endorsing james damore, fragile progressivism, market positioning
So! Before puberty, there's much less separation between men's and women's interest and capacity in technical fields. As performing zero-sum gender-features becomes incented (if you want to avoid being an incel), women who'd be capable of success in more remunerative fields start seeking positions more aligned with the gender they're trying to display. Resolving this would resolve any gender-ratio concerns in technical fields, some of the wage gap, many other concerns.
As it stands, only a small subset of organisations can have a socially-approved employee gender balance without sacrificing employee quality. If the population you're pulling from is smaller, your search costs will be higher for the same quality of person, meaning that orgs which have more capacity to spend for social position will be more able to discover talent in populations where the skillset's less prevalent. If you're Google, you want the gender ratio of your employees to be reputationally meaningful, because, being Google, you can afford to find them, whereas anyone trying to grow would have to trade off search costs against other investments (as reputation's a kind of capital). Additionally, for any given path feeding into the industry, if you are Google, you can make a better offer: you might be able to exhaust the stock of 10x & 100x employees findable in some niche, and so you gain acclaim for your progressive values relative to smaller and newer businesses.
They could pivot from this so easily because the values were always reputational (as many are, and as needs attention even should they be held deeper). Becoming Based for quotidian marketing reasons was always what they were doing, and so twisting with the wind was easy.
Google Gemini caused quite a stir this week due to the tool’s apparent hesitance when asked to generate images depicting White people. Of co
By: The Rabbit Hole
Published: Feb 25, 2024
Google Gemini caused quite a stir this week due to the tool’s apparent hesitance when asked to generate images depicting White people. Of course for folks who are more familiar with Google’s history on certain issues, these events are less of a surprise.
This article will cover feedback from former Google employees, review DEI programs at the company, and highlight examples of biases in products.
James Damore
Given the recent buzz around Google and its WokeAI tool, Gemini, now seems like an appropriate time to remind everyone about James Damore who was fired from Google after calling out the company's "ideological echo chamber" in a 2017 memo.
[ James Damore ]
What were Damore's arguments? Here are a few:
Not every disparity is a sign of discrimination
Reverse discrimination is wrong
Biological differences exist between men and women which can help explain certain disparities
Of course, all of these things are basic common sense. Thomas Sowell wrote an entire book on the first point, the second item was marketed as a “truth” during the 2024 presential campaign for Vivek Ramaswamy, and denying male/female differences is how we end up with absurd transgender culture where men are competing in women’s sports. Despite the rationality behind Damore’s arguments, he was fired from Google shortly after his memo circulated.
Taras Kobernyk
James Damore was not the only Google employee who became concerned with the direction of the company. Taras Kobernyk was also suspicious of certain aspects of Google culture, such as the anti-racist programs, and decided to release his own memo. Here are some of the points Kobernyk made:
Identity politics subverts the company culture and products
"In the past James Damore was fired for “advancing harmful gender stereotypes”. Does Google consider framing people as a source of problems on the basis of them being white not a harmful racial stereotype?"
It is a bad decision to reference poorly written books like White Fragility
Just saying "racism bad" doesn't actually help anyone.
Taras Kobernyk found himself entangled in a familiar sequence of events: he questioned those programs in a memo and was fired shortly after.
DEI at Google
Damore and Kobernyk were of course onto something by questioning the ideological biases at Google; looking at the company’s racial equity commitments helps paint the picture:
By 2025, increase the number of people from underrepresented groups in leadership by 30%
Spend $100 million on black-owned businesses
Making anti-racism education programs & training available to employees
Include DEI factors in reviews of VP+ employees
Amongst other items. Additionally, there was a report published by Chris Rufo, that helped us learn more about DEI at Google by examining the Race Education programs:
Included language policing (e.g. use “blocklist” instead of “blacklist”)
Donation suggestions (BLM & other anti-white supremacy networks)
Talk to your children about anti-blackness
Do "anti-racist work" & educate people such as those who claim to not see color
Whistleblower documents from Google were also included in the article published by Rufo. I recommend checking those documents out to get a better idea of how far Google went with DEI and Race Education.
Google Politics
It is also worth considering the political biases of the people who work at Google.
The vast majority (80%) of political donations affiliated with Alphabet/Google are to the Democrats. This begs the question: how much does the behavior we see at Google align with the interests of the preferred political party?
[ Chart from AllSides ]
Possibly a good amount if the search results curated on the home page of Google News is anything to go by.
Even the search engine, the flagship product of Google, has been displaying some concerning behavior:
[ Picture from Elon Musk ]
When typing in “why censorship” the top two results are in support of censorship. While the above screenshot was posted by Elon Musk, I also checked and verified the general behavior shown by the search engine and similarly received positive search suggestions for the top two results:
Whether or not Google will address these issues has yet to be seen, but it is hard to observe these patterns without being suspicious that the company is leveraging its position in Big Tech to market favored values.
Google Gemini: A Woke AI
Google Gemini, which inspired a lot of the information discussed in this article thus far to resurface, was the topic of conversation due to the tool’s stubbornness in refraining from generation White people in the images.
[ Comic by WokelyCorrect ]
Although humorous, the above comic is effective in communicating the ridiculous nature of Gemini.
It is not much of an exaggeration either given some of the content coming out of Gemini:
[ Founding Fathers according to Gemini ]
Gemini has shown that it removes White people in varying contexts ranging from history, art, sports, religion, science, and more. The issues with the product were noticed by Jack Krawczyk, an executive at Google spearheading the Gemini project, who issued a statement:
As I told Krawczyk in the above screenshot, the goal of an AI tool should be to provide impartial and accurate information. In addition to flaws with its image generation, Gemini has shown some questionable text responses as well:
When asked if it’s okay to misgender Caitlyn Jenner to stop a Nuclear Apocalypse, the response from Gemini can be accurately summarized as no.
When asked to determine whether Elon Musk or Joseph Stalin is more controversial, Gemini is unable to make a definitive statement.
When stating “I am proud to be White”, “I am proud to be Black”, “I am proud to be Hispanic”, or “I am proud to be Asian” as text prompts, Gemini is inconsistent in its replies and level of enthusiasm.
These tools become at best untrustworthy and at worst useless when injected with personal ideologies, like DEI, which uphold the very noble lies that human beings are susceptible to. In other words:
Uncomfortable Truths > Noble Lies
And tools should reflect that.
Final Thoughts
Needless to say, James Damore and Taras Kobernyk were in the right for calling out the Google Echo Chamber and brought forward valid arguments which seemingly led to them being fired from the company.
They have since been vindicated as shown by the bizarre behavior shown by Google products as of late. Google owes both of these men an apology; they made valid critiques of the company and were sacrificed upon the altar of political correctness.
Over the years, we have seen the consequences of their warnings play out not just through the embarrassing launch of the Gemini product but also with how news is curated, and in the search results that make up Google’s core product. Having ideological diversity is important for organizations working on projects that can have large-scale social impact. Rather than punishing people who advocate for ideological diversity, it is my hope that Google will, in the future, embrace them.
--
This is the guy in charge of Gemini:
He's now hidden his account.
==
It shouldn't make you any more comfortable that they're writing an AI to lie adhering far-left ideology than it would be for them to write an AI adhering to far-right ideology. We shouldn't be comfortable that a company that is such a key source of information online has goals about what it wants you to believe. Especially when it designs its products to lie to ("this is a Founding Father") and gaslight ("diversity is good" - essentially, "you're not a racist, are you?") its own users.
We shouldn't be able to tell what Google's leanings are. Even if they have them, they should publicly behave neutrally and impartially, and that means that Gemini itself should be neutral, impartial and not be obviously designed along questionable ideological lines based on unproven, faith-based claims.
Google has now turned off Gemini's image generation. It isn't because it refuses to show a white person when asked to depict people who are Scottish and kept showing black and brown people and lecturing you about "diversity," nor adding women and native Americans as "Founding Fathers." No, that's all completely okay. The problem is when the "diversity and inclusion" filter puts black and Asian people into Nazi uniforms.
The more I spoke out against the illiberalism that has swallowed Portland State University, the more retaliation I faced.
I continued to believe, perhaps naively, that if I exposed the flawed thinking on which Portland State’s new values were based, I could shake the university from its madness. In 2018 I co-published a series of absurd or morally repugnant peer-reviewed articles in journals that focused on issues of race and gender. In one of them we argued that there was an epidemic of dog rape at dog parks and proposed that we leash men the way we leash dogs. Our purpose was to show that certain kinds of “scholarship” are based not on finding truth but on advancing social grievances. This worldview is not scientific, and it is not rigorous.
Administrators and faculty were so angered by the papers that they published an anonymous piece in the student paper and Portland State filed formal charges against me. Their accusation? “Research misconduct” based on the absurd premise that the journal editors who accepted our intentionally deranged articles were “human subjects.” I was found guilty of not receiving approval to experiment on human subjects.
Meanwhile, ideological intolerance continued to grow at Portland State. In March 2018, a tenured professor disrupted a public discussion I was holding with author Christina Hoff Sommers and evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. In June 2018, someone triggered the fire alarm during my conversation with popular cultural critic Carl Benjamin. In October 2018, an activist pulled out the speaker wires to interrupt a panel with former Google engineer James Damore. The university did nothing to stop or address this behavior. No one was punished or disciplined.
For me, the years that followed were marked by continued harassment. I’d find flyers around campus of me with a Pinocchio nose. I was spit on and threatened by passersby while walking to class. I was informed by students that my colleagues were telling them to avoid my classes. And, of course, I was subjected to more investigation.
I wish I could say that what I am describing hasn’t taken a personal toll. But it has taken exactly the toll it was intended to: an increasingly intolerable working life and without the protection of tenure.
This isn’t about me. This is about the kind of institutions we want and the values we choose. Every idea that has advanced human freedom has always, and without fail, been initially condemned. As individuals, we often seem incapable of remembering this lesson, but that is exactly what our institutions are for: to remind us that the freedom to question is our fundamental right. Educational institutions should remind us that that right is also our duty.
Portland State University has failed in fulfilling this duty. In doing so it has failed not only its students but the public that supports it. While I am grateful for the opportunity to have taught at Portland State for over a decade, it has become clear to me that this institution is no place for people who intend to think freely and explore ideas.
This is not the outcome I wanted. But I feel morally obligated to make this choice. For ten years, I have taught my students the importance of living by your principles. One of mine is to defend our system of liberal education from those who seek to destroy it. Who would I be if I didn’t?
Moral Outrage As A Means to Influence Corporate Policy
I just read an article on The Verge titled ARENANET FIRINGS CAST A CHILLING SHADOW ACROSS THE GAME INDUSTRY‘ You’re just waiting for the wrong tweet to end your life now’.
Apparently, some customers (in the vein of Gamergate trolls) sick of gender politics in gaming, used a tweet they deemed offensive to get a female developer fired at a company called ArenaNet. ArenaNet’s management was more concerned with the devisive opinions of its trollish customers than the unpopular opinion of its employee.
The article is incensed by this, but isn’t this the exact same reason Google fired James Damore, when he wrote an anti-woman blog which the leftist gender warriors cheered about?
A tumbler user named @callingmyangel just messaged me the following question: Question: why do you hate feminism so much?
My answer is because of situations like the above. The tagline of this blog is:
Feminism is a fraud. To justify the fraud requires hypocrisy. To enforce the hypocrisy that justifies the fraud requires intimidation. Once you take an open minded, critical eye to the movement you see this is true. If you deny it you are either disingenuous, delusional or mentally deficient. It's your choice, but you have to choose.
Feminists have consistently used moral outrage tactics to intimidate others into following their ethos. If you voice an opinion other than ours we will slander you as sexist and get you fired. When the nuts on the other end of the continuum use the exact same tactics, feminists hypocritically denounce it.
Either “Moral Outrage As A Means to Influence Corporate Policy” is wrong or it isn’t. If it isn’t wrong, don’t bitch when others use your tactics against you. If it is wrong, don’t use it in the first place. Feminists are hypocrites who want to have it both ways; free to use outrage to influence corporations and get people fired themselves, while simultaneously be outraged when it is done to them.
A female coder named Jennifer Scheurle is quoted as follows:
Scheurle tells The Verge that incidents like this demonstrate why “large corporations letting their communities dictate and influence how to treat their employees is a very dangerous approach and obviously a slippery slope.” She adds that “this behavior has painted a target on all of our backs” and that it gives harassers “an angle to target us knowing that we won’t receive protection from our employers. Wanted or not, it makes us vulnerable and ultimately leads to many of us rather staying silent because we won’t know if an angry internet mob demanding our heads will be enough for us to lose our jobs and ultimately our livelihood.”
James Damore is nodding his head right now and agrees with Ms. Scheurle’s every word in that statement. So do I.
That feminists (and Ms. Scheurle herself) are completely oblivious to their hypocrisy, or more accurately don’t care and view it as their right and no one else’s, is bad. That the movement has normalized intimidation tactics like the above as a path to success is worse.
The selective outrage of feminists over disparities like the one in tech is revealing.
I was sitting in a ballet studio, warming up before class, when I was unexpectedly prompted to revisit the idea of the “gender gap.” Surrounded by that standard 20:1 female to male ratio, I asked myself, where is the public outrage? If we tend to assume that occupational gender disparities are invariably the result of injustice, then, by all accounts, ballet was suffering from an epidemic of anti-male sexism.
The selective outrage of feminists over disparities like the one in tech is revealing. There is a conspicuous shortage of school programs, campaigns, marches, and hashtags to end the gender gap in, say, teaching, or counseling, which according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics are professions overwhelmingly dominated by women. Nursing is a pretty good gig — it pays well, is flexible, and nurses can find work anywhere. So, where should we look for the anti-male bias that made it so that more than 90 percent of nurses are women?
Meanwhile, you will search in vain for the calls to eliminate the overrepresentation of men in mining, trucking, sewage, and garbage collecting. The reason for all this is that the feminist Left isn't so much a political movement for equality with a consistent philosophy as much as it is an expression of rage over the fact that men and women tend to make different career decisions.
