Comment by quatrefoil | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quatrefoil | Hacker News Reader

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Here's the thing, though: we, the general public, did this.

Up until the mid-2010s, the prevailing dogma within Google and at most other Big Tech companies was this spirit of "information libertarianism". We make all information accessible and useful, and the world gets better.

Around that time, a lot of pressure started to mount on tech companies for their complicity in bad things; the election of Donald Trump was a pretty major catalyst. So, all the companies responded to public pressure by building algorithmic fairness organizations. But because tech companies hire from specific backgrounds and in specific locations, and aren't particularly ideologically diverse, they converged on enforcing a worldview that aligns with their morality and their concerns.

Gemini is incredibly touchy about hot-button issues that animate progressive folks in the SF Bay Area and almost nowhere else. But then, we literally demanded Google and Facebook to become arbiters of morality - so what outcome were we hoping for?

I have noticed that there are a group of people actively pushing for these outcomes, to them this wasn't a mistake but a big victory. When they inevitably get criticised its very convenient to pretend like this was ordained by the general public, but in reality the general public are very much against this, they just don't have the priviledge of being close to the development.

Strikes me that the people who advocate for these outcomes follow the old mantra of "Privatising the winnings and socialising the losses", any win for this ideology isn't considered a general public win, but a win in spite of the general public, whereas any loss is always due to the general public. Both can't be true.

>But then, we literally demanded Google and Facebook to become arbiters of morality - so what outcome were we hoping for?

"We", as in "some unidentified vocal group, amplified to max by certain journalists", but definitely not me. I was never asked and I have never voted for anything like that.

> the prevailing dogma within Google and at most other Big Tech companies was this spirit of "information libertarianism".

There are people online that actually mock people that say they have freedom of speech by saying they have "freedumbs" and "freeze peach". These are people on the left. There are polls of university students and the majority believe the speech should be regulated. These are our future "elites".

There are obviously people on the right banning books before we get into the us vs them argument.

> the prevailing dogma within Google and at most other Big Tech companies was this spirit of "information libertarianism".

I'm not sure if it is true. Google fired James Damore for his internal memo titled "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber". Google employees thought that military was unconditionally evil and would rather giving up a 10 billion dollar contract (I really wish send those employees back to the Euro-Asia of the end of 12th century to taste the "peace" without a strong military when facing the shamshirs of the Mongolian soldiers). And what did Pichai and their rank and file say after 2016 election?

DEI is probably the determining factor.

I refused to work in SF/SV after discovering that what passed as jokes and fun in high school were taken as threats against a person's life and the consequences were the loss of a job.

The public internet has always had a mix of business, pr0n, and awkward communities where each push the boundaries of interactions.

Once I started hearing about AI Safety I thought "well that's useless now" because as someone who attempted to build filters for spam, profanities, and 'hate' along with moderating communities - and gave up - the rules cannot be created nor applied consistently without heavy human hands.

Professionalism lost to DEI. We can no longer disagree - we must be advocates and allies against whoever is in a position of power to define 'hate'.

Like the Great Scott said. This is a hate crime because I hate it.

"Public pressure" and "we demanded" meaning a small group of angry, chronically online, outrage-addicted Twitter mobsters. Which in no way represent public opinion.

It's not the general public -- it's the ideological echochambers around these companies.

You have 10% left extremists, 10% right extremists, and 80% centrists. The 10% leftist extremists control most of the educational institutes and Silicon Valley, so they try to force their views onto the 80% of centrists using the excuse that the 10% right extremists are some supermajority existentially threatening democracy.

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