This is changing tho, with avatars and pronouns and emojis that display skin color. Now a thumbs up in Slack is segregated by color. Why people don't see this as an incredibly bad idea, I don't know.
We've got that happening by gender as well - dancing is a gender independent activity, I don't understand why I need to pick a gender to express when I want to say "I feel like dancing".
In all fairness, the good old yellow ones still work fine too. It's not like they were overwritten by the constant burden of choosing a race for your ephemeral internet hand.
> I have been imprisoned in Catalonia nearly 7 months. I speak no Catalan and little Spanish so human contact is limited. There are no entertainments - no escape from loneliness, from emptiness, from myself.
> This has been the most trying period of my life.
Turns out prison sucks after a while.
As for the food, he changed his tune on that, too:
This group of domain experts know what's best and there will be no unintended consequences. It's the perfect permanent solution and 15% is exactly the right number.
Because he didn't have much of a choice? I have a feeling he'd much prefer being back in the US or somewhere in Europe or any other number of places, but all of those lead to a jail cell.
When I worked at a FAANG, anti-censorship and pro free speech was normative. What happened? Why have we let a small number of intolerant activists scare us into silence?
Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with Damore, he was engaged in free speech. What he said is supported by a significant body of research and researchers. (And opposed by others - as it often the case on controversial topics.)
And yet, he was fired and made an example of. Anyone who publicly says that he had a point got shot down both within companies like Google, and on various discussion forums like this one.
I don't know how or when we lost tolerance for free speech, both as an industry and as a society. But the Damore incident is when I realized that we have.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that all the people doing the canceling are right and all the people being canceled are wrong.
Cancel culture will make racism and sexism worse. Even the most well-intentioned will fail to learn when they are afraid of expressing the wrong answer.
Try to teach someone mathematics where every time they get the wrong answer, they get shocked. Not a good learning environment.
And that's exactly what we have now. Repeat a few buzzwords and you are safe. But when problems manifest in a new way, you won't be able to understand or correct them because you don't really understand.
Being wrong is part of the path to being right. If you are cancelled for being wrong, you'll never be right. You'll just have to be quiet.
That isn’t the big issue. The big issue is that people think/act like they are always right. That is a close minded attitude that doesn’t lead to learning.
Furthermore people are actually acting tribally. They cancel people on the other side for the same behavior that they are ignoring from people on their side.
Let's assume - for the sake of the argument - scientists have managed to scientifically prove some unpopular theory. Pick your favorite one: working women do not benefit the society, some races are smarter on average than others or - god forbid - vaccines cause autism.
What's next? What are we going to do with these results?
P. S. And for those looking to reply "this cannot happen because it can never happen" - remember, this is just a mental exercise.
But we had just that... we had scientists and doctors telling us just last year (at the beginning of "the plague") that masks are useless for healthy people, and that they even present a higher risk to wearers, because they touch the mask and their face more.
And then, one random saturday (in my country atleast), masks became mandatory, along with gloves to enter the stores. Some media outlets have even removed the previous newsstories (not edit and say "whoops, now we know better", but remove completely), and everybody acts as if that didn't happen.
Same with trump + wuhan lab theory... at first it was a bannable offence on facebook to promote such idea... and now after trump, there are serious inquiries if that really happened, and we're allowed to discuss this again.
Basically, whoever is in charge (government, media platform, moderator,...) will moderate, censor and ban, until the preferable (for them) reality is set.
Masks reduce the spread of respiratory diseases in hospitals. People have known this for more than a century. Many tests have confirmed it for many different diseases. Masks also work outside of hospitals. Sars-cov-2 spreads like other common respiratory diseases. Therefore, masks reduce the spread of sars-cov-2.
We see this in data. Washington [0], Vermont [1], and Maine [2] all got mask mandates last summer. These states have had half the number of cases [3] as other northern-US states which waited many more months before requiring their citizens to wear masks in public indoor spaces.
I'm not talking about what happened after.. I'm talking about WHO literally not recommending to wear masks unless you're sick or caring for someone sick.
Back then, people who were wearking masks were marked as "stupid conspiracy theorists" and fearmongerers. Then, suddenly the mask mandates came in, and people not wearing the masks were "stupid conspiracy theorists".
> "There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there's some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly," Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergencies program, said at a media briefing in Geneva, Switzerland, on Monday.
> But we had just that... we had scientists and doctors telling us just last year (at the beginning of "the plague") that masks are useless for healthy people, and that they even present a higher risk to wearers, because they touch the mask and their face more.
> And then, one random saturday (in my country atleast), masks became mandatory, along with gloves to enter the stores. Some media outlets have even removed the previous newsstories (not edit and say "whoops, now we know better", but remove completely), and everybody acts as if that didn't happen.
sigh
There are nuances for that. First, there weren't enough masks and other PPE for medical personnel; second, there was already hoarding going on. Making masks mandatory at the beginning would have been disastrous and likely resulted in the deaths of many medical personnel, who were among the main limits of how many cases a country can take.
Then, you're missing a big difference between the initial "don't use masks" and later "everyone should mask up" guidances. The initial one was that you shouldn't wear a mask to protect yourself because untrained people were unlikely to wear them properly and would just touch themselves too much, thus wasting the precious resource. And of course, there was little certainty about how the virus spread and when ( do you spread it only when you have symptoms? do you spread it only if you have a positive test? )
The later one was due to knowing much better how the virus propagates, we can now conclude that wearing a mask stops people from spreading it, so everybody should wear a mask to stop community spread. There's a huge difference between wearing a mask to protect yourself from getting infected, and to stop unknowing sick people from spreading the virus via the main way it spreads. And of course, when that came about, there were just about enough masks in most countries to actually be able to do that.
Yes, it should have been handled better. Is it normal for such guidance to evolve considering the many known and unknown unknowns ? Absofuckinglutely. Would you have prefered for the guidance to stay the same for fear of looking stupid and wasting countless more lives?
> Same with trump + wuhan lab theory... at first it was a bannable offence on facebook to promote such idea... and now after trump, there are serious inquiries if that really happened, and we're allowed to discuss this again.
Again, nuance! What was bannable was claiming that China developed the virus on purpose. The lighter versions, like accidental lab leak, weren't banned ( that i recall; if you have a source stating otherwise i'd gladly retract that statement). In any case, any such discussion in the beginning seemed, to me at least, as deflections and excuses. We suck at handling a pandemic compared to just about anyone, but it's not our fault, China made this! What does it matter where the virus came from when people are dying left and right from it? Now that things are calmer, we can discuss and investigate.
There is still zero proof on the matter, and i doubt there ever will be ( as if the CCP would admit a lab leak in China caused a pandemic with such proportions and consequences).
> Wuhan Institute of Virology has collaborated with the Galveston National Laboratory in the United States, the Centre International de Recherche en Infectiologie in France, and the National Microbiology Laboratory in Canada.
> In 2015, an international team including two scientists from the institute published successful research on a hybrid virus, combining a bat coronavirus with a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease. The hybrid virus was able to infect human cells.
I want to believe they had a good excuse for doing so.
I want to believe they created rigorous safety protocols that reduce the risks as much as possible.
Then they chose to do it in the most populous city in Central China (population 11 million) which is so stupid I doubt they had a good enough reason and certainly didn't bother with safety all that much.
After such stupidity one doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt.
> Facebook is keen to ensure that a change in one rule doesn’t lead to a free-for-all for Covid misinformation. On the same day that it lifted the ban on lab-leak theories, it tightened up restrictions on users who “repeatedly share misinformation on Facebook”.
Guardian says it they also banned the "lab-leak" theories... (not to mention the second part of the quote).
Those are just two examples. Vaccine passports were also a "conspiracy theory". AstraZeneca was also marked as "perfectly safe" (and not "probably safe"), until they started ditching it everywhere.
And I'm not complaining about science changing after more data is revealed/processed (that is a normal part of science), I'm complaining about people getting banned one day for saying something, and then that something being accepted as reality the next day, and companies like facebook removing the bannable offence and saying "we will ban more people" in the same sentance.
Some media outlets have even removed the [erroneous] previous newsstories (not edit and say "whoops, now we know better", but remove completely), and everybody acts as if that didn't happen.
Well, yes. We've always been at war with Eastasia.
By your tone alone and the wording, I feel like downvoting you too, despite probably agreeing to your main point.
That means, I agree we live in a time, that is pretending to be based on science - but the debates are way more about how all the people feel about certain things and words and happily ignore or fight against all the facts, if they don't fit.
Those are impossible because such questions can't be scientifically asked in the first place.
Like, what does "benefit society" even mean? By what parameter? You can definitely make a scientific conclusion of the order of "religious conservatives really hate it when women work", but... duh? I can agree with that and not care one bit.
Second one, impossible because there's no such thing as race scientifically, in the sense the common person uses that word. You could make such a conclusion about groups with particular genetics, but you can't tell those by eyesight.
Imagine we managed to create a good enough model of the society. Kinda similar to what engineers use to design bridges or combustion chambers.
Then we create a target function - minimize the number people below poverty level, minimize the weighted number of crimes, maximize productive life longevity - and so on. All good things.
We run it and the model tells us: (1) mandate every woman have three kids by age of thirty (2) promote currently elected president to the king and make it a lifetime hereditary post and (3) make sure everyone goes to the church every Sunday (4) sell Alaska to China.
We shrug, check things here and there - and no, there's no mistake, the solution is stable and whatever we thought were unresolvable problems of monarchy actually do have simple solutions which noone thought about before.
Impossible, we'll never agree on the target function.
Eg, "minimize people below poverty level" -- this isn't universally wanted. Some people believe in fact that it's fundamentally impossible and that if anybody is brought up, that can only happen by bringing somebody down, and at best this is achievable by averaging everything to mediocrity, and they hate the idea of that.
Well, at the very minimum the target function can be something like "make sure everyone is not worse than right now and as many people as possible are better".
For the definition of "better off", see [1]
[EDIT]
Here's another option. Imagine, people come to you and say: hey, dale_glass, you're smart we trust you. Please pick the target function. You can put there whatever you want with whatever weight you want.
The caveat: you will have to unconditionally accept the outcome. You cannot keep tweaking and rerunning until the result matches your ideas of perfect society.
> Well, at the very minimum the target function can be something like "make sure everyone is not worse than right now and as many people as possible are better".
Not everyone wants that either. Some enjoy having inferiors.
> Here's another option. Imagine, people come to you and say: hey, dale_glass, you're smart we trust you. Please pick the target function. You can put there whatever you want with whatever weight you want.
What does that have to do with science or what we were talking about? That's extremely subjective.
I think you have picked particularly bad examples for this. Both the model and the target function have real, practical considerations that make them probably impossible. If, however, you did make such a model and such a function then the running that model in every possible configuration space would be a problem of such massive scale that you couldn't ever hope to find the best configuration.
I think if you have some sort of point you are trying to make, you should confine yourself to something more practical and easier to have a definite answer. If you so I think you will find that, eventually, the invalidated belief will be dropped except by a small minority and the consensus will shift to encompass that viewpoint.
Your scenario requires a lot of people to give up their personal freedoms and happiness for the good of whichever individuals' lives would be improved by their sacrifice. Let's add in that all men not married by the age of 21 should be castrated. It's for the good of society right?
What's the point of this? If/when those things would hypothetically be found, we'd have to come to terms with it. However, we found that (1) reproductive freedom (2) constitutionalism and democracy (3) religious freedom, are all conducive to a better society. It's impossible we'll ever find otherwise.
That's completely missing the point. The point is, do you accept that unpleasant Truth, do you reject it, or do you weigh whatever other values you have against that truth and ignore it.
You can't make that question in the general sense and draw useful conclusions.
Eg, it's an "unpleasant Truth" that you're at a risk of dying in a car accident. But yeah, we just decide it's worth going out anyway, and ignore it.
But that isn't applicable to a similar "unpleasant Truth" that welding on a gas tank could get you killed. The task is different, the risks are different, the tradeoffs are different, the ways to compensate for danger are different.
All such things are very contextual. Trying to divine some sort of general rule or philosophy doesn't really work.
Honestly, both of these, the car accident and the gas tank are being treated exactly the same here. You've looked at the given "truth", evaluated it, and then come to a decision on whether it's worth it or not. It's explicitly making that decision and that trade off.
what andrepd said felt far more like a handwave
>However, we found that (1) reproductive freedom (2) constitutionalism and democracy (3) religious freedom, are all conducive to a better society. It's impossible we'll ever find otherwise.
It's a denial of a hypothetical, which is not engaging with the core point, but instead attacking the analogy instead. It's a standard (and often unintentional) logical fallacy.
This is my interpretation of the conversation. Please avoid approaching this from the "perfect hypotheticals" perspective, their perfection is besides the point.
A: We have a perfect target metric, and we've found that C, which we philosophically like, performs far worse than B, which we find abhorrent
B: There's no perfect metric, and if there were, we've already found C is better, and there's no way how C could be worse.
It's deliberately avoiding the point.
To break it down even further:
>However, we found that (1) reproductive freedom (2) constitutionalism and democracy (3) religious freedom, are all conducive to a better society.
If you didn't want downvotes you could have left out the particulars especially untimely is the inclusion of vaccines cause autism. The whole debacle was fueled originally by a lying sack of garbage who was drummed out of the medical profession for faking his results and just took off from there.
Well, I mean, he makes it clear enough that those are just examples for the sake of argument. I found the examples useful to understand the scenario he was proposing.
> Try to teach someone mathematics where every time they get the wrong answer, they get shocked. Not a good learning environment.
The problem with the analogy is that the underlying assumption is that the people learning math want to know the truth and are acting in good faith even when they get the wrong answer.
On the other hand, there are people, powerful people, who push ideas that don't care about the truth. Here is a specific example. As the Republican nominee in 2016, Donald Trump tweeted that 81% of white murder victims were killed by black people. This is *wildly* wrong. When he was corrected, he didn't send out a correction, he didn't even remove the old tweet. The point is he was sending a message to his target audience that made them feel a certain way, and that was his goal ... not communicating the truth.
Politicians who are crafting policy are certainly a different category.
Many well-intentioned people do get stuff wrong when it comes to racism or sexism. It's a complex topic with shifting definitions and evolving standards.
100 years ago, academia was at the forefront of racism due to some flawed philosophies and bad science. Should we really expect the average layperson to be ahead of those scholars just because some time has passed and they hear "racism is bad" a thousand times? No. The education needs to happen, and being wrong is a starting place.
There's also been a general failure by academia to explain modern racial concepts. Many people don't understand why it's OK to discriminate against asians in college admissions, for instance.
It requires you to go with a very different axiom of equity over equality, basically. Asians do well at exams for some reason, therefore to ensure that there is an equitable distribution, we then sacrifice the level playing ground of equality in favour of the outcome driven goal of equity.
Equality focuses on normalizing the distribution of resources, while equity distributes resources to normalize the outcome.
Equality, given a group of people, would aim to put them on a level playing ground by allocating the same level of resources to each. Equity however, would allocate resources to try and achieve similar outcomes across the people. People performing worse would thus get more resources in equity, but would receive the same amount.
The two are thus mutually incompatible. To a certain extent, some games can be played with the definition, such as what to include under the "level playing field". An example here would be the inclusion of natural talent and propensity for work that is generally considered innate. Should this be
I disagree, there can be conflicts between the two goals when resources are limited, but I think systems can be defined that support both.
College admissions is a strange place to promote the idea of equity since it is a fundementally inequitable process that is designed to find people with advantages and give them bigger advantages.
By introducing race based discrimination into college admissions you are reducing equality in a way that that doesn't create a more equitable situation. Anti-asian racism will handicap these students in other parts of their professional life so using the argument of "promoting equity" to discriminate against them in college admissions as well seems purely pernicious.
If you truely want to improve college equity, you need to first make changes to what is required for success at college and then adjust the admissions process to find candidates that can succeed.
> Many well-intentioned people do get stuff wrong when it comes to racism or sexism. It's a complex topic with shifting definitions and evolving standards.
In my specific example, there was nothing well-intentioned our complex about it. He was off by a factor of more than 5x. When his error was pointed out, and it is something trivially confirmed, he didn't fix it.
The scariest thing about Trump is not that he lied like crazy. It is that he really had an audience, and that audience is reasonably close to half the country. If you're a progressive, it is worth spending some time thinking about how to reach out to and get support from that half of the country. Because attempting to govern without them is a guaranteed disaster.
That ship has sailed. The progressives have been playing the strategy 'if we just follow the rules of the game, eventually they will play along'. But the populists completely threw out the rulebook a number of years ago, they no longer want to play the same game. And now there is a new breed of younger progressives coming into power who recognize that and also want to throw out the rulebook. Interesting times coming.
Yes, and if you read https://www.amazon.com/How-Democracies-Die-Steven-Levitsky/d... you'll realize that once democratic norms have broken down on both sides of the aisle, the next thing that happens is the replacement of democracy by a totalitarian state.
>Cancel culture will make racism and sexism worse.
I completely agree with that.
Just to keep an eye on matters, and you never know how you need to set up your life going forward, lately I've made an attempt to eavesdrop on snatches of private conversations.
I'm blown away by how radicalized people are becoming, and not in a way that progressives would like. Formerly, these people were essentially indifferent. Now, not so much.
Good one, thanks. It conflicts a bit with the "assume good faith" guideline and sometimes I find it hard to figure which side should win.
(Note: in hindsight of course a comment that suggests mass murdering people is a troll post and not written in good faith, I'm not sure what I was thinking. I'm not debating that, just saying that it's hard and appreciate the nudges)
Imagine your mom is racist. Will you go to each and every house on her street telling everyone not to talk to this racist bitch who is not willing to admit she's wrong? Or you will spend time after time after time leaving no avenue unexplored trying to see what is she coming from and why is she wrong?
The sun'll come out
Tomorrow
Bet your bottom dollar
That tomorrow
There'll be sun!
Just thinkin' about
Tomorrow
Clears away the cobwebs
And the sorrow
'Til there's none!
When I'm stuck a day
That's gray
And lonely
I just stick out my chin
And grin
And say
Oh
The sun'll come out
Tomorrow
So you gotta hang on
'Til tomorrow
Come what may
Tomorrow!
Tomorrow!
I love ya
Tomorrow!
You're always
A day
Away!
The sun'll come out
Tomorrow
So you gotta hang on
'Til tomorrow
Come what may
Tomorrow!
Tomorrow!
I love ya
Tomorrow!
You're always
A day
Away!
Tomorrow!
Tomorrow!
I love ya
Tomorrow!
You're always
A day
Away!
People are expected to learn not to be racists and sexists growing up. Those who don't learn then are rarely reformable but at least they can learn to be silent.
>I don't know how or when we lost tolerance for free speech, both as an industry and as a society. But the Damore incident is when I realized that we have.
The tech industry was just an exception for a decade or so because it was fairly non-corporate. Go to any conservative law firm or traditional management and try to start a fiery political debate, and see how that goes. There was never any lively democratic discourse or tolerance in any corporate environment, or any other private environment for that matter, ask any gay person that's older than 25 and doesn't live in a liberal state. George Carlin made a career of saying 'shit' on television, that's how free-wheeling discourse was.
Also as a sidenote on that Damore debacle, he got canned because of his presentation. You can cite 100 studies, when you start to argue that women drop out of high stress jobs because they're neurotic you might as well commit seppuku. He should have passed that manifesto by someone who isn't on the spectrum because anyone could have seen that trainwreck coming a mile away.
I know several people on the autism spectrum. They say Damore was an asshole. It frustrates them so many neurotypical people casually equate those things.
May be he's an asshole. Isn't it what tolerance is about?
Having nothing against gays is not tolerance. This way people are also tolerant to microwaves, ceiling fans and aluminum foil: they have nothing agains all these things.
Tolerance is hating gays passionately, but still tolerating them and serving them in your store. Thinking that women should not be in the workspace, but still treating them equally and professionally.
Hating someone and treating them "equally and professionally" is indeed the epitome of tolerance. However, I think your examples do a good job of illustrating the limitations of tolerance, perhaps inadvertently.
First, a world where most store owners hate me but serve me and most of my coworkers think I shouldn't be there but keep quiet about it is, bluntly speaking, a shitty world. Obviously, that world is better than one where people are outspoken about their bigotry, but I would strongly prefer a world of widespread acceptance.
Practically speaking, someone who "hates gays passionately" or thinks that "women should not be in the workspace" will probably treat their gay customers or female colleagues worse, even if they are trying to be tolerant.
Finally, I'd like to emphasize that these situations aren't academic to me. I'm fortunate in that I don't regularly experience homophobia in stores or misogyny at work but they're a real risk I face.
"Tolerance is hating gays passionately, but still tolerating them and serving them in your store. Thinking that women should not be in the workspace, but still treating them equally and professionally."
I have never seen that work. The hate usually manifest in various hidden and subtle actions. Intrigues. Plots. Leaving everyone involved with a bitter feeling and pure drama after a while.
If I am hated, I prefer open hate. Then I know where I am and can just go to a place I am truly welcome.
True tolerance in my book, is actually tolerating and accepting that life and humans are very diverse. Live and let live. And I can tolerate a lot of things I don't like for myself, as long as it is no direct harm to me.
I know people with every combination of on/off the autism spectrum, who like/dislike Damore. Given that, anecdotes from any particular perspective aren't very telling.
"similar to criticizing blind people for being bad at riding bicycles"
I am not aware of a debate where people get blamed for being blind.
But it makes sense to me to critizice people who want to ride bikes but have not the ability to do so in a safe way, that not endangers other people participating in street traffic.
Now if a blind person learns to ride the bike reasonable well (with technical help) so he or she can actually ride with safety and not endanger others - fine with me and probably most other people.
The authors underlying point is that factoring in traits of the population — as described statistically and not anecdotally - is the way to make social structures more inclusive.
For example, let’s say that statistically it was discovered to be that more women prioritize work-life balance over all else. Let’s also assume that you want women to feel included in that little “meritocracy” you created. Is it more or less inclusive that your corporate strategy for promoting favored women who sacrificed their work life balance by working on weekend?
The irony of the response to that memo, and to cancel culture more widely, is that reasonable people who read it and don't agree with everything it says, but at least agree that some of it is worthy of discussion, are more likely to be radicalized than side with the cancelers. The diversity and inclusion mob is tolerant of diversity only when it satisfies their narrow definition of what that is.
I don't understand why Damore is the hill people are always trying to die on. He didn't publish that in the marketplace of ideas. He sent it to his coworkers, using company resources, on company time. Your workplace has never been a free speech bastion.
Any person may or may not like that but it's been true forever so I'm not sure how it indicates that free speech is now in some sort of novel danger.
Have you read the Damore memo? It is fundamentally about how Google should increase diversity, given the data showing that most women are choosing to not go into engineering-like fields, rather than being forced out of them.
It's a corporate policy proposal, and it was posted to a private internal board of people interested in how to shape Google corporate policy to increase diversity. Sort of a workgroup. In a sane world, that's exactly the sort of workplace discussion one would want.
> It is fundamentally about how Google should increase diversity
Well, it was fundamentally about how Google should stop all efforts to recruit or promote women or non-white men, because Damore believed those efforts were "discrimination" against himself.
Huh? My description is completely accurate. I feel like a lot of people didn't actually read Damore's document, or perhaps read it and were shouting "YES! YES!" so loudly as they read about Google's supposed left-wing bias that they can't actually perceive the words written.
Damore says straight up and in so many words that Google should end all of its "diversity" hiring initiatives because he believes they're discriminatory against himself, this is just not an arguable issue.
I can see how you could get that Google should end "diversity" hiring initiatives as one of the core messages, but not "all" of them, and "he believes they're discriminatory against himself" is quite uncharitable. Having reread it just now after five years, the theme seems to be that he wants to find the intersection of Google being a good workplace for women and Google being successful as a company.
From the memo:
> Non-discriminatory ways to reduce the gender gap
> Below I’ll go over some of the differences in distribution of traits between men and women that I
outlined in the previous section and suggest ways to address them to increase women’s
representation in tech without resorting to discrimination. Google is already making strides in
many of these areas, but I think it’s still instructive to list them:...
He goes on to list interventions like more pair programming, changing performance evaluations to encourage collaboration over competition, allowing more part-time work, and reducing the stress of the job.
He says Google needs to reduce hiring initiatives which are not backed by evidence, and which are themselves likely illegally discriminatory, like hiring quotas (likely illegal) and implicit bias training (debunked).
It's because he published a memo pertinent to a hot topic at the company and rather than engage him on the merits of his ideas leadership decided to fire him. Is it unsettling that the employees at a company with a global monopoly on information retrieval seem to not tolerate dissent within their ranks?
It was very much within the scope of his job duties. Many of his colleagues were encouraged and rewarded for making presentations on the same topic using company resources on company time (with the opposite conclusions).
The idea that you can investigate something and present your good faith effort at the truth, with evidence, and be fired for that, is pretty scary. Like imagine several of your colleagues do comparisons of PostgreSQL and MongoDB on your internal blog, showing some benchmark results; you think that's not the whole picture and do your own comparison showing some other benchmarks. And then you get fired, not because your benchmarks were less rigorous or your writeup was poor, but because they don't like your answers. That's not an environment that's going to lead to good technology choices and an effective company.
> He didn't publish that in the marketplace of ideas.
If a forum isn't a "market place of ideas" than it's not a forum.
> He sent it to his coworkers, using company resources, on company time.
All of which were not reasons he got fired. And Google actually encourages its employees to do such things, by the way.
And those are all things we have done and is considered normal in most sane workplace. We all posted something not work related to your coworkers on internal forums, including politics.
> Your workplace has never been a free speech bastion.
Which was never the argument in the first place. Nobody is arguing that Google violated the 1st amendment by firing him. But let's not pretend that Google's size doesn't make it a major non-elected influence on our society. We have seen the consequences of that when it came to potential Covid-19 treatments and its origins. The "it's a private company", which hypocritically used by self-described socialists but I digress, doesn't negate the consequences of their actions or their responsibilities.
> Any person may or may not like that but it's been true forever
That's just an appeal to tradition fallacy.
> I'm not sure how it indicates that free speech is now in some sort of novel danger.
I'm the owner of a big corporations and me and my buddies form the largest group of employers in the country, I don't like your stance on free speech and who you support politically. Yeah but!? No, I'm a private company.
Damore said that men are better engineers than women. That is false. It is also incompatible with an organization that tries to be diverse and inclusive. That's the main reason he was fired.
Getting fired for insulting your co-workers is not censorship.
In society today, we have a "paradox of tolerance". If we tolerate everything, then we tolerate people being intolerant, and many people in our society will suffer. So we must be intolerant of intolerance. This is the only way to build a society of equality and justice.
Oh, right. You can't. Because he never said that, nor did he say anything that amounted to that. When it comes to false claims, people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones and all that.
Ironically, the paradox of tolerance is often used to justify attacking almost any opposing view, as almost any view can be framed as some form of intolerance.
I believe the paradox of tolerance as a useful idea is empty and bunk
We haven't lost our tolerance for free speech, we've lost our tolerance for listening to people who claim society has to listen to their bullshit because of the first amendment rather than because they present a compelling argument in a positive way.
The only people bringing up the free speech argument are the people defending Google, not the other way around.
Open discourse can exist as a value too. And Google, one of the most influential entity in the US and the world, has decided that it's not something that should be promoted. Just as LeBron James has the right to defend the genocidal regime of China. But let's not fool ourselves about who's on the right side of history.
> The only people bringing up the free speech argument are the people defending Google, not the other way around.
Quoting the OP, "Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with Damore, he was engaged in free speech." This sounds like it refutes your statement, no?
Having worked there when this happened, the discourse definitely felt like, "Google is stifling the free speech of one of their employees" vs "Google has the right to fire employees for any reason."
> Open discourse can exist as a value too
It does (are we not engaging in it right now?).
There were (and I assume still are) plenty of random internal mailing lists where those types of discussions happened. I mostly stayed away from them because my goal at Google was to build cool products, not waste my day on internal mailing lists; I prefer to go to HN to do that.
> Just as LeBron James has the right to defend the genocidal regime of China.
I guess the NBA and China is the Godwin's law equivalent for free speech. He has the legal right to say what he wants, he doesn't have the right to have what he says have zero consequences (which is what the comic says).
You argue that he doesn't have a choice, but he does: he can speak his mind and potentially lose access to his largest market; he's just unwilling to do that because he deems the economic ramifications are too large. You always have a choice, most just choose to not make the hard one.
> Quoting the OP, "Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with Damore, he was engaged in free speech." This sounds like it refutes your statement, no?
> Having worked there when this happened, the discourse definitely felt like, "Google is stifling the free speech of one of their employees" vs "Google has the right to fire employees for any reason."
Free speech as in the 1st amendment, sorry I wasn't clear enough. Yes Google "has the right to fire people as they like", but it's not free speech as a value, which can and will cause problems down the line on a societal level. Would it be all right for FAANG to fire all Republicans? All pro-unions people?
> I mostly stayed away from them because my goal at Google was to build cool products, not waste my day on internal mailing lists; I prefer to go to HN to do that.
Good for you, but his post was was about Google's internal policies and work, which is work related.
> You argue that he doesn't have a choice, but he does: he can speak his mind and potentially lose access to his largest market; he's just unwilling to do that because he deems the economic ramifications are too large. You always have a choice, most just choose to not make the hard one.
I don't get why you insist on showing a total lack of social conscience like a crony corporate lawyer who likes to brag about how he shipped well paying jobs overseas. Yes it is legal right now, it doesn't mean it's right thing to do.
I guess when they will use your data for salary and hiring purposes against you then you will change your tune. P.S.: do not talk about unions ;)
>I don't know how or when we lost tolerance for free speech
I think you're confusing lost tolerance for free speech with 'raising the value of the speech of traditionally marginalized groups.'
A man at Atari in 1976 who argues women are worse engineers than men mostly broadcasts to an audience of empowered men and disempowered women. So his 'free speech' is respected while those women's is not.
A man at Google in 2018 who argues the same thing has to deal with the consequences of women's speech, but to him, that feels like a chilling of his free speech.
I'm fine that we are in scenario 2, having listened to a lot of other ill-informed white men give heir 'opinion' on things for no true reason.
Honest question. Have you ever actually read the memo?
If you have, please tell me what passage makes you think that it says that women are worse engineers than men. Because as far as I can tell, there are none.
The topic at hand is controversial enough WITHOUT making up stuff about what was said.
>humans are generally biased towards protecting females.
>These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas. More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics
>This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading.
>Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average
I think the disconnect here is that the author is couching his claims with strawmen 'women prefer' and links to small-n surveys that you find sufficient (but most do not). Maybe if we refactored some of what he said, it would make sense:
> people who excel at math are generally biased toward being short and unfriendly.
>These two differences in part explain why STEM students relatively prefer working long-hours and avoiding meaningful human connection. More liberal arts students may like socializing because it requires EQ and even within startups, comparatively more PMs and SDRs have significant others.
>This leads to engineers generally having a harder time receiving criticism, asking for help, staying out of others business, and collaborating.
>Engineers on average look for peer praise while SDRs have a higher drive for wealth accumulation.
Nothing you've quoted says that the author thinks women make worse engineers, only that people are different. If you think it says something else, you should search within to find out where you generated that meaning.
You think saying that women have a harder time speaking up and leading has nothing to do with engineering?
Where exactly have you worked as an engineer where leadership didn't matter and people weren't encouraged to speak up?
EDIT: To be clear about the point here, none of these claims are sourced! He's just insulting women in 'kind-sounding' language! I think women are very unprotected in modern society! I think women LOVE systemization! The insult is the unsourced claim!
LOL, disempowered women in 1976. The real student revolts took place in 1968-1970 and produced hippies, free love, another instance of feminism (second wave I believe).
It was probably a better time for being a woman in CS than now, with disingenuous bros paying lip service to SJW causes in order to keep their > 250,000 salaries while not having a clue.
College's changed; It used to be free speech focused with debates and exposure to a wide set of ideas being seen as critical to a well rounded education. Now you can't even get vaguely controversial speakers on campus.
Tech workers tend to be younger so the more recent changes to the political views of colleges effect them first.
Are people on college campuses generally clamoring to see a standup routine from Jerry Seinfeld? As the article points out, he's 66 years old and his humor is self-described as "observational". Maybe today's college students just don't connect to the observations of someone two generations older than them?
But why perform for an audience full of people who won't enjoy it? In my experience, performances hosted at colleges overwhelmingly attract audiences of students. It's nobody's fault that his humor doesn't land with that audience, but it is his fault that he's blaming the students for it.
College campuses are where you are supposed to be confronted with challenging ideas and different perspectives. That's one of their great gifts. But even mainstream Jerry Seinfeld, who created one of the most popular sitcoms of all time and doesn't even swear, is now considered too controversial?
It's not just him. Dave Chappelle and many other comedians have been saying the same thing about college audiences.
Consider that maybe people agree that being confronted with challenging ideas and perspectives is valuable but they don't find the same value in Jerry Seinfeld's comedy as they do in, say, a lecture by someone with radical beliefs.
People are going to love Jerry forever because of the sitcom. His standup isn't a big hit with the kids these days but everyone still knows the sitcom.
Chappelle is one of the biggest comics alive. The people who are bothered by trans jokes are a small, humorless minority.
The problem with trans jokes is there's basically only one of them that most comedians tell. It's just degrees of incredulity about the variety of things that people identify as.
Patton Oswalt's version got chuckles out of me though. His take was basically "I'm on your side, I'm just old and don't know what you're talking about", which is at least poking fun at the incredulity, rather than the variety.
Seinfeld currently has 2 routines, one is for the normie/mainstream crowd which is what you expect from his TV show. The other is his totally uncensored and cutting edge written material he only performs for younger audiences or in other words 'people not expecting TV Seinfeld' and it definitely would be blacklisted on any campus.
> it definitely would be blacklisted on any campus.
They don't blacklist anything on college campuses anymore. They naughtylist it, disallowlist it, or ungoodlist it... presumably so anyone descended from regicides won't be triggered by Charles II of England's words appearing out of context.
I have a good sense of humor. Making fun of a group that is persecuted is not funny to me because I don't find anything amusing about taunting the disenfranchised.
So tell me so good trans jokes and change my mind, eh?
I mean, I just googled "trans jokes" and the first hit was "18 trans jokes by actual trans people" that weren't funny. I was hoping for some raunchy limericks or something. Instead I got pages of results just saying how so-and-so shouldn't make trans jokes.
Having that powerful of a chokehold on media and search results is the opposite of "persecuted" and "disenfranchised". On the contrary, that's a terrifying amount of political clout and power to steer discourse.
> I was hoping for some raunchy limericks or something.
Yay because being trans is all about being raunchy hey ho!
OK, here's my own joke. I'm trans and this is a trans joke taken from, like, life, dude.
There's this guy sitting with four ladies and another
guy and he starts saying how he knows a tranny when he sees one.
"I mean, they all have like, what, size-7 feet? I mean come on, it's so
obvious!"
"I got size 7 feet" says one of the ladies.
The guy blinks once, then goes on:
"And their hands! Have you seen their hands? They're like two times the size of
my hands!"
The second lady holds up her hands. "My hands are bigger than your hands".
The guy pauses for a mere second and goes on.
"But the dead give-away is their voices. They have loud, booming, bass
voices..."
"I can sing in the entire baritone vocal range" says the third lady.
The guy stops, clears his throat, looks around, then leans in conspiratorially.
"You know what's the real way to tell a trannie apart? They can explain the
offside rule in soccer".
"That's easy" says the fourth lady. "A player is in an offside position if any
of their body parts, except the hands and arms, are in the opponents' half of
the pitch, and closer to the opponents' goal line than both the ball and the
second-last opponent".
The guy is now sweeating bricks. He turns to look at each of them carefully.
"OK" he says. "Was even a single one of you born female"?
> Yay because being trans is all about being raunchy hey ho
To be fair, while that is a common attitude toward trans identity, it’s also a common attitude toward humor (that is, lots of people equate good jokes with raunchy ones.) It’s hard to tell which consideration is in play.
> "That's easy" says the fourth lady. "A player is in an offside position if any of their body parts, except the hands and arms, are in the opponents' half of the pitch, and closer to the opponents' goal line than both the ball and the second-last opponent".
<ex-ref>
But that is just explaining offside position, which is only part of the offside rule.
</ex-ref>
> On the contrary, that's a terrifying amount of political clout and power to steer discourse.
This one reminds me of the old joke about Jews controlling the media. One jewish man asks another why he's reading all those tabloids that are full of antisemitic lies. The othere one replies that no matter how bad things are in real life, the newspapers always make him feel great because according to them the Jews control the banks, the media, the world governments and everything else.
Look, I'm willing to judge a joke on its on merits but there's some territory that's trickier than others: when the subject is a member of the underclass.
Trans people are literally being legislated today and actively demonized by the right. Do you remember the trans bathroom laws that were all the rage? Do you remember all the attacks by trans people that precipitated them? No, because it's manufactured fear.
You finding pages of individuals speaking out against that and that's terrifying? More manufactured fear.
I'm not sure what iteration of Chappelle's jokes they are addressing in the indiewire piece, but here's what I could find, and it seems very different in tone https://youtu.be/r_EXb8_8xlM
First joke aside (which I'd guess is older material than the rest) if you stick with him and don't cherrypick quotes, it's almost entirely self-deprecating. Even in the Caitlyn Jenner joke, the punchline rests on him acknowledging his own failure to resist his impulses. Don't forget the layer where he is acting out the role of a horrible, insensitive person throughout this so the audience can laugh at his oversimplification and ignorance. That's a big part of comedy and it does not translate over to quotations in prose.
Hopefully I didn't kill the frog, but he's absolutely not punching down from what I could find.
> I have a good sense of humor. Making fun of a group that is persecuted is not funny to me because I don't find anything amusing about taunting the disenfranchised.
If your humor is subservient to your social/political beliefs, you don't have a sense of humor.
Just a minute there. Putting aside the other comments that pointed out that you're probably making this up... are you saying 18 year old women shouldn't feel empowered to date whoever they damn well please? Who are you to decide an adult woman's rights over her own body? That's creepy fascist territory.
AFAIK, he is only know to have done that once (and they first met and went out, though Seinfeld said later that they weren't “dating” yet, when she was 17, not 18.)
Large corporations are very pro censorship and anti free speech these days. Amazon bans books even though it’s the worlds biggest bookstore. AWS, Apple and Google all ban businesses, apps and content that they don’t like through selective enforcement of TOU. Netflix and Prime Video refuse to carry certain content.
Inside these companies, a few loud voices control the Overton window, and management kowtows to them either enthusiastically (many of them agree) or at least resignedly (easier than taking the bull by the horns and potentially alienating large swathes of employees or customers.
The reason that radical ideas with marginal support have this level of impact is the total recalcitrance and volume of the proponents. I don’t need to reason with you; i just need to shout you down and label you a moral pariah (“racist”, “white supremacist”, “climate denier”, etc). Natural self-censorship will cause almost everyone to shut up so I don’t unleash on them too.
Part of it is being scared. But in the world of 24/7 surveillance I think it's more that anything you say can haunt you for the rest of your life. It's not OK to make mistakes or slip up because it's captured and stored forever. People aren't allowed to debate, learn, and change.
Anecdotally, most of my interactions with friends has moved offline. I wonder whether that's a broader trend, and whether it will be sustainable?
Like, in the same way I learned not to post personal stuff on Livejournal (then MySpace and Facebook), will we just... log off half the time, and treat the rest as a resume? Or will we hole up in private discords/IRC/Matrix/etc groups?
(* and for anyone wondering, we're all fairly left-leaning, pro-social-justice people. we're not hiding from Cancel Culture, we just feel more free in smaller groups.)
Basically, yeah. There's no expectation of permanence like there is with social media. Recording/transcribing and publishing would be a gross violation of trust.
Someone could point a directional microphone at you in the park, too, but one doesn't typically worry about that.
It's easy to allow and promote freedom of expressing thoughts, any thoughts, even controversial thoughts, if you're an underdog in an underdog industry, whose existence and success depends on being free to think up and try weird things. FAANG of today is not that.
FAANG is a bunch of good ol' megacorps now[0]. They're very sensitive about their stock price, about their relationships with investors, customer base. These things are strongly and negatively affected by media controversies, so corps obviously want to minimize such stories. This is how you get a trigger-happy HR: they become the internal enforcement arm of company's ongoing PR efforts.
I haven't seen a company that's actually ruled by their HR department. All I've seen is HR protecting their company - and the way this protection looks depends on the company's position and culture. They will absolutely fight for freedom of expression for as long as the company itself needs it to survive and grow.
--
[0] - I think it's important to repeat because people old enough to remember how they started, who were adjacent to hacker culture back then, sometimes cling to that image of a bunch of geeks trying to make something about the world better. I know I do, I have to keep reminding myself that Big Tech is just a collection of run-of-the-mill multinationals. They may happen to employ a lot of software developers, some (few) of which work on cutting-edge problems, but they're just corporations, like all other corporations, like all the corporations the hacker culture of yore used to mock.
They went mainstream. As soon as your trying to sell kids TV (on Netflix, YouTube, Apple/Amazon TV etc) suddenly your have to be 110% boring and vanilla. No more space for constructive disagreement or controversial content. Just colourful shapes and a laugh track please.
I left Google in 2015, and I started to notice the flip from liberalism to illiberalism around 2012-2013. I still remember how weird it was the first time I heard someone on Memegen say that due process (ie, trying to understand whether a complaint occurred) was a legal constraint that Google didn't need to adhere to when adjudicating intra-employee complaints (eg harassing comments).
IMO it's pretty straightforward, in Google's case at least. They scaled wildly in terms of headcount (I think they have a bit under 10x the headcount they had when I joined), right when competition for the best tech employees exploded. They obviously had to lower their bar[1] significantly to keep growing, and they ended up scooping up masses of coastal urban[2] midwits, precisely the population that was most susceptible to and hit hardest by the religious awakening that occurred in the early 2010s. A bit more speculatively, there's some evidence that higher cognitive ability is correlated with support for free speech[3] and other tenets of liberalism, so any company going from a highly-selected-for-intelligence employee base to a dumber one has a built-in backlash against liberalism/pluralism/open-mindedness/etc.
[1] I'm not suggesting that a binary switch was flipped, and that I personally made it in right before they started dumbing down their hiring. I wouldn't be surprised if the bar was higher a few years before I joined, and I can't say whether I would've met that bar. It's an iterative process that sped up over time and the company started to suffer the cumulative effect in the quality of their employee body.
[2] This isn't implying that being coastal and urban makes you stupid. I myself am very much coastal and urban and have been my entire life. These are just the areas that were hit hardest by these ideologies, and "midwits" (to borrow a term from Taleb) are fertile ground for new mass movements.
> A bit more speculatively, there's some evidence that higher cognitive ability is correlated with support for free speech[3] and other tenets of liberalism, so any company going from a highly-selected-for-intelligence employee base to a dumber one has a built-in backlash against liberalism/pluralism/open-mindedness/etc.
I wonder if their focus on mind-numbing algo questions in interviews also contributed to this? Somebody willing to spend months grinding Hackerrank, Leetcode or the like to get a job probably isn't a bastion of criticial thinking.
> I wonder if their focus on mind-numbing algo questions in interviews also contributed to this? Somebody willing to spend months grinding Hackerrank, Leetcode or the like to get a job probably isn't a bastion of criticial thinking.
Fwiw, I didn't practice for my tech interviews and found my Google new-grad interviews pretty easy. IIRC, the questions were "implement a cache" and "turn a sorted array into a binary tree". I haven't done work similar to algorithm problems for a decade now, and I'm pretty sure I could ace that interview again with my eyes closed, using skills that are relatively useful for a general SWE job. Though obviously I was much closer in time to the algo questions of my CS education, and most of the complaints I've heard about the process are not centered around new-grad interviews.
Though perhaps that's your point? As the size of the organization scaled, perhaps they moved away from the type of interview I got, towards interviews that more closely match your complaint. Conducting an interview that accurately predicts job performance is basically an impossible task, so I wouldn't be surprised if, speaking generally, the quality of their interviews suffered from their scaling just as much as their candidate pool did.
I've never interviewed at Google personally, but I've heard lots of people complain about the needless difficulty of the questions so I assume they're something harder than just turning a sorted array into a binary tree.
It's not worth paying attention to vote counts on HN; it's been years since I've taken them seriously. It's worth hanging out here for the smart people that remain, but there are a lot of dumb people with aspirations to the "magic" of success in SV that don't realize that being aggressively narrow-minded is explicitly counterproductive.
I think this is just the lifecycle of any space with low barriers to entry full of smart people. There are positive effects from smart people interacting openly, dumb people notice the effects and want a piece, and they flood the zone with their dumbness without realizing how anathema it is to what attracted them there in the first place.
The flip side is what exactly do you need to say that you're silenced from saying. Our natural instinct to enter debates and "win" them really leads otherwise smart people astray as well.
Let the activists yap. And you do what you want to do.
We've evolved to speak not to win arguments, but to coordinate our actions better. And actions still speak loudest.
It's strange. The biggest change isn't with the evidence, but with the narrative. For decades it was just pure crankery, but now we have 60 Minutes with a big episode with US Navy pilots, Obama talking about it, the mass media, late night shows, etc, all taking it seriously. This all would have been considered crazy just a year ago.
It would appear we are being prepped to get comfortable with a new narrative. Sam Harris, who I'd consider trustworthy and hard to fool, was given a heads up about what's to come. If he's right about his source being reliable, then we may have to have to contend with this:
"I got contacted by somebody who gave me a heads up with respect to all of this happening and he more or less told me listen, when this other shoe drops you’re going to be in the position of having to acknowledge that all the experts are on the same page, and there’s just this blanket declaration that we’re in the presence of alien technology, and we don’t know what to make of it. So prepare your brain for that and figure out what you’re going to do."
I'll never really understand why people latch onto a figure and think that they have all the best ideas and inside info they're not that special go get the inside info yourself
There are valid concerns and a difficult risk benefit analysis for some cohorts, I think. What are your thoughts on this? Put yourself in her shoes:
"I held off on a COVID vaccine because I wanted to wait for data with positive signals for both pregnancy in the short term and long-run fertility. I’m trying to get pregnant, and those are the two things I care about most.
Vaccine data is so politicized that it’s actually somewhat difficult to find full studies, results discussions or data sets as a layman, because every search term redirects you to “yes, get vaccinated right now, your concerns are merely ignorance”
The other study that concerns me shows that the vaccine’s lipid nanoparticles— which carry the RNA instructions for the spike protein — move beyond the deltoid muscle they’re injected into and accumulate in other tissues, and seem to accumulate in ovarian tissue preferentially.
That study looked at a very small sample, but given what we think we know about the spike protein — it likely causes some degree of tissue damage on its own, independent of the virus — it’s something that definitely demands further study
Anyway, I feel like I need to come clean at this point. For a long time I was avoiding the vaccine because I wanted to hold out for more data. Now I’m actively choosing not to get it because what I’ve seen is providing the opposite of a positive safety signal for my purposes.
It’s really important that I clarify I’m not at a high risk of exposure. I generally don’t work or even socialize outside my home. Lockdown life frankly doesn’t look that different from my preferred lifestyle. If I were a high exposure risk I would think about this differently
I’m in the process of getting a prescription for prophylactic ivermectin, which has also become extremely politicized — to the point of becoming a censored topic on some platforms. I’m not giving advice, here. I’m not making broader efficacy claims. I’m just trying to be honest
COVID is no joke. You do not want to get COVID. “Long COVID” symptoms should concern you even if you don’t think an infection would kill you. But the vaccines are very new and skipped a great deal of otherwise required safety testing, and some of this data is really worrisome."
The vaccines did not skip any safety tests, they just compressed the schedule because millions of people were dying of a preventable disease.
At this point hundreds of millions of people have taken the various vaccines. There clearly are no major short or medium term effects (other than the reported, rare side effects).
Also you can literally read all the documents provided to the FDA concerning the efficacy and safety of the vaccines. There isn't a giant conspiracy, all the original studies and data are in the open.
The parent never mentioned a conspiracy. They did mention running into a lot of glibly dismissive dead ends researching their concerns.
I don't think their decision is unreasonable. I'm personally not looking at the same factors, and think of covid vaccination differently. I'm guessing you do, also. I personally don't see a problem with that. Who am I to tell force someone else to my way of thinking?
The OP said it was hard to find the data and documents. I searched for “fda vaccine pfizer documents” and the 2nd link is the FDA page with every document and study that was reviewed for approval.
The information is not hard to find. Yes, there are a lot of pro-vaccine resources and anti-vaccine resources as well, but it’s obviously not hard to find the source materials.
That philosophy is fine when the resulting issues only harm the person taking that attitude, herd immunity, viral mutation due to more hosts, and a plethora of other reasons don't allow us to take the live and let live attitude about vaccinations this time around.
But it's still a heavy thing to force other people into something. We live in quasi-democracies and a significant percentage of people feel differently than you do. There's also a significant percentage of people, me included, who are willing to respect that people have different understandings of the risks.
Lots of things harm us as a group, and we accept them. We don't, and can't, aim for zero risk.
I'll be getting downvoted but it doesn't matter: it's you. You and people like you are the reason I'm not getting vaccinated. I'm from a time when having and exercising autonomy over what one does or does not with their own body was something celebrated, however now society has normalized insulting and bullying people for making their own choices.
I will not tolerate a society that does this, fortunately I'm in a position to hurt it by simply not getting vaccinated. I have no doubts that it's perfectly safe and I'd be fine, with the bonus of being more protected.
So yes. You are the reason I'm doing my part to ensure we'll never achieve herd immunity. Good job.
> I will not tolerate a society that does this, fortunately I'm in a position to hurt it by simply not getting vaccinated.
Don't think of it as hurting a society that upsets you, think of it as hurting the individual people who get a serious disease through no fault of their own and suffer and die from it. It's very unlikely you'll hurt any of the people who have upset you - they are probably all well vaccinated.
There are all sorts of actions you could take to promote bodily autonomy, and I'd support them, but if you're really choosing to do this one out of spite because some small section of society has offended you, then I would encourage you to find a different way to express your distress.
> So yes. You are the reason I'm doing my part to ensure we'll never achieve herd immunity. Good job.
Along with your old fashioned view on bodily autonomy, I'd suggest you take a old fashioned view on personal responsibility too and try to avoid blaming others for a choice that you are making.
No offense but those are pretty weak arguments. I'm not looking to hurt specific individuals, but rather society as a whole; large social phenomena aren't the fault of any individual (although granted some specific individuals may carry a lot of fault, given their positions, Trump and other far-right high-profile individuals such as Orban or Bolsonaro being a prime example of that but that's not what we're discussing here).
Two outcomes: either my not taking the vaccine has no impact on society as a whole so it doesn't matter, or it helps having a negative impact in society as a whole and therefore it also directly or indirectly hurts the groups who upset me (be it via further restrictions, health or economic downturns), in which case I feel vindicated. Most importantly: in both cases my actions spite those who would pressure me into doing it which by itself is a good enough outcome for me.
That last argument goes both ways: people who feel it's acceptable to bully me out of my autonomy should take personal responsibility for the choice they are making, so dismissing that argument is effortless on my part.
edit: I should point out that for very personal reasons I won't be getting in to, autonomy over the self is something that I hold very close to my heart.
> I'm not looking to hurt specific individuals, but rather society as a whole
I phrased it that way because I worry that in seeking to spite society as a whole you're missing the fact that you'll likely hurt specific individuals. Most of whom have nothing to do with the reasons you want to spite society.
> in both cases my actions spite those who would pressure me
They really don't. The people your actions (and public support of them) will most likely contribute towards hurting (and possibly killing) are those who are sick in other ways, or those who hold similar views to yourself.
If you live in a democracy, there are much better, well tested ways for you to promote bodily autonomy without deliberately taking actions most likely to harm people you agree with or the sick and weak. I'd love to see the cause of bodily autonomy promoted in ways I could respect, but this action won't help with that.
> people who feel it's acceptable to bully me out of my autonomy should take personal responsibility for the choice they are making, so dismissing that argument is effortless on my part.
Well, I think it's a poor dismissal. If people are bullying you, then they need to be responsible for their bullying, not for what you do in reaction to it. If you're really insisting on people being responsible for other peoples reactions, then don't you worry what you'll be responsible for when people react to your behavior?
It's my opinion that allowing yourself to be so affected by other people's views (whether it's towards spite or compliance) is fundamentally a less good way to live than deciding what you think is right and living according to that.
I do understand the extreme self-hurting aversive reaction to behavior you don't like (and there are places for it), but the internet has made that kind of attitude dangerous - you'll find bullies on every side of every topic, and to let which bullies your filter bubble rubbed you against dictate your behavior in serious ways is to cede way too much of your precious autonomy.
Steps were not skipped, but they are left incomplete. None of the vaccines have left Phase 3 yet, have they? Also it’s really hard to be confident in the data collected about vaccine safety as there is a social stigma associated with claiming that you have a negative effect from the vaccine.
Is there? Everybody I've met talked about how the 2nd shot knocked them out for a few days at least.
From my POV there is a heavy stigma associated with anti-vaccine activists downplaying and disbelieving the very real stats about covid sicknesses and deaths.
It's semantics at the end of the day. Less tests were done overall in accordance with a prepared in advance plan to rapidly deploy a vaccine in the case of a global pandemic. More risk was taken for more reward. It's questionable if more risk was even taken at all given the unknowns of COVID itself.
At this point the COVID vaccines are among the most "tested" medicines in history just on merit of their huge scale deployment, with them only truly lacking much insight into what happens after 2 years, which is something we hardly know about COVID itself.
You're right in a way but I think these people are still a tad wrong. It's not that everyone deny there can be side effects, on pregnancy or otherwise. It's that if nobody does the sacrifice, and everybody has his little thing he wants to protect (you want to get pregnant, I want to keep on working, my wife wants to be there for our kid, our parents have diabetes, etc etc) then nobody gets the vaccine.
Get it, whatever it cost you, because it's your duty.
I was also on the fence about vaccine, but what made me take is realization that there isn't only side effects of vaccine, but also side effects of catching covid. Media made us obsessed about deaths, but majority of people survive and among of them small portion get side effects. From what I remember it was about 1 every 10 people that had some kind of issue that lasted after recovering.
Even the blood clots that were found with AZ and J&J are happening with the virus itself at higher rate.
Because the whole pandemic became politicized, and majority decisions are actually driven by politics. The countries are going against the narrative that they are purposefully trying to kill people with vaccines as a method of population control.
There was also heavy disinformation campaign against AZ because AZ was the only non-profit vaccine made and its presence was standing in the way of Sputnik V being introduced into EU[1]. J&J has similar issues and it wasn't affected as much. Pfizer[2][3] was also targeted similarly, but the problem was that not much could be found on mRNA vaccines. I guess the worst one was some inflammation of hart in young people that resolves on its own.
I don't think so, because the Norwegian government made that decision based on a risk/reward analysis by their own public health institute. COVID deaths in the female under 40 group are group are exceedingly rare, likely more so than (lethal) DVT in the vaccinated. It wasn't necessarily a popular decision.
The "Russian disinformation" argument doesn't really work either, because Russia targeted mRNA vaccines specifically. The Sputnik vaccine (in theory) has the same problem as the AZ and J&J vaccines, also being based on viral vectors.
I haven't found it exceedingly hard to find data supportive or critical of vaccination despite the fact that the pro-vaxxers feel morally entitled and even obligated to censor the planet. Where there isn't censorship there is forced editorialization or often both. Such things aren't unusual though and I predicted it before it happened based on the known correlation between disease outbreaks and authoritarianism. Mind that you have to know how to FIND uncensored communities of anti-vax cranks who will gladly shove the most plausible theories they can devise in your face.
The fact that the lab leak hypothesis stopped being a heterodoxy despite long being censored by big social media networks by non-medical professionals pretending that by citing politifact they were proxy medical professionals was shrugged off and censorship didn't even pause. Negative feedback has no effect on the strategy even when it reveals a stunning lack of expertise on the part of the censors. We even saw papers like WaPo just quietly retroactively correcting headlines and continuing to dish out Pinocchio ratings.
I don't find the data to convince me of the anti-vax argument at all, save for potential arguments that there might be an angle to freeride at least short term off other people mitigating covid through vaccination and non-vaccination measures.
> The other study that concerns me shows that the vaccine’s lipid nanoparticles— which carry the RNA instructions for the spike protein — move beyond the deltoid muscle they’re injected into and accumulate in other tissues, and seem to accumulate in ovarian tissue preferentially.
This is really nasty, I'm inhaling litres of it per year while vaping.
I think a better solution is funding students instead of systems. Give everyone the ability to opt out of broken systems, force all schools to compete for students.
https://boysvswomen.com