This seems to be a common pattern on HN where users make very strong negative claims about some person/organisation without even attempting to justify it.
I wonder if this is a conscious tactic where people who don't like some person/organisation attempt to attach negative emotions to it.
Hoping that people unfamiliar with it would feel negatively about it, without really knowing why they feel that way. "I just remember someone saying that it is bad."
Whether this is part of your secret masterplan, or a casual Sunday morning comment, is irrelevant.
You referred to Quillette's articles as, "bullshit in its most exquisite, hand crafted, artisanal form". If you aren't willing to even attempt justifying such defamatory claims, don't make them.
That is exactly the problem with Quillete and many sites/personalities across the sociopolitical spectrum: they carefully craft headlines and articles to tick all the bias boxes of their target audience. Making people stop, think, and maybe look deeper is a fine thing to do.
I'd say that behavior is often called "virtue signaling" when it's mostly other people who have to pay the cost for someone's "virtuous" behavior.
Example:
Y Combinator notices how only 15% of their funded founders are women. Their fellow progressives call them out on this, and YC commits to fund more women. They will write posts about how they want more female founders. They will organize women only events. Perhaps, they will even actually favor female founders over more qualified male founders for funding.
Very virtuous of them to care about gender equality.
The problem is that the society doesn't consist of "men" and "women". It consists of individuals. When a man applies to YC, he isn't "men", he is a unique individual. An individual who has put enormous effort to build a product. An individual who has been long dreaming of founding a company, and finally built enough courage to take the leap. An individual who would be qualified by his merits.
But... he gets rejected because YC consists of virtuous people who care about gender equality, and unfortunately they have already funded enough men.
Now YC gets to post how they have funded more female founders, and their fellow progressives will praise them for caring about gender equality.
And what happened to the aspiring male entrepreneur after that? No one knows. No one cares.
...
In this example, it's YC who gets all the virtue points, while it's the aspiring male entrepreneur who has to carry most of the cost for their "virtuous" behavior. This doesn't mean that YC's behavior is wrong, but it does suggest that their behavior isn't as virtuous as it seems.
I like this analysis. I’d say the root problem is that it feels like there should be no trade-offs in doing “good”, when in reality there are always trade-offs. In other words, there is no way to solve the undesirable gender disparity issue that will meet the standard of YC’s behavior being “as virtuous as it seems”.
> Joel Spolsky in 2002 identified a major pattern in technology business & economics: the pattern of "commoditizing your complement"
> This pattern explains many otherwise odd or apparently self-sabotaging ventures by large tech companies into apparently irrelevant fields ...
> ...they are pre-emptive attempts to commodify another company elsewhere in the stack, or defenses against it being done to them.
After having read this article, it's been interesting how a lot of these investments have started making more sense. They often aren't primarily about the product itself, rather they serve the function of minimizing any leverage other companies could have over them.
As Github offers an access to a valuable resource for tech companies, developers, Microsoft could use it to promote its products/services and to attract talent. This isn't good for Google, so they are hoping to reduce Microsoft's leverage.
In some sense this is obvious, but I hadn't consciously identified this as a pattern before.
Apologies if what I say is naive -- I don't follow Google announcements at all -- but they don't seem to try and progress any field per se, except maybe deep learning and only where it serves them (like one of their first successes was to reduce their power usage on a ship full of servers I think?).
They are merging YouTube Gaming to YT itself (cited branding problems), discontinuing Inbox next March... Add that to a long list of canceled services. I am not saying they have to run a charity but they do seem very heavy-handed in these situations.
And so far we have not seen them innovate anywhere for a while -- correct me if I am wrong.
To me, it seems they entrench themselves even further in the business of using personal data for profit -- one example could be the upcoming laptop OS Fuchsia. Imagine how much more they will know about people if that takes off on a massive scale.
They do have lots of ancillary revenue streams, but when you're talking about 100s of billions from ads then they just get overshadowed completely. Very hard to build an equivalently sized business in any other sector.
The major now seems to be on Google Cloud, but they have struggled there with bad marketing, lack of sales and support talent, and strange priorities. Seems to be growing now with the AI functionalities but there's a long road ahead.
The very example you cite at the end is an example of them genuinely innovating and advancing the field. Have you read the Fuchsia docs (https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/docs/+/HEAD/README.md)? It's spearheading several innovative OS concepts and I'm excited to see it develop (to name three: microkernel architecture, top to bottom least-privilege access sandboxing, and Flutter for the UI which advances UI development in other ways).
Google Compute Engine, and their infrastructure offerings more generally, are in a nice spot relative to Amazon and Microsoft. AWS and Azure get all the attention, but I wouldn't be surprised if GCE is decently profitable as well.
Like sibling commentors have pointed out, it's easy for even relatively successful ventures to be completely overshadowed by the golden goose that is ads and search.
As much as a Google replacement would be great for competition, it would be extremely difficult. Google was able to scale with the web gradually through anti spam and proprietary software, but a new competitor would struggle to reach such a needed scale so quickly
Agreed but I don’t think this is quite the same case. Back then Alta Vista pretty much only offered search as a value to its users. Google certainly started there but offers a lot more than just search to its users. Only one service had to be overthrown to overcome AV. Lots of services would need to be overcome to overthrow google.
For people not aware of Peterson, I want you not to take the parent comment seriously. Peterson is a highly polarizing figure, and people tend to have very strong positive/negative opinions about him.
Thus the parent comment is an example of someone feeling very negatively about him, and not an accurate representation of him or his ideas.
Properly justify it? Read his YouTube page and video list. I didn't even get into the racist shit. I'm going to let you guess what "Who's killing who, by race and gender, FBI statistics" and "Black Son of a MULTIMILLIONAIRE, STILL the SJW victim!" are about.
Before you say "ad hominem:" no, that doesn't apply here. He's not a credible source.
Urbit is interesting for me in how I first couldn't understand its purpose at all. Since then, I have had several cases of pondering on some difficult problem, only to find myself thinking, "...isn't this what Urbit is attempting to be a (partial) solution to?"
> Is this more Jordan Peterson, “woe is men” shit?
Acknowledging the existence of a problem affecting men?
> ... then that is their problem, as individuals ...
I agree, but the society needs to acknowledge that it actually IS a genuine problem for these men. We can then encourage the development and adoption of technological solutions, such as sexual VR and sexbots. It might not be the ideal solution for these men, but at least it's a solution (and it puts no responsibility on women to do anything).
I actually agree with you, society does need to acknowledge that members are in trouble.
I don't think anything that has come out of the MRA/Petersonian fringe is helping though.
There certainly is problems with men/masculinity in society, it's both sad and tragic, as illustrated by the tragic suicide of Scott Hutchison a couple of weeks back. I'm convinced that all these people who think they're sticking up for men are only making things worse though.
The answer doesn't lie in blaming female empowerment.
If you mean your post as a general argument against organisations claiming to value any vague "good thing", I can respect that. With few word changes in your comment, you could use it to argue against claims of valuing: privacy, diversity, inclusivity, environment etc.
Do you believe organisations should remove all claims of valuing such things?
You could easily come up with data that might be interesting to look at when discussing this question:
- are college liberals more or less likely to answer survey questions supportive of free speech than they were in the past
- has the annual rate of incidents of college activist excesses (such as violence over unwelcome speech) been increasing over time, or has the media environment just made it seem that way?
- are liberals more or less likely to support free speech than conservatives?
and so on. All we hear about is the same few anecdotes over and over again. Don't get me wrong, if there has been backsliding on support for free speech on the left than it's something I think we should be concerned about. I'm just not convinced that the panic we're seeing is justified. Certainly not when you compare this problem to the other problems we're currently facing as a society.
edit: formatting
edit: ironic that I've found no other topic on the internet where people are more likely to downvote you without engaging in reasoned debate than on the question of whether _other people_ are willing enough to engage in reasoned debate.
Thanks, I'll look at this, though I would advise retaining some skepticism when evaluating data from a single source, especially when that data is confirmatory of that source's stated mission. Here's some more to evaluate:
If you are a conservative, we will hire progressives to decide what is ethical and isn't ethical.
If you are a progressive, we will hire conservatives to decide what is and what isn't ethical.