The story didn't read as "sour apples" to me but rather an employee pointing out evidence that contradicts the "two strikes" policy Zuckerberg explained at the company Q&A. It's tough to write that off as "Facebook isn't perfect".
If he actually cannot get a job due to his stated opinions, well, frankly I’m not surprised. Why would you hire someone who publically says up front he scorns many of his potential coworkers?
Now that the dust has settled a bit on the memo, I'm curious about this take:
>That employee argued that people, such as people like me, were inherently less competent than others due to aspects of their gestation.
I didn't get that much of a dichotomy from the memo. To me he focused much more on interests than competency or capability, and he went through some effort to indicate that the effect was limited, including this summary at the top:
>Many of these differences are small and there's significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.
Then followed with a little chart showing two distributions with a lot of overlap.
I felt like the story of the memo overtook the memo itself, which seemed to be a ham-fisted attempt at exploring how we prioritize various metrics with diversity and inclusion. It was obviously premature as well, based on his own charts the effects he was discussing wouldn't come into play until we're approaching something much more even than we have today.
Ultimately the way Google handled it seemed rather cowardly. Damore's personal story adds a little complexity to the situation and I really feel that he touched a third rail that might not have been as obvious to him at the time.
And that story was mostly fictional. The memo itself bares little resemblance to most of the reporting about it.
Squaring off over unfalsifiable claims about intent and impact isn't going to get us anywhere, in the Damore case it's literally 'he said/she said'. We need to navigate it piece by piece and try to apply a balance of reason and empathy to try to get to a place of understanding.
Sure, but you can't hold the original author responsible for how it is being rewritten and reinterpreted in other people's minds. It's not a reasonable expectation that everyone should write everything with concern for how every cultural intersection might interpret it. That simply can't scale.
From what I understand it was about preferences not competencies.
I thought at first you meant gender, but then I looked up the word and it means "the process or period of developing inside the womb between conception and birth" and now I'm not sure.
It’s the same as when people protest building housing: “oh it will not align with the character of our neighborhood”. I know what they are really talking about, and I know full well what he was talking about — he was making the same argument, in the same terms, as plenty have before him. I assume he read those arguments before, himself.
> oh it will not align with the character of our neighborhood
Is there no situation where this is obviously, trivially true? If someone wants to replace a traditional cottage in the middle of an Irish village with a glass and steel modernist masterpiece, would you accept the argument then?
I read the memo as sincerely asking whether the data showed a sexist conclusion. Either it is inherently sexist to ask the question, or it isn't. If it is, then... what? Is it inherently sexist to note that men are faster than women? (Yes, I am aware that there are 12-year-old girls who can beat me in the 100 meters. No, that doesn't invalidate my point.) Then is reality sexist? Or is it only sexist to notice? Or to admit that you noticed?
If it isn't inherently sexist to ask the question, then we start into judgment on whether he asked it in good faith. That's a different question, on which I will not pass judgment. But I suspect that what's happening is that people have decided that it is sexist to ask the question, and therefore he couldn't have asked it in good faith.
And anything that says * ism might be a smaller problem than thought, that * ism is getting better, or that our current efforts to reduce * ism are ineffective... Well, that's an unapproved direction.
Also, if I know there's no way to convince someone of something, I'm generally going to stop caring about what they think. (Because it's always going to be the same, and nothing I can do will change that)
Right after the (somewhat-carefully-worded) memo was punished, the author showed his hand by appearing as a guest on the YouTube show of Stefan Molyneux who, even then, was well-known for his white nationalism and "men's rights" activism.
In any case your underlying argument is really bizarre.
In fact extreme xenophilic restrictionism is the norm in Japan. There's almost universal support by the Japanese people for their extremely restrictive immigration policy—probably the most restrictive first world country. But no sane person could call the Japanese people racist. They love other cultures—no, they adore them. They are incredibly welcoming to tourists from across the planet and delight in the sharing of culture.
Is this a joke? Japan has well-known issues with race relations and its historical and current treatment of its minority indigenous populations.
Can you point to some statistics on that, please?
>probably the most restrictive first world country
If you can get hired by a Japanese company (and some do accept applications from overseas), they will sponsor your work visa. There's none of this H1-B style nonsense. After you're in Japan, if you've been there continuously for five years (which, mind you, is a smaller period of time than any country I can name OTOH), you can apply for citizenship, and again as far as I know, it's not a ridiculous waiting list/lottery style process. In what way is this nearly as restrictve as you're saying?
It's also not difficult at all to get into Japan by applying to an English teaching company (eikaiwa or ALT jobs) from overseas (where they recruit from), and all you need is any Bachelor's degree. You'll have a valid work visa and you can be shipped out within months. Try doing the same as a Japanese teacher applying to teach in the US (or many other countries, for that matter). Browse tech job listings for Japanese companies on major job boards in the West. Almost all of them note that they'll be happy to sponsor your work visa.
This game of prettying up the language to make it seem nice and friendly, while maintaining the otherness that daily affects people (groups which the other reply to you here has pointed out) with language like "xenophilic restrictionist" does nobody favours.
And if there is support for such policies, and in particular bent on nihonjinron notions and race perceptions, I must be insane, but I'm going to go ahead and call "the Japanese people" racist. Being "incredibly welcoming to tourists" doesn't mean anything if you want to work and live there. It misses the whole point of the discussion, and waves away systemic issues with a gloss of "they're good to tourists". We're not talking about tourists. I don't care how much they are able to enjoy Western comedians. I care how receptive they are to people integrating and living in their society like everyone else, as the Japanese constitution guarantees should be possible.
At the risk of stirring the pot a little (and only because I couldn't think of a better analogy), you may as well say no country has race problems, because after all, members of the majority race might frequently listen to music by, and watch films featuring, the minority race. That doesn't mean anything in terms of how the minority race is treated, and it's a farcically ignorant point to make. So sorry if I see the same sort of logic in nebulous feelgood terms like "xenophilic restrictionism".
I would disagree with that. You will see many sane people pointing out the racism against koreans, chinese, tourists, western residents, etc in Japan.
Kind of like how he soon after sued Google for discrimination for being "white male conservative" (which has not aged well).
What does it mean to you?
By suing Google for discrimination against white conservative men, Damore fits this fairly well. That, and the alt-right podcasts he went on.
When they're not conservative opinion pieces, they're cherry picked articles, even going to far as to misrepresent the data they support.
The sort of people who argue against his memo always end up looking foolish because they never argue against anything that was actually said. No specific claims are ever brought up except lying strawmen like "he said women can't program", a claim not found in the memo.
Instead it's all just slurs, insults, attacks on his character, guilt-by-association and so on. There's never any actual depth to it, it's all "don't look at the bad man".
Damore's arguments must be good, because in years of this coming up nobody has ever once managed to make an intellectual argument against the stuff in his memo.
It would be one thing if they called the diversity memo out as disruptive and bigoted, but they said it had "wrong opinions." That just reeks of authoritarianism.
I'm more afraid of authoritarianism from a major company than a bigot.
If you haven't read it yourself, I encourage you to challenge yourself with an open mind and give it a read.
I did. It relies on junk science to justify bigotry.
And that's why Google's response concerns me. (I encourage you to look it up too.) It uses the words "wrong opinion" instead of calling out the junk science. But it also abandoned employees who may have mild concerns about the processes that Google was following.
Thus, Google handled the situation poorly because it didn't discredit the "diversity memo." It assumed that everyone disagreed with the memo, which clearly isn't the case.
---
Junk science: Think of debunked science like eugenics that were used to justify past bigotry.
Go on then, cite a paragraph directly from Damore's memo that "relies on junk science." I'm waiting. I dare say I'll be waiting a while. Hopefully it inspires you to actually read it for yourself instead of parrot what a few other people have said.
Or at the very least, if you'd prefer the lazier option, listen to what some other people who've read the memo said about it.
He and his buddies had and endless list of grievances involving political this and that. Nothing seemed to happen that wasn't somehow 'political.' They surrounded themselves in this thicket of 'logic' where the simplest explanation was impossible and conspiracies were the most obvious answer to them. Thankfully it was long before social media as we know it.
He was fired for leaving some nasty bigoted comments in code.
But for the record I have no idea who these folks at Facebook are or their motivations.
If the guy I'm thinking of made the news, you wouldn't know either.
Eventually I just stopped talking with them as that’s all they could talk about.
> I’m sure Facebook isn’t perfect, but I know enough good people who work there to know they’re not all out to “get” us.
Yeah, I don't think you read the article. That's what's happening: a bunch of employees are blowing the whistle on what seems to be executive abuse of the fact check program.
Large scale platforms like this are hard to manage. I can see many cases where people doing their best can be misconstrued as an evil conspiracy.
Eg.
- Users and companies with large fan bases are open to brigading. Previously companies have been taken off the platform suddenly because of militant FB groups.
- A new rule is instituted "anyone with more than X followers get Tier-1 support in reviewing and reinstating their account following a take down."
- Engineer on some team mildly close to the team who runs the takedown/reinstatement systems sees that a Right Wing commentator is getting Tier-1 support and fast turn around reinstatement.
- Said engineer tries to vilify the people who wrote the policy and those who are carrying it out, tries to go public with a conspiracy that "FB is prioritizing reinstating Right Wing users". Instead they've really just lost the trust of their peers, failed to understand the space properly, and now brought their employer into disrepute - they should be fired.
This stuff happens all the time, and is usually just chalked up to "its a hard problem to get right, and we're trying to get better every day". When people over react and make out like Zuck is pulling strings to rule the universe i have a hard time understanding when he sleeps.
Zuckerberg should never have given way on fact checking. I wonder if he understands it was a mistake. Facebook is meant to be a social network, it's inherently a graph oriented organisation in which graph nodes are all roughly equal. Fact checking is the exact opposite: a hierarchy with Facebook at the top and delegated "truth arbiters" a layer lower, that try to dominate the social graph.
The cited example of the Breitbart video is a good example. The video is a video of doctors. There are tons of scientists, government advisors and indeed whole governments saying they don't see any need for masks, children can go back to school or never even left (as in Sweden), etc. You don't need to go far to find them. That children aren't infectious is by now widely accepted in the scientific community. For Facebook to censor the President for making such a statement makes them look absurd, and totalitarian. Given the long term accusations of fraud surrounding mail voting that were never addressed, it's not a big surprise Trump is worrying about the integrity of the election process.
I'm curious also by your claim that children aren't infectious. That is not widely accepted by the scientific community. It sounds like you're taking some minor positions and pretending like they're mainstream.
Indeed. And if the grandparent got all their "news" from paid feeds and shared content on Facebook (given the right seeding and demographics), they might genuinely believe these are mainstream positions.
Which is exactly the problem people are worried about in the linked article.
The problem with that is no amount of flagging and removing is going to fix the problem and that is why I don't even see the point, the left and right are so divided that those on the extremes will fall for anything being blinded by their emotional hatred for the other.
I mean we are at the point where the extreme left believes for a fact that via a thoroughly refuted dossier, that the sitting president paid Russian hookers to pee on him.
The extreme right is just as bad, believing that their is a global cabal of elite leftist that are raping children with a presidential candidate being one of them.
No amount of blocking content is going to repair the fact that people are no longer listening and that is the problem one side wants the other side filtered so that they can be the only voice shouting in the dark, thinking if the other side cannot talk then they are by default going to listen, but the reality is almost everybody has stopped listening, no amount of censorship is going to fix that.
Fact checks might help slow crazy conspiracies a little bit. I think it is worth for this reason, although I believe in content warnings+disclaimers instead of takedowns because of Streisand effects.
Finally, again, the Steele dossier is not even a "left conspiracy". It is a side-product of rumor spreading games that the intelligence community plays, that got leaked. I think it is a bad example for the point your seem to be making.
It was a hit piece, who funding is now well known, it was political from the start. What it was not, and would not qualify as is an intelligence report and was never formulated for the purpose of intel. It is no different than the hit pieces being produced by the right to paint Biden as a pedophile. So I don't see it as a Strawman as the point was people are so far gone on their version of the truth that no amount of censoring or labeling is going to pull them back from the edge. Both sides are doing it, and at this point there is no gradient of less-bad.
OK, that's just silly. Read a newspaper? Watch a routine 1 hour news program from any of the major networks? No pee tape. No pizzagate (well, except when that nut started shooting up the restaurant over it). I'm sure you think there's "bias" but there are no lies.
There are many journalistic organizations who genuinely care about reporting the truth. And they "filter" and "censor" themselves to do it all the time, because in that world it's called "good journalism". They get stuff wrong, and when they do they tell us about it.
And the issue at hand here is that Facebook is trying to apply some of the same controls to the news it presents to its users, via most of the same processes (i.e. by trusting journalists). And stuff leaks through, and sometimes Facebook itself seems to be uneven in the application of its own rules.
So I don't get your point. Why is it OK for The Times to spike its reporting on the pee tape because it can't find good sourcing but when Facebook to do the same it's somehow an impossibility?
Sure there is bias, Fox news is plenty biased so is CNN. and there are plenty of lies, a lie by omission is still a lie. Not to mention burying retractions in blurbs and page 10 even if they do a retraction. Make no mistake about it, I blame both sides equally so I am not advocating for one sides bias over another. My point is simply that people have stopped listening so all the meandering in the world will not "get them". Most everyone has chosen a side and the few of us left in the middle are stuck in a shit storm, that we don't want and we damn sure don't want to hear either sides dogma as it has become the stuff of religious fanatics, so we are not listening either.
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/masking-lack-of-evidence-with-...
Just to be clear, I am not advising anyone to avoid wearing a mask.
Please note that I did not say there was scientific evidence for masks, but that wearing masks is good is the mainstream scientific position (which changed only very recently).
I read your article. It's pretty limited in its analysis. I'm going by this popular science article from my alma mater (I have a PhD in biophysics), https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/06/417906/still-confused-abou...
The article you cited doesn't include a number of the articles my article mentions (http://files.fast.ai/papers/masks_lit_review.pdf, https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2020.00818 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342198360_Associati..., https://www.cmaj.ca/content/192/15/E410, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/06/17/masks-sal...,
More importantly- this is a situation where we don't have unambiguous data, but the mainstream position is consistent with the current data and reasonable thinking about disease prevention.
There's nothing in there that should serve to argue against the general consensus that masks are a good idea. They are, within the bounds of the evidence at hand, effective in the opinions of most experts. And that includes the authors of the paper you wrote.
You just wrote yourself that there is no consensus, even amongst scientists who have been extremely willing to recommend extreme measures from the start. The review paper showed the science isn't settled: that's literally the definition of no consensus.
The concept of scientific consensus is horribly abused. Look at the reply to my post. It's not about anything concrete, it just asserts everyone agrees with the poster. That's a lie, and obviously so. Yet simply by claiming it's true, some will believe it, as it's an unfalsifiable statement. Indeed you yourself believe it, even whilst reading a paper that says there's no consensus.
They are not "weirdly rogue political activist type employees". They are normal people reacting to the abnormality that is Facebook. I mean which tech company has ever produced the kind of polarization, fake news, Brexit and Trump type events all over the globe?
If Intel or IBM or AT&T had produced these type of outcomes you can bet your ass "weirdly rogue political activist type employees" wld suddenly start popping up all over the place.
Facebook will continue to be a highly abnormal place to work for anyone who isn't mildly conformist.
Transparently it seems the right type of activists are celebrated and the wrong vilified. That’s fine, but let’s not act like this is principled.
I get that there are good whistle blowers. I also have first hand experience (a growing list recently) of people who decide to vilify their coworkers under the guise of "justice" and "taking down the man" when really most people ("evil VPs" included) are just trying to do their best and get through the day. They on the other hand are horrible to work with, and usually very unproductive. When threatened with performance management for their lack of delivery, they then tend to become hostile and see the whole charade as a conspiracy against them, when really no one trusts them or wants to work with them as they are assholes.
You've been using HN primarily for ideological warfare for a long time now. Your recent comments in particular have been breaking the site guidelines egregiously and repeatedly. You've pulled this "sleeper account" attack before as well (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23859828).
If you keep breaking the site guidelines, we are going to ban you. Actually, you're well into bannable territory as it is. I'm shocked at how much and you badly you've crossed the line. We've cut you way more slack than most people get here.
If you don't want to be banned on HN, please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on. For all its many flaws, this is a community, and to participate in a community while constantly destroying the commons is incongruent. People who use this place need to take care of it, not burn it. That goes for everyone, regardless of what their political views are or how intensely they feel them, and that includes you.
The idea that commenters should "make HN good because we all want it to be good" is quite positive, and that sentiment seems to be reflected here far more than banhappy reddit.
It's better to err on the side of patience generally, and feels more in keeping with the values of the site. There's are also judgment calls about things like who seems more likely to respond to persuasion, how much history the account has, whether it's related to previous abusive accounts, and things like that.
They'll just make another account and start over.
By explaining what the person is doing wrong, maybe Dang can help them be a more productive member of the HN community.
As for HN being "no longer salvageable" - people have been saying these things for 10 years or more. Of course it could have become true after 10 years—I don't want to be complacent. Sometimes the wolf eventually shows up. But there needs to be some evidence beyond simply repeating the things people repeat.
Right-wingers think HN is overrun by Marxists and left-wingers think it's overrun by Nazis. Both sides agree that the mods do a bad job and the site is destroying itself fast. They've been saying that for years. The decisive element here is the passions of the perceiver, not the object being perceived. That's why people's perceptions are so contradictory: what they're perceiving is an inverse of their own identifications. Usually this is based on a few data points that they overgeneralize. I've written about this a lot: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 for a summary, and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... for endless descriptions of the bias at work.
Of course it doesn't follow that criticisms are invalid. We try to be open and often adjust in response. But criticisms have to rise above a certain noise level—they need to clear the "randomness plus cognitive bias equals narrative" bar. When you say "Many people not in the community believe that Hacker News is no longer salvageable," it's not clear to me whether you're talking about serious critics or, say, Twitter ideologues, who have been saying that about HN since at least 2013. Most of that is driven by fashion. For example, small groups bond by snarking about, or denouncing, larger groups. That's all normal social dynamics (and internet dynamics), but I've learned the hard way that if you take those statements literally, it's crazymaking, because they're not really about what they purport to be about. That's not a reliable way to improve or, if you like, "salvage" HN.
All of which is a long way of saying that if you, or anyone, wants to discuss problems with HN, that's great, but we need specifics and links.
1. Be significantly less tolerant towards transphobic comments on this site, such as this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23937722
2. Send very clear and very loud signals that transphobia is not welcome here, such as by making a clear, pinned front page post about it. There are going to be a number of people who are going to complain about this policy and talk about "free speech" and "marketplace of ideas" &c, and to them make it very clear that either they get with the program or are no longer welcome here.
Seriously, techies seem to act on the same amoral plane as business executives and I wonder how you people manage to sleep at night.
1) The company is actually doing evil things
2) The employee is aware of the purported evil things the company is doing, and agrees with that claim
Now we can debate all we want how evil Facebook is or not, but how many employees do you think check off box 2?
I use facebook to connect with my family and friends. I've unfollowed all overly political friends. I get no real or fake news in my facebook feed. If I worked at facebook I'd be proud of helping people to stay connected.
Here on HN we are happy to call out the NYT and Bloomberg when they are wrong, but is that only when their articles don't align with our prior biases?
Can you continue to work for the digital service without being complicit in the government’s sins? There is plenty of evidence of wrong-doing and questionable judgement by the government’s leaders, for sure.
Say everyone who did take issue with Facebook’s policies decided to leave – who would be left?
Facebook is not a democracy, and given the corporate structure and differing voting rights of shareholders, it is practically impossible to replace the current leadership even if a majority of shareholders wanted to.
Moreover, the Government is immense and highly diverse in its missions compared to Facebook. I don't think anyone reasonably believes the sins of the CIA should be borne by, say, U.S. Forest Service park rangers. If Facebook had a public service mission that, among other things, provided essential services to the public like food and housing, perhaps the discussion would be different.
> Say everyone who did take issue with Facebook’s policies decided to leave – who would be left?
Some might say that this is the desired outcome, but eventually management might see the writing on the wall and change the way they do business. Indeed, this is one of the key mechanisms of unionized labor - to bring management to the table for negotiation through the threat of work stoppage (striking).
- They could work on something “good”, like trust and safety, community moderation tools, emergency response, etc.
- They could work on something user-driven or “neutral”, like Events or Groups which are used to organize anything from BLM protests to Trump rallies.
If they’re not actively designing privacy anti-patterns or trying to make the news feed more addictive, quitting would not really affect those problem areas.
I think organizing at the workplace is a great idea, and the threat of work stoppage could be a very real one if enough employees organize. But the idea of telling people to quit their jobs and distance themselves from the problem is very different from telling them to start organizing to fix the problem.
A great many are there to build their skills and/or resumes, which is a lot more than just putting food on the table. There aren't many places where one can learn so much so quickly about certain technologies (like VR/AR) or how to run things at that kind of scale, and most of those (e.g. Google, Amazon) have their own ethical issues. Many other companies, including some HN darlings, were founded by ex-FB employees. Some of them are doing good things, for practically any definition of "good" you might apply.
Others are there because they believe in the good Facebook does as well as the bad. As you said, they're likely exposed to more information about what the company does, which means a lower percentage is of the "jealous columnist at NYT" variety. Facebook helps connect people and businesses in positive ways as well as negative. You might think the ratio is not high enough, but others can quite reasonably disagree and/or think it's worth their time to work on improving that ratio.
There are many other possible reasons as well. "Evil or trapped" is not a useful simplification.
Yes, some people may have concerns about the product and its long-term consequences to individual health and society, but those are just alarmist freaks and we can ignore them.
Yes, there are also those internal reports that you might have seen or heard about in chatter around the water cooler, but you are not an expert in that subject so really what do you know? And the experts the execs bring around on office tours seem to be OK with things.
Yes, everyone at the company uses the product and while you were not a heavy user of the product before joining you can't avoid it in meetings and daily work. You seem to be recognizing some of the negative symptoms of the product in your daily life a lot more these past few months, but that recent project you worked on was pretty cool and in your last evaluation you got high marks for 'impact' so it can't all be bad, right?
Everyone who works at FB (ok, let's say IC2 and above) knows what is going on. Everyone who has been there for more than two or three years feels the relentless pressure to increase 'engagement' no matter the cost. Most are a bit unsure about the whole 'vision' thing Mark keeps talking about and they have enough self-awareness to see the cult-like aspects of the company, but the pay is very good and it can be a thrill at times to have access to either the audience or systems of such size and scope (e.g. let's count the files in /tmp across 1 million+ systems just because hypershell lets us...)
At what point in your career at RJ Reynolds do you realize that you are actually doing evil and check off box 2? At what point do you admit to yourself that what you do day to day has negative long-term consequences for society? When you do realize this what do you do?
(Disclaimer: worked at FB a while ago for a long enough period of time that the actions of sociopathic management eventually overwhelmed the 'protecting these systems protects activists and persecuted people from their evil governments' story I told myself and so I bailed.)
It seems to me that there are three stories here. One is that some small group of employees were violating policy by preventing certain users from being flagged or banned when they should have been. One is that an employee caught them. The third is that the employee was fired - apparently for conduct around the disclosure rather than the disclosure itself, but that's beside the point. The point is that it's absurd to assume that the first and third stories are totally representative of how every single person remaining at Facebook is, while the one that connects them is assumed to be an anomaly that could never possibly happen again.
All Cops Are Bastards: the idea that it isn’t possible, by definition, for there to be such a thing as a good cop.
Presumably F for Facebookers.
Can we just acknowledge for a moment what it’d be like to have a colleague who’s desperately trying to prove that your work is a “big conspiracy” when you’re honestly all just trying to do your best.
I see so many of these stories of weirdly rogue political activist type employees recently surprised when they their employer doesn’t like that they’re purposely trying to undermine them and their employees work. I’m sure Facebook isn’t perfect, but I know enough good people who work there to know they’re not all out to “get” us.
This smells like sour grapes* from an employee who focused more on their plans to take down their employer than their actual job.
*ed: previously written as “sour apples”...it’s been a long day.