Read the Google Memo

Yesterday I was recovering from Armadillocon, but since I still had a zillion things to do, I guess I’m still recovering today as well. Which means blogging will be a little on the lite side.

So let me jump on the story that every other single blogger in the world is talking about, that of Google firing the author of an internal memo whose (literal) “tl;dr” conclusions were as follows:

  • Google’s political bias has equated the freedom from offense with psychological safety, but shaming into silence is the antithesis of psychological safety.
  • This silencing has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed.
  • The lack of discussion fosters the most extreme and authoritarian elements of this ideology.
    • Extreme: all disparities in representation are due to oppression
    • Authoritarian: we should discriminate to correct for this oppression
  • Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership.
  • Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.
  • I don’t want to comment more until I’ve actually read the entire memo, which you can do right here.

    But one bit of personal fallout: It looks like I’m going to have to start using Bing as my search engine of choice. Do you know how painful that is?

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    3 Responses to “Read the Google Memo”

    1. Dwight Brown says:

      ” It looks like I’m going to have to start using Bing as my search engine of choice. Do you know how painful that is?”

      What’s wrong with Duck Duck Go? Other than the fact that there’s no “Let Me Duck Duck Go That For You” equivalent.

      (Little known fact: Yes, there is a Let Me Bing That For You. For those times when “Let Me Google That For You” just isn’t insulting enough.)

    2. martywd says:

      Yup, DuckDuckGo is my, errrr, _go_to_ i.e. default search engine as well.

      In addition the ‘!bang’ functionality available in DDG can be truly useful ==> https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=

      .

    3. BigGator5 says:

      I’ve been using Bing for ages now.

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