Google Doesn't Want What's Best for Us

&gt; <i>Peter Thiel, one of the ideological leaders in the Valley, wrote in 2009 on a blog affiliated with the Cato Institute that “since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”</i><p>&gt; <i>If women should not even have the vote, why should we worry about gender diversity in the engineering ranks?</i><p>These two paragraphs read as a microcosm of this whole episode. Think what you may about Peter Thiel, but the quote does not say or even suggest that &quot;women should not even have the vote.&quot; It merely points out that as the voting public has been broadened, it has been broadened to include sectors that are not (historically) as amenable to limited-government policies. Therefore, the relative popularity of limited-government policy among the totality of voters has diminished, suggesting that democracy and capitalism are presently at odds. Reading the quote with a reasonable level of charity suggests Thiel would prefer to convince these voters of the appeal of limited-government policy, not revoke their right to vote. Simultaneously, he is also presumably arguing, as many others have, that simply increasing voter turnout does not necessarily lead to better governance.<p>Can the New York Times point to any quote from Thiel that justifies the implication they have made here: that Thiel believes women should not have the right to vote? Perhaps there is one; I really don&#x27;t know much about Thiel. But this quote alone isn&#x27;t it.

What does anything Peter Thiel says have to do with Google? The writer calls him &quot;an ideological leader in the Valley&quot;. That&#x27;s a pretty tenuous connection.<p>And the contrast with Drexel and Milken? Come on, those people went to jail for fraud!<p>This is fact-free dreck that&#x27;s just adding to the noise.

Of course not, they want the best return for Google, and you&#x27;d have to be deluded or knee deep in KoolAid not to know that. Google isn&#x27;t a public service or charity, even if we want to pretend that it is or use it that way. What Google is, even more than Facebook or Twitter, a massive exercise in gathering personal information and then attempting to monetize it.

The claims of sexism in this article are shaky, at best. A programmer created a memo about how the small proportion of women in programming is likely to be due to biology, Google fired them, and that&#x27;s somewhow supposed to prove that there&#x27;s a &quot;toxic bro culture&quot;? A memo, which most professors of the subject matter seem to mostly agree with... which makes its vilification questionable.

Fairly disappointing article title, but it is true.<p>Google executives and other management personnel from other tech giants have internal and external fiduciary responsibilities to uphold inside their own organizations. Google firing the engineer is, unfortunately, what many companies would choose to do when faced with the same public dilemma.<p>And while it sucks, one has to wonder if our outrage at the termination of an outspoken engineer is somehow spawned from an unrealistic expectation placed upon google as the &#x27;good guy&#x27;? Or is it from an unrealistic optimism born in the late twentieth century and early twenty first that the internet, and its leading companies, would somehow chart themselves on morally superior course?<p>In my humble opinion, I am not totally sure google qualifies as a truly private enterprise, and as such they should have a greater interest in the stakeholder. And in that context, our outrage makes much more sense, and is more justified.

Ah, the dear old NYT. Yesterday one of the NYT columns posted to HN was on how even sex was better under socialism. Not that they wear their politics on their sleeve or anything...

&gt; The rise of Google and the other giant businesses of Silicon Valley have been driven by a libertarian culture that paid only lip service to notions of diversity.<p>&gt; The effects of the darker side of tech culture reach well beyond the Valley. It starts with an unwillingness to control fake news and pervasive sexism that no doubt contributes to the gender pay gap.<p>I&#x27;m inferring that instead of &quot;lip service&quot;, the technology sector should &quot;control&quot; news and ideology.<p>&gt; The future implications of a couple of companies’ having such deep influence on our attention and our behavior are only beginning to be felt.<p><i>This</i> concerns me, not because Google isn&#x27;t on &quot;my side&quot;. It concerns me because I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s healthy for <i>anyone</i> to have this sort of invisible influence.<p>&gt; By giving networks like Google and Facebook control of the present, we cede our freedom to choose our future.<p>Right. But the answer isn&#x27;t to pick a better authority to win fights for &quot;our side&quot;. The answer is to give individuals freedom (in practice, not just in theory) to stay away from bullies and fools. Even if you set up perfect rules and systems, eventually someone you think is foolish and&#x2F;or dangerous will be in charge: Thiel, Pichai, Jobs, Gates, Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, Sanders, Cruz, Maduro, Castro, Kim, Gaddafi, and the list goes on. You may not mind some of them, but everyone would be at least dismayed by <i>some</i> of them.<p>The author ends up on the path to this conclusion, that freedom of choice is essential, but doesn&#x27;t really lay it out clearly. There&#x27;s is some praise of EU&#x27;s data privacy laws (conveniently leaving out &quot;right to be forgotten&quot; rules), but it seems to me that the goal for the author is more government <i>control</i> over technology, not necessarily true freedom for the individual. How many of the above leaders would you trust with your data?

I&#x27;m a Googler.<p>The way you decide whether to trust someone or something is whether someone you already trust trust them. So the question is: who do you trust and how far does your chain of trust go?<p>For me, I need to trust my coworkers. And I do. And I trust that those coworkers will report misbehavior internally such that I can see it.<p>And from what I know, I trust them to look after my data. They have everything: search history, location history, email, photos of my daughter. I am not a product. I am a leaf on a human-indecipherable neural net that shows me a particular ad.<p>Companies don&#x27;t care about people. Companies aren&#x27;t people. People care about people. I do not think Google The Company &quot;wants&quot; anything in any way you can moralize good or bad. Google The People want to do right by users.<p>So, the question is, do you trust me? :)

A lack of diversity is among the least terrifying of Google&#x27;s many evils.

Peter Thiel understands Special Circumstances. don&#x27;t know whether existing SC-like organisations understand Peter Thiel.

My own controversial opinion on this, borrowing words from Peter Griffin: &quot;Oh my god, who the hell cares?!&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=RFZrzg62Zj0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=RFZrzg62Zj0</a><p>Googler wrote a document which was widely derided internally and externally. Sundar took the conservative option and let him go, due to his toxic effect on work environment. Shouldn&#x27;t that be the end of the story?<p>Maybe a googler can explain how and why this has exploded into the zeitgeist, because I fail to see it. It seems there were some number of bad actors inside google besides the original author, but a small number.<p>If Google has a mono-culture that&#x27;s not open to debate about gender and diversity issues, it&#x27;s neither my business nor my concern, and all the bloggers and Ezra Klein and NYT who are trying to frame a megacorp-sized story about this, are stretching.<p>EDIT: Instead of downvote, maybe an explanation on WHY this incident shows (as the posted article claims) Google&#x27;s bad intentions for us?

I think that this professor is correctly relating the recent sexism episode with other critiques of Google, culture, it&#x27;s place in our society, and previous monopolies. We should take advantage of his perspective. They are all related problems.<p>In a way, getting down to the uglier sides of the people involved in the organizations with unchecked control over our society is a way to bring the point home that no, we cannot place this much trust in these people.<p>But whether people are buying that angle or not, listen to the professor when he connects it to the larger problem of technopolies. Really this is just a new variation of the overblown corporate power that has been around forever. These companies like Google, Uber, and Amazon are so powerful they are basically supplanting aspects government in many countries. It&#x27;s sort of like the giant corporations the cyberpunk authors envisioned, but worse because they don&#x27;t have competition.<p>It does seem to basically be working to most people&#x27;s benefit -- as long as you don&#x27;t have a business that tried to compete with these companies.<p>This is just the core problem with both cooperative and competitive approaches to society -- without adequate structural prevention they tend towards over-centralization. If we can realize that this over-trusting relationship is unacceptable, that will motivate structural changes to improve it.<p>I believe the next big revolution will be mass deployment of truly decentralized, open, easily evolved, and public, platforms that have some similar features to the closed for-profit monopoly technology giant services. This includes things like search indexing and advertisement Google, retail indexing and logistics (Amazon), transportation (Uber), etc. And probably even banking, which is not quite as centralized but has things like PayPal etc.<p>Because high-tech economies of scale are great, but centralization of control by private companies over the public at large with fixed platforms that don&#x27;t evolve are not.

non-mobile link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;08&#x2F;12&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;sunday&#x2F;google-tech-diversity-memo.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;08&#x2F;12&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;sunday&#x2F;google-tec...</a>