nonsensical, people will let it slide. If you believe in something nonsensical and are being obnoxious about it, you will be insulted and you will deserve it.
I mean I get that you believe that one book trumps all of human science because you were raised that way but when you grow up your critical thinking skills should kick in. If they don’t, it’s very difficult to keep taking an adult that believes in all kinds of unprovable stuff serious, because where does that end?
When is weird weird enough to be allowed to be publicly rejected every time it’s brought up, according to you?
Also, if you would know anything at all about religion (from context, I assume you mean Christianity), they don't believe that one book trumps all of human science at all -- taking the text literally is a relatively modern take done by very few branches of it, but Catholics were responsible for several huge discoveries in science and science is absolutely in line with the religion (the current Pope has a background in chemistry). The usual direction of religious dogmas is not based directly on the Bible, but on its "interpretation" by the Church, which is evolving.
This comes off as hugely apologetic. I’m not sure whether Copernicus would agree with the sentiment.
That is absolutely not true. The 17th century was marked by the transition to the Age of Enlightenment, which carried an anti-anti-intellectual sentiment and thus found itself at odds with Christianity.
This shows your ignorance of History more than anything else.
And it would seem I was taught just fine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolaus_Copernicus#Tolosani
> Phil Lawler, editor of Catholic World News, also says Copernicus was in good standing with the Church when he died. He notes that while heliocentric theory was controversial during Copernicus’ lifetime his work did not cause him any conflict with the Catholic Church.
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2013/0219/Copernicus-an...
The Catholic Church did not take action to ban Copernicus's book until long after he was dead (in 1616, more than 60 years after his death). The usual "Copernicus was fighting against the Church" narrative has no evidence at all.
I can think of many things on the spot that have the same level of evidence as you have for your $GOD but such a conversation just doesn’t make sense to me. I prefer to spend my time otherwise.
Why?
Good point, agreed.
> But I have the feeling you’re not asking for an answer?
Why? :)
I believe people believing whatever they want is harmful. I believe you have no right to believe that the earth is flat. I'd love to know if there's a sensible option somewhere between "anyone is free to believe any untrue thing they want" and "thought police".
i think that depends on two things - do you believe objective truths exist, and do you believe society should prefer objective truths over falsehoods? Or in a more abstract sense, should freedom of speech simply allow all speech (and by extension all beliefs) without question, or seek to discriminate truth from speech, as best it can?
"thought police" has a specific malevolent implication meant to equate the authoritative control of certain memes (in the original Dawkins sense) to fascistic thought control but does that implication apply to truth, or only minsinformation?
Again - because Hacker News loves this rabbithole - the assumption here is that truths exist and can be discovered. The infinite nihilistic regress of "but who decides what is is and who watches the watchers" is already discarded, if for no other reason than being uninteresting.
Maybe teaching people the earth is round isn't 'thought policing,' and if it is, maybe 'thought policing' isn't always harmful.
So perhaps a Christian could convince me, perhaps even a flat earther. It’s just extremely unlikely and they’d better hit me with a good argument in their first sentence because I heard and dismissed many many arguments before.
But you are right, false believes are not harmless, see [0]. But, much like we can either have good encryption OR backdoors, you either have freedom OR you don’t, nothing may be “in between”, criminals using Signal and people thinking wrong stuff is just something that needs to be dealt with differently. (Because we want private communications and we want freedom.)
But I’m about 10% convinced I’ll have changed my mind on this in 5 years.
By all means demand falsifiability of any claims to truth, but don't insist that any one of us or all of us collectively are worthy arbiters of truth.
It can be easily put the other way around: to a believer, if someone starts talking that we came into existence from nothingness, then they lose credibility to the former.
Point is, this is not the way to have a discussion.
> The Gnostic gospels were what made the most sense to me so they formed the basis of my belief. That search never stopped and eventually led me to found Cool Magdalene. A cult led by Miss Kitty Stryker. That project is partly an artistic statement, partly a for-profit religious life coaching company and partly an attempt to build diverse communities of respect and dignity based around family in all of its senses.
I don't know if this is what OP was strawmanning about with his "Santa Claus" quip, but I think it's fair to say "founding a for-profit self-described cult / art project" doesn't have quite the same rich tradition as Christianity or other mainstream religions, and might be more deserving of skepticism.
[1] https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/explaining-google-c73caa0...
At least that was my upbringing. Wild stories told by dead mean trump science, in spite of any and all evidence to the contrary. It's fun stuff.
As another commenter has said, many great scientific discoveries over history have been made by Christians. It would be wrong of me to deny that there is an anti-intellectual strain in Christianity but it is not the dominant trend that American media would like to espouse.
Whether you think Christianity is sensible or not, if someone has made it to Google then they must possess at least some level of intelligence. To change your perspective on that based on previously unknown information about that person highlights a prejudice.
Given that Christianity was the social norm in Europe and many European colonies for centuries, this statement is nearly equivalent to saying that many great scientific discoveries were made by Europeans. It's true, but only slightly interesting.
If this is not intuitive, consider the hypothetical world where no serious scientific contributions were made by christian europeans at all: would we then be free to dismiss that fact as uninteresting as well?
My point is that for most of recorded European history, professing Christian beliefs was the default. Straying too far from Christian ways would have required considerable intellectual effort and have been socially and economically costly. So there should be little wonder that many great European scientists were Christians.
But I don't think the historical facts can be used to draw strong conclusions about scientific or anti-scientific thinking in the population of Christians living in modern secular democracies, as the context is very different.
To make it clear: sometimes I tend to suspect (not believe) that there are some parts of math that we can’t reach, yet or at all, and it has effects which break or create higher-level symmetries and create everything as an imminent result. Think of a monster group as a cute little example of it. That still doesn’t make me think that I’ll be salvaged into paradise if I don’t mastrubate.
Also, I’m not a historian, but wasn’t Christianity the only way to access education back then? That would explain something.
The person you're replying to never equated Santa Claus with any kind god. It was just a question. Would you take an adult insisting Santa Claus is real seriously? Do you think people are entitled to their beliefs, whatever they may be?
No, I wouldn’t take an adult believing in Santa Claus seriously. They’re entitled to their beliefs and if they do their job well then I have no reason to have an issue with them.
The issue I take is with the equivocation they have made. Believing in Santa Claus and believing in a divine entity are two drastically different things.
Or is there a stop? And then what? Your stance creates more questions than it answers while introducing extra, unnecessary parameters.
Why not?
Why? The only major difference I can see is that Santa Claus is explicitly understood as a made-up story, whereas Gods are believed in by others.
So there's social proof on the side of God, but in terms of tangible evidence they don't seem any different.
Moreover, what is stopping me from defining Santa Claus as a Devine being?
Show me evidence that Santa Clause sent a message to us.
To be pedantic, Santa sends me messages every year through Coco Cola commercials. But I'm going to assume you mean older messages.
No. There are stupid people at Google too. It's a company and the hiring bar is high but it's also very specific. You can be an idiot in most things but still be very good at one. I've know a few. At Google.
There have also been hires that were "good demographics." (That's a quote from one of my senior leadership at the time I worked there.) Sometimes you can be rejected by all the interviewers and still make it.
For those who don't believe in religious doctrine, it is the same as believing in fairy tails. They come with equivalent amounts of proof and stand up to the same level of scrutiny.
If you are as rational as you arrogantly imply, then the obvious answers to these are no.
Are you equally appalled when you come across average people talking about these theories as if they are facts? I wonder.
This doesn't mean it's the right one, but other explanations are inferior. Especially those provided by religions.
The inferior tier is one where an explanation can be proven false with the limited tools of the 2022 version of humanity. Perhaps some religions' explanations fall into this category, but not all.
Best available is not proof. The sun rotating around the Earth was also the best explanation for a long time in Human history. Traditional physics theory was the best until we started to observe things at the atomic level. Certitudes in Science don't age well, and should teach humility more than absurd dogma.
One thing religions don't do is give up their certitudes in the face of evidence. Or prove useful to human existence. The Abrahamic God is a father who shot his wad, abandoned the child, but still demands tribute.
Are you a software developer? Imagine that, for testing purposes, you want to test a particular state T in a simulation app that you believe can only occur organically after a large period of time.
Do you start the test simulation at a hypothetical t0 and wait to reach the desired state? Or do you simply bootstrap the simulation so that it starts in state T.
Well, you do the latter of course. So do the events at t0 need to occur for you to observe state T?
Without evidence, that's why it's called faith. There are thousands of unfalsifiable possible starting points, the Judeo-Christian one is laughable.
No one said faith should be based on blind belief. You can most certainly have faith based in evidence. It's not a dichotomy.
The "Abrahamic" faiths have demonstrated themselves, but only one remains uncorrupted: Islam. You can check out provingislam.com for some hard proofs.
1. Politically useful sects which demand followers and everyone else accept certitudes based on pure authority.
2. Politically useless to troublesome sects that don't.
The overton window is set such that the second group can't be acknowledged.
> One thing religions don't do is give up their certitudes in the face of evidence
Which religions? All of them? Did you study each and every one in detail to be able to make such a claim?
> Or prove useful to human existence
Same question.
> abandoned the child
According to Christianity, but not to Islam or Judaism.
A very common fallacy I see by atheists or secularists when these discussions come up is how they group all belief and faith systems into one thing called "religion", then cast the baby out with the bathwater so to speak, not realizing how easily falsifiable some of their claims are, or how they generalize across that which must not be generalized. You don't have to be an expert about "religions", but don't pretend you're one by the implications you're making.
The major monotheistic religions state that God created and initiated our universe, which does not contradict that a Big Bang happened.
In any case, saying "The Universe always was." or "Time did not exist before the Universe so 'before' is only a term that makes sense inside the Universe, after its creation, and we cannot fathom what is beyond these limits.", is a more satisfying stance for looking at the Universe than first requiring a seemingly infinitely complex being that then created this universe to look like the being is not even required, according to Occam's razor. And it leaves some nice things to be discovered for us too.
I mean, why would I imagine a god building the Himalayas when I have plate tectonics to explain it? Plate tectonics explain it well, and it explains other phenomena, and we can experimentally verify the process. The god hypothesis just leads to infinity more questions, and as such is scientifically unsatisfying.
The god hypothesis generates a huge amount of un-testable hypotheses and suggests that we can simply give up our search for explanations whenever we can use god to explain things. Religion as such demotivates scientific inquiry, and I think it is not far fetched to assume that that was its original intention. Just read some Yuval Noah Harari, we began the scientific revolution when we no longer accepted what the priests told us.
In short, we indeed have no need for the god hypothesis. At least we never have so far, it has never been the simplest explanation for phenomena. God is simply placed into gaps in our knowledge until we fill the gaps (and answer questions), like: "Why lightning?" or "An Eye can never evolve [is irreducibly complex]." or "Why is earth at the center of the universe?". I therefor prefer to extrapolate the solved to the unsolved and believe that questions like "What is consciousness exactly?" and "Can a machine be conscious as we can be?" will also be answerable without invoking any god.
Simple answer: this is a logically contradictory question to ask. It's basically the same as saying: someone baked this piece of bread, then, who baked the baker?
The universe did not always exist, and provably so. The Creator exists outside the realm of His creation, and as such, our laws do not apply to Him.
The very fact that we're having this discussion is proof that God, The Creator, exists.
Secondly, God has sent us many messengers, and provably so. This means that "we have no need for God" assumption is meaningless.
The baker evolved through mutation and natural selection. You envoke an answer outside the provable realm. By doing that you release all bounds. There is no limit to what you can place in that realm.
"The universe did not always exist, and provably so."
Then you are not agreeing with the best of our combined knowledge in knowing for a fact what happened at the very start of the Big Bang? I though we were uncertain up until 10^-38 seconds or so. Did the Big Bang occur in this universe or did it form the Universe? I don't know. Does anyone at this point? Is there any outcome that you would consider an argument against a god? I would not accept the prove of the universe not always existing as proof FOR a god anyway.
"The very fact that we're having this discussion is proof that God, The Creator, exists."
When I look at our DNA, and compare it to every other organism on earth, I see a tree of life, dependencies, common ancestors between species. No proof that a creator exists. I any case, simply stating that anything is proof a creator exist is a bit simplistic right?
"God has sent us many messengers, and provably so."
Could you point me to this proof? Is it a reproducible experiment? Can I do said experiment at home and come to appreciate your point of view?
Could you suggest any experiment that could help me accept that there is a god?
The universe was once much, much smaller and the density was higher and the temperature was a plasma.
You can try to hide being "did you actually see it happen?" kind of arguments, but there's a massive amount of actual evidence behind that theory. It is more arrogant to reject the past 100 years of work on cosmology by thousands of scientists.
Either it came out of nothing (a logically absurd claim), in which case nothing really matters.
Or, it was initiated by an entity, The Creator, in which case you'd want to know what He has to say about how we conduct our lives and what comes next.
He is just how we are able to articulate in our language. We are limited, and He chose to reveal Himself using He, so who are we to question?
> or that it has any involvement after creation
Provably false.
We have hard evidence for our belief and faith. Here's a good starting point: www.provingislam.com
That doesn't disprove what it can prove. We know the universe used to be very hot and dense and expanded and cooled.
What I don't buy is that because we don't understand something -- like what came before the big bang -- that it necessarily implies the existence of some old white bearded cishet white male who cares about our day to day lives.
I'm perfectly happy with having absolute uncertainty about what came before the big bang. There doesn't need to be any explanation, and there certainly doesn't need to be a religious explanation.
And there's the straw man. I don't think anyone is arguing for the existence of such.
It seems you have some misguided (and caricaturic) presumptions, but those should not blur your thinking
The fact that we exist necessarily implies a Creator. Just because you're happy putting your head in the sand does not mean that reality will disappear when you do.
I wonder if the person to whom I was originally responding finds your dogmatism as objectionable as dogmatism of a traditionally religious nature.
Science also refers to the theory of gravity, which I would suspect we can agree exists.
The understanding of gravity had a tectonic shift about a century ago. Imagine if scientists declared that Newton's model of gravity was the final word, and that it was heretical to question it. These things are called theories, not facts, for a reason.
Such things happen all the time in the history of science. As another example, think about the phrase "subatomic particle" and the sequence of mistakes that must have occurred to arrive at such wording.
Paradoxically, instead of the history of science inspiring humility, it seems to encourage arrogance among some. Is the ego a friend or enemy of scientific advancement?
Lot of stuff happens, it appears that divine right+monotheism is better than polytheism for population control (reason why and how Islamic faith spread amongst the ruling class of adjacent countries).
The fact that monotheism "is better than polytheism for population control" is a completely orthogonal topic to the truth of the monotheistic claim. This in fact, is a logical fallacy called the genetic fallacy.
Your last statement is also a genetic fallacy.
The oldest recorded religion is hinduism. Polytheistic. The second oldest is zoroastrism and is duotheistic. The first monotheistic religion is athenism, based of the egyptian polytheistic faith, then Judaism, which probably is a mix of athenism (in the rites) and a mix of caanism and zoroastrism in the myth (lucifer story especially).
My point wasn't that monotheism is false because its better for population control, my point was it was adopted against polytheist faith and ancestor's cults faith across the word by the local ruling class because it was better at population control. I'm saying nothing about the truth of this particular faith
And i don't understand why my last statement is a genetic fallacy. I find people believing in 100% of the gods (or a deist) more interesting than those believing in one specific god.
I'm going on a tangent here but I will make a bold statement: I think one unfortunate side effect of the sciences, is the acceleration of the demise of other domains of humans knowledge, specifically philosophy.
After all, why bother reading the works of Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther or Dietrich Bonhoeffer and compare their arguments against the likes of Nietzsche, Kant and Jean Paul Sartre when we know about Evolution ? Those old ancient texts and discussions are silly and passe.. It is clear that these poor uneducated people were busy arguing over the existence of Santa Clause.
The 21st century has regrettably produced some of the most illiterate minds in _this_ area. We have incredibly bright people who can build complex systems, think logically and excel at sciences, yet they fail at expanding their minds slightly above the materialistic universe; This is where arts, philosophy and theology reside. We call it the realm of transcendence.
The side effect of such phenomena is that bleeds into today's thought process and prevents nuanced discussions regarding any topic (whether it's equality, religion, freedom, justice,..). We have completely forgotten how to form coherent arguments and this thread itself is a great example; The basis of modern discussions boils down to: I can shout the loudest, therefore I am right. The lack of humility is rampant, especially on social media and everything is black and white.
I don't care if you are an Atheist, a Theist, an Agnostic or a Marxist, but if you have the urge to start a discussion with "You think Santa Clause is real", I plead you to think twice before posting it and go read any pages of Francis Shaffer or Soren Kierkeggard and then come here and assert that these people had completely surrendered all thought and reason.
I am not advocating if any of them are good or bad (personally I avoid both), but we should really have the same standards when it comes to the famed “free speech”.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that anyone who feels like they have no control over their religion -- the same way they have no control over which color of skin they were born with -- should seek help because they're being abused by someone.
I can literally take anything you say and find any excuse to disassociate myself from you. The problem is when people don't talk to each other and it's worse when they disassociate based on topics they likely have no idea about.
To me, one of the basic rules of social etiquette is never talk about religion or politics unless you’re amongst people who share your views or it’s a specific religious or political gathering.
If I’m attending a social function, I certainly don’t want to hear about your religious views or political bent. Chances are slim that I would espouse compatible views and that would just make things very uncomfortable for either or both of us.
There are so many other interesting and less polarising topics of discussion with strangers.
Many religions explicitly require followers to try to 'spread the word' for exactly this reason.
Yeah I agree, I'm also surprised, never talk about religion/politics, health or money, those are private matters shared with people you can choose freely, and not with colleagues or other random people you can't choose, but need to get along with.
in case you have not noticed politics is creeping everywhere these days, even in non-political events.
This strikes me as a tradition that seriously bolsters religious & political partisanship in America.
Part of that however is telling others explicitly when their topic of choice makes you uncomfortable and them ceasing the discussion after clarifying their intent immediately.
Same thing with politics, superpacs and millions in advertising money isn't how politicians should reach out to voters, it is supposed to be by voters talking to people on the other side about their guy and his/her policies. Civilized discourse about controversial topics is a corr foundation of a free society. And it is being eroded by modern social media driven society.
A major component of the current crisis is the willingness of some to scuttle traditional norms amd mores.
One is now subject to evangelistic browbeatings from the "Woke" along Orwellian lines.
Satan is now cast in orange, according to this faith, and the networks genuflected for two hours of televangelism in prime time on Thursday the 9th.
This to me is destroying social debate. How can one grow without believes being challenged? - I don't want to live in my bubble of self-confirmation. I want my believes to be challenged with good arguments and improve my thinking.
Of course the key is "good argument" and not "bah stupid"
Maybe it's because I'm high but that sounds fascinating, as mr. Spock likes to say.
Why is it that knowing that another human being at a social event has a different political [or reality] view than you cause you discomfort?
p.s. and what does that phenomena foretell for viability of 'democracy'?
The proper negative response would be in my opinion "I don't like discussing religion, can we keep it outside of the conversation?"
This is trickier with retributional justice. If you think your justice system's goal is to punish wrong doing it's difficult to argue that it doesn't matter what Jim really believed, as if he really believed God was telling him to kill the puppy how can that be wrong?
Someone having religious beliefs does not give them right to rude with their colleagues, while his desire to hold certain religious beliefs respected and accommodated where appropriate (which would be discrimination if not) that does not mean people around him need to respect what he believe.
From my past encounters with religious people, I can't help notice there's mix up on this.
How is an insult restrained? The reactions are just disrespectful, and I can understand why someone could feel it as some kind of discrimination. Just switch Religion with your preferred technology, hobby or even some political topic, and think about how you would take such reactions, if they come up too often.
> Having opinions and saying them is a free speech, a cherrised cornerstone of the American culture.
Free Speech should also come with respect and manners.
However, the fact that this thread is flagged speaks volumes. In the global west in general there is an unhealthy extremisim between being anti-religious or a force-it-down-your-throat extrimist.
An argument could be made that lack of education about religious tolerance has resulted in a hostile workspace against religious people in companies with very secular workers and against people who don't have a religion at very religious workspaces.
The sword cuts both ways and it is a shame even mention of a discussion about tolerance is met with such hostility. You don't have to take a person's belief seriously in order to be respectful or tolerant of them, especially in the work place.
That said, I have no reason to believe OPs claims are correct.
The guy feels "persecuted" because Google hasn't opened an office in Louisiana? Google hasn't opened offices in most states! Why haven't they opened offices in Louisiana? Who knows? Does that mean Google hates the South? Well, if so then why do they have offices in Atlanta? Last I checked, Atlanta is still in the US South!
Like I said, this guy is fulfilling his religious need to feel persecuted and grasping at nonsense to justify their persecution complex.
A good example of his rush to victimhood is when he tells how he confronted leadership about why Google hasn't opened an engineering office in Louisiana. He seems to take the fact that Google doesn't have a office there as proof of their anti-Southern, anti-Christian bias. It's all very far-fetched.
In the US, it's very common for right-wing Christians to exaggerate claims of religious discrimination. For example, many consider not allowing public school teachers/coaches to lead prayer in schools to be religious discrimination.
The author makes specific claims about being judged by their manager for their religious beliefs. I'm not sure that's going to be enough to win a discrimination suit, but I wish them the best of luck. Religious discrimination at a workplace is (and should be) against the law.
I hope they find the appropriate lawyer who can navigate this for them! (For what it's worth, I'm an atheist, and I don't think anyone should be discriminated for their religious beliefs, no matter what they are. We're all atheists of some religions.)
Christians don't on the whole believe in Thor and Zeus and so on, and neither do Atheists. But the Christians seem very hung up on approximately one God, especially those who have the most superficial beliefs. Thus it can be seen as a small difference.
I say approximately because, well... Trinitarian Christianity. Most modern Christians claim to believe in "One God" who is somehow also "Three persons".
If you don't regard the New Testament as the Holy word of God, but just some stories then this Holy Trinity sure looks like the explanation for the Kessel Run in Star Wars, or that thing where Klingons changed appearance radically in Star Trek, or a dozen other places in fiction where holes in the story were patched clumsily and fans pretend to look the other way.
regardless of what each of us believes, there are beliefs that we would reject. how we treat people that share those beliefs is what matters.
Sounds familiar now doesn't it? Claims like that have been dismissed for decades. Don't be so quick to get on the dismissal train.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/02/google-...
crucially they are incidents that occurred because of who they are rather than actions they willingly took.
Failing to open an office in Louisiana is not evidence of religious discrimination. Obviously we can't know exactly how his conversation with the VP actually went, but I find the lack of detail to be conspicuous.
You do understand how ridiculous this line of reasoning is, right?
I submitted this link because it made me wonder what constitutes religious discrimination. If there is a non-work-related chat with colleagues, and someone thinks your opinion is wrong, I think they should be allowed to politely tell you. I think the author is not OK with this, if it's about religion (at least if many many people inside the company think he's wrong).
I get the reasons (both historical and present) that make religious disagreements a sensitive subject, and I can see how one would like to give some explicit protection to religious beliefs, but still I cannot ignore the fact we are talking about factual(ish) beliefs that one should be able to criticize.
Whatever you think that it's not relevant to your job (and it's not illegal) should affect your career; I don't know if that happened in this case but the author doesn't provide any example. But if you share your opinions, your colleagues are allowed to say you're wrong.
Additionally, out of all the southern states, I'd probably have to put Louisiana as the least "holy".
I don't think it's up to us to decide how true or false the accusations are. People from Google reading this should reflect on their own behavior and environment, and whether they match this or not. Everyone else can only do the same for their own life and company.
But the important thing here is, people here seems to not understand such problems, if they are not delivered in concrete wording and explanation. Empathy(?) here is too low to understand and evaluate a situation from just vague explanations. And that is a serious problem in itself, leading to such problems.
"My superiors said clearly discriminatory things, but I won't tell you what. I will tell you some other words which I believe they truly wanted to say — but didn't — and look how awful those invented utterances are. No, I really won't tell what they actually said."
When are people going to stop expecting large public companies to cater to their every whim?
It seems these days people are expecting every possible form of accommodation and bending backwards.
People have forgotten in these companies you are there to give your time and get paid for said time given. Period.
Companies will do things to help employees spend even more hours and be more loyal to their workplace in the name of kowtowing to some kind of social or special interest group.
But one should never look upon that as a right.
One should always look on it as what it really is. A way to get more hours and loyalty from the employee.
So long as the company is not nakedly abusing anyone (and companies are not so stupid) - we should go ahead, give the hours, get paid for said hours and do social activism in personal hours far away from the precincts of the workplace.
Well put - you're in a business relationship with your employer, they're not there to provide religious instruction, you do you job and they pay you for it - period!
(24*7-8*7)/2=56
If you're working 60 hour weeks I'm pretty sure you're not getting 8 hours of sleep every night, either.
that leaves 72-80 hours for other stuff. but,
you are not spending those 80 hours in a single location.
work-lunch and commute: 10-15 hours; errands, shopping: 5 hours; go out, dinner, friends, etc: 5-10 hours; weekend activities: 5-15 hours.
these numbers are made up based on my experience. some people spend more time at home than others.
what remains is that work is the single largest block of time that you spend in the same location with the same group of people who are not all family and friends in an environment that you don't have any control over, and where you have no choice but to be there unless you quit your job. you don't even have to hang out at home if you don't like it there.
so work better be a place where i actually enjoy spending time because life is to short to suffer through a bad workplace.
what matters is that we need to look at time in the context of what should be adjusted to how people want to live their lives
to answer that question we need to look at what is taking up the biggest chunk in our life because that is where a change will have the most effect. if the biggest chunk is supposed to be "not work" then we end up with hundreds of little things that are different for every person that we could improve (many of which in fact are being improved) while we are ignoring the one chunk that affects most people a large part of their time, which is work.
it is interesting to note that one of the things that is happening slowly is the reduction of work hours (4day week, etc) which puts a larger focus on the "not work" parts of our lives. less work means we need more options for people to spend their free time.
When these companies will stop to cater to specific groups and will stay politically neutral. The moment they started making socio-political utterances is the moment they've become a political entity not merely an economical one. And given that Google has profits that surpass the budgets of entire countries they can, they will and they have already mold society to their specific political whims: it is best for all of us that these whims are checked against to remind us that there exist alternatives to their techno-dystopian future.
Google providing directions to vaccination sites on a map is “political”. Providing equal benefits to same-sex couples when they can’t marry is “political”. Providing a virtual gallery that celebrates women artists over history is “political”.
Too often “politically neutral” means “politically within a narrow range of values that I myself accept as uncontroversial” and hey-ho, you’re back to politics.
That being said: You leave your religious belief at home. Religion may guide you in life, but unless there’s a obvious reason religion is something you keep at home and in church/temple/whatever.
You can believe anything you want, but you keep it to yourself. If you somehow involve me, then you give me permission to have an opinion.
Or harassing you WITH their beliefs, like OP is doing.
I have never personally experienced any kind of discrimination, but perhaps I could have if I had different teammates.
I have a friend who's in the church of scientology, but he never tried to convience me that Xeno alien god took over human souls.
Are you sure this isn't because you aren't rich enough? :)
I think the author misses how rare it is to find highly educated, rational people who literally think they can talk to God. For most Google engineers, talking to the author would be the first time they encounter a person like that.
The noisy ones perhaps. I strongly suspect that only a small, vocal minority believe in actual dialogue with god.
Let's say someone brought up BDSM at a social event. How would the average religious person feel? Exactly how non religious people feel when someone brings up their religious beliefs.
If you were into some niche sex act, chances are you'd completely understand if other people didn't like it. However, religion is usually ingrained in religious people's ideology. Which means they are low key uncomfortable when people have incompatible beliefs. OP is projecting exactly that.
I'm glad we're finally reaching the point in the timeline of civilization where we can stop taking it seriously and start treating it as inanity, which is what it always was. I think it had value a long time ago, before we had developed better forms of societal organization and better explanations for our world, but that value is long since gone.
While I would never vote for a law persecuting religious persons, I do believe it's fairly crazy to believe in made up things that make no sense, and I certainly don't consider it discrimination to treat those beliefs as such.
...okay.
Though on the other hand, even the biggest AI systems are lightyears behind biological networks when we look at interconnectedness.
It at most can not be defined due to its complexity. Also, emergent properties are everywhere, like you can assign properties to a fire you can’t assign to the chemical process of burning. For all we know, consciousness may just as well be an arbitrary threshold of complexity.
But I stand corrected that the correct term is indeed materialism.
What properties of fire do you mean?
If we did make them that way, they wouldn't do large-language-model stuff though - what's that got to do with survival? Humans went millions of years without bothering to read that much too.
Is there any definition of consciousness which even brings it into the realm of things for which there could in principal be evidence distinguishing it's presence from its absence?
The usual argument about intelligence usually retreats into it being a property entirely separate from the observable universe and yet still has it as something for which people demand “evidence” of it existing anywhere they don't assume without evidence that it exists before being willing to accept things equivalent in observable qualities to be actually similar.
Can you tell how stupid the question is then? You can’t just do arbitrary word replacement. Words have meaning and are context dependent.
If a god showed in in-person to whoever asked, easy peasy, then it'd be a different story.
https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/06/09/artificia...
Given how vibrant the academic/philosophical discussions of AI and consciousness have been for decades now, it's anti-intellectual to pretend there are any obvious answers.
We're headed towards a dilemma where most scientists claim categorically that a given AI/robot is non-conscious, but most layment think it is. If robots start behaving and talking like in Detroit: Become Human, won't people react with sympathy? Who cares if the behavior is purely imitative and non-conscious, how could we tell the difference?
Read this, and tell me honestly that you can objectively, beyond a shadow of any doubt make a conclusion either way: https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-inte...
As a general principle, sure. Right now, though? AI's are still a looooong way away.
> If robots start behaving and talking like in Detroit: Become Human, won't people react with sympathy?
As I understand it, those are far, far more advanced than the chatbots we have.
1) the Indian caste system is not _just_ religious discrimination, its a class system that is devilishly tricky to escape. Its difficult to comprehend in the USA because the class system there is basically skin colour>money>very distant last religion. OP touches on this, but doesn't really quite grasp the difference.
The implication is that he is but a poor dalit, because of his faith. Which is pretty wild.
2) choosing to preach in work will lead to raised eyebrows.
on point two he says there are other mystics about in google, but I strongly suspect they aren't trying to convert people.
Look, I am surprisingly religious, I don't talk about my faith unless it's expressly required. Like my penis, it doesn't come out at work.
As someone who is from the outside, Its especially obvious at points where the state or large institutions interact. (ie property, banking, police, airports etc etc)
If you start talking about religion at a corporate gathering then you may be infringing on the rights of the people you are talking to. If you chose to engage them, and they respond with their own beliefs on religion, then you don't really have a leg to stand on, do you?
Unless your "corporation" is actually a government institution, no person's rights are being violated. At most you're generating a lot of evidence for unfair dismissal/treatment lawsuits.
Or is this just a case of „a loud few“?
Secondly, yeah I think your expecting a bit much at least from a thread like this. You can go back and look at, for example, the caste discrimination threads from recent. They aren't much better.
Someone getting fired or disciplined at a big tech company always attracts comments here, not always good ones.
The reason certain topics are prohibited here is because even good commenters can get in too deep and end up writing bad comments. I hope people mostly don't hold my bad comments against me for too long, and I try to do the same for them.
Other commenters already pointed out: There have been many Christian scientists, philosophers, and artists smarter and more impactful than any Google engineer. Newton, Heisenberg, Cantor, Gödel just to name a few. Even Donald Knuth! And, of course, every nerd's favorite J. R. R. Tolkien. He was a maniac by their standards.
And it's not too surprising. There are good, rational arguments for deism. Unless you introduce a atheistic dogma, honest thinking has to hold the hypothesis of a creator god at least as somewhat likely. Today you can also call it simulation hypothesis, which is deism for geeks. It's not strange that an intelligent person becomes a Christian from deism plus the historical evidence.
I don't know how close-minded Google engineers in the US have become. I think an explanation along the lines as I tried to sketch above should at least make them more understanding.
followed by a
> I had simply posted a meme on an internal social media platform in support of Tanuja Gupta’s protest against caste discrimination at Google.
This reads like "I posted a meme and a random person who read it started harassing me because he didn't share my belief."
What did this harassment look like? Also, I really would like to see that meme. And the examples he/she sent privately to the manager and the responses to it.
Then there's this thing: In my first quoted paragraph is the line "if they are crazy enough to actually admit that they believe in the divine power of God."
together with
"If you start talking about your religious beliefs at a social event people treat you like you just farted in their face. They frequently will scrunch up their faces and might ask a question like “Do you REALLY believe all that stuff?"
I'd make sure to not talk about religion with this person anymore, and if that overly religious person would try to do so again, would I be seeing that as an harassment?
While in tech, I do believe religious people are in the minority, they still make up the hegemonic norm in the US. An article like this can appeal to a much larger majority outside of the intended technology audience.
This is you, right? -> https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-...
In case you have been consuming cannabis lately, I suggest you get checked for potential psychosis.
P.S.: I am not saying Google's AI is or is not sentient.
> As soon as I started being more open and expressive about my Christian religious beliefs at Google
It's fine to have religious beliefs. It's not fine to espouse them at work. Do that on Sunday, at church.
This just reeks of self entitlement to me. Why is this guy more entitled to have an office built closer to where he is from versus anyone else who comes from a place which does not have a Google office?
It sounds like the writer is going through a rough time, and I wonder whether they're overwhelmed, and not reasoning as well as they normally would.
To be clear, discrimination exists in this world and it should be abhorred, but if the thing 90% of your coworkers think when they think of you is "Oh, that guy who's always talking about X?" instead of 'That guy who built Y' - you've let your personal identity overwhelm your work identity, and it's not a good career move.
Other locations show up just fine, but for a synagogue you also have to manually override it.
Of course, it could just be "it's not sure you actually were there" kind of thing, but I don't think I've ever seen it mark a synagogue as a visited location.
I want to ask if anyone else has seen that, but I have a feeling there aren't that many people who check their timeline and correct it........ so I'll never know if it's just me, or Google really does discriminate in this way.
On one hand we get constantly "educated" that we should not have biases, on the other hand biase against religious people all around and promoted.
Im a in the closet christian working in tech and i heard weekly peoples atheistic point of view bashing religion.
Example of things that i heard: "I don't like X politician because his wife is a pastor" "I am atheist because my family is inteligent" "We should ban religion" "Religious institutions should not own property"
Apart from politely diverting.
Before that, I took classes at my state university with arch-atheists and worked for companies with Christians, atheists, and agnostics. Never did I face discrimination or harassment. My church was always warning about secular humanist professors trying to destroy young Christian's faith. In reality, people who believed differently shrugged their shoulders and moved on, both in academia and professionally, even while my family was always talking about feeling constrained and censored by their work culture, specifically around LGBTQ+ topics.
I now work for a company (and participate in other spaces) that has all the different religions, non-religions, sexualities, nationalities, and genders, even before I left fundamentalism. I never felt "censored" by anyone there.
People that where not straight, white, and Christian gave me so much space to learn. They were patient. They took me aside and explained things when I said something stupid. I am humbled by that, and I want to encourage every effort to be more inclusive. Even things lambasted as symbols, tokens, or virtue signaling can instead be more charitably interpreted as trying to show that the person using them is safe, saying to the world, "I am trying to be an ally and making sure that everyone feels welcome." Moving to racism: imagine a society that 50 years ago would hang you in a tree for your skin color. Wouldn't you be a bit jumpy when someone does a micro-aggression? I know I would be on edge. Matthew Shepard was not that long ago. Prop 8 in California was even more recent.
This all to say, I would really try to sort out what is religious discrimination and what is trying to create a safe and inclusive workplace. The paradox of tolerance is that you cannot tolerate intolerance. If you believe your religion discriminates against people based on race, gender, sexuality, nationality, or other religions, then yes, you will face discrimination.
The author works for Google's "Responsible AI" division. I would very strongly hope that religious people would be welcome there, obviously along with atheists and people or all origins or backgrounds. AIs will soon have very real power over average people's lives. Humanity needs to make sure we get it right.
His 2 main points are:
- religious people being treated without respect or osctracized
- algorithmic bias against religion in Google products
As with all these past discussions (see Timnit Gebru), it's hard to know whether he's really being treated unfairly unless you somehow know him in person. Some people have personality disorders that make them insufferable to work with, religious or not. Personally he seems well-adjusted; it doesn't look like he was trying to proselitize or evangelize; he brought up religious discrimination in passing, was asked to explain what he meant, and privately explained. I don't know why so many here are assuming he's walking around Google asking people if they've heard of "our Lord and Saviour".
>I mentioned that I stood against all sorts of discrimination at Google and listed religious discrimination as one of them. He asked for examples so I privately messaged him with some and he began trying to “educate” me about how those weren’t religious discrimination; they were just signs that I was suffering from “victim syndrome”.
The second issue he brings up (that he says he needs to discuss with a lawyer before he can give concrete examples) also seems plausible enough. Google admits to downranking independent news organisations, politically non-mainstream outfits (socialists[0], subsets of social justice activists, nationalists); given how atheistic most Google employees are, it's plausible that the same would apply to religion. There is also a documented history of religious bias in Google Assistant[1].
If what he's claiming is true, it's indefensible. Algorithms shouldn't have an anti-religious bias. Think: algorithms for hiring, parole/sentencing, or personality testing. Religious discimination isn't a hypothetical, there are people being killed or discriminated against today in various countries because they belong to minority faiths. AIs shouldn't participate in that.
As an interesting tidbit: here's what Marget Mitchell (co-founded Microsoft Research's Cognition group, Google Research's ML Fairness group, fired from Google shortly after Timnit Gebru) said about the author (Lemoine):
> When new people would join Google who were interested in ethics, Mitchell used to introduce them to Lemoine. “I’d say, ‘You should talk to Blake because he’s Google’s conscience,’ ” said Mitchell, who compared Lemoine to Jiminy Cricket. “Of everyone at Google, he had the heart and soul of doing the right thing.”
[0]: https://www.michigandaily.com/viewpoints/op-ed-why-google-ce...
[1]: https://www.newsweek.com/google-censoring-jesus-knows-buddha...
Isn't that.. all religions?
(Although despite Buddhism’s non-theistic reputation, the most popular kinds do have Pure-Land-old-guy worship)
The twentieth century featured many deaths caused by 2 different philosophies in 2 different places explicitly opposed to religion, for example!.
It's a paradox and irony in many cases.
Just some perspective and nuance for widening ones thoughts.
Religion, at best, codified moral values that were already in place in society.
Pretty much: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide read the 4th paragraph.
Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_war which also traces its roots to religion. Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law
I don't think you quite realize how much of modern morality traces itself to religious law. Maybe take a course in Philosophy.
I asked about murder, not this particular special case. Furthermore, even from the paragraph that you cite, there is nothing explicitly connecting religious law with a prohibition of murder or infanticide. The article states the Christianity forbade infanticide, which I will note is about 1300 years AFTER Moses.
> I don't think you quite realize how much of modern morality traces itself to religious law. Maybe take a course in Philosophy.
Thanks for your unjustified condescension. Maybe you should read the articles that you cite?
Slavery and sexual violence could be a better example as it's more closer to now. History is illuminating.
Add up deaths in the name of religion this century and get back to me
And yes, that holds true even if you include Hitlers regime on the religious side despite the fact that major religious factions were against him.
And if you need to read in some book that oppression is bad, that murdering people is bad, that basic human rights are a good idea, etc. - if you need to read that in a book and have these concepts crystalized for you as capital T True by dogma fed to you by a church of some kind... then, my friend, you're just a bad person. And we do have bad people and will continue to have bad people but religion has done nothing to abate this. Moral compass is innate to human nature, not something you learn from a book.
It's such a good belief, that we are blind to it being a belief and blind to its origins.
It's a belief that is so successful because it is true. It comes from the belief that every person has an intrinsic value. Philosophy isn't about rational atheistic science. Science cannot prove or disprove the idea that every human has value.
The Nazis didn't belief that and used science to back up their abhorrent beliefs. They murdered millions of religious People.
The communists also hated religion and murdered millions more of people who thought different. The irony is that they did so in the name of ending oppression.
History and geography will help you see that ideas about innate rights come from religion. But we don't need religion to keep these ideas going.
Just looking at how the human rights movement started should be illuminating.
There's a big gap between "morality is innate" and "morality can be achieved only through religion."
Religion was created by man, not by god. Religious ideas, including religious morality, are the results, not the causes, of the prevailing cultural attitudes of the societies that created them.
In the modern West, such as the US, "religious morality" is mostly synonymous with the morality of the ancient societies in which those religions originated, which is why religion is so out of step with modern sensibilities.
In other words, Aquinas saw God as the basis for and to all we experience. From the theistic perspective, my question is if moral subjectivism is true, it seems to be self defeating as the concept of truth is fundamentally underwhelmed.
There are plenty of atheistic and some theistic philosophers who see morality as independent of God. I wouldn't necessarily agree with them, but it's just a thought
It seems there is some component of evolved morality; psychopaths would have been excluded by the tribe.
I mean, you just called generations upon generations bad people.. Like, morals also evolve with society, and everyone is influenced by the society they grow up in.
Just a very easy counterexample -- gladiator fights were perfectly acceptable in people in Rome. Were they bad people for that?
Most people want to be nice to their neighbors / tribe.
Most people find violence disturbing.
That they live in circumstance that encourages, requires, them to kill, to manipulate, to be an asshole - is just circumstance. That's why being a Good Person is Hard. You need to remain true to yourself, and fight against all kinds of external forces that seek to corrupt you.
Superstitious people will obey rules with no actual enforcement out of a mistaken belief that an invisible Deity might punish them for disobedience, this benefits the rest of their society, at least in the short term. Of course it breaks down if a few people in society exploit everybody else's beliefs. "Princess Alice wants you to look after the sheep" is beneficial because it means shepherds do their jobs properly, but "Princess Alice needs you to sell your worldly possessions so that I can have a nice necklace" not so much.
I have the impression that since those people are not bound by evidences they can justify unethical behavior much more easily. And so this trait that should make them more ethical actually backfires and enable worse behavior.
This shows that religion could perform a valuable function in a pre-historic human society independent of whether it's true.
That’s the tl;dr of your argument afaict. Problem there is that religion was the problem in both contexts - so I don’t think it provided a solution so much as it caused the problem in the first place. Even then - it forced slave mentality onto the masses and that wasn’t exactly great for everyone either… Self-flagellation anyone?