[gizmo686]

That is literally what Google was founded on. Their core technology behind their initial success was pagerank, an algorithm whose sole purpose is to manipulate what people see. They have stayed dominant through a combination of market forces, and keeping their algorithm near (or, IMO at) the top of the market for generalized search [0], and have leveraged this competency in other markets (video, ads, etc).

Beyond just Google, this is an inevitable result of having any which resembles the internet we know today. The alternative is to go back to human gatekeepers. While it is arguable if human gatekeepers are better from a consumption standpoint, it is clear that they are worse from a production standpoint, as it massivly increases the barriers to publication.

[0] In actuality, I suspect that Google's "algorithm" involves a fair bit of "cheating" by having humans nudge the results. Political bias aside, I think not doing this would leave them too open to attack from other players in the market who do.

[roenxi]

I value political neutrality in the workplace, so I have a lot of in-principle issues with what is being shown here right from the get-go. I didn't wind the video back to find the exact quote, but we now have publicised evidence of senior leadership at Google who stood up and said 'obviously our values are not the same as a big chunk of Americans'. Clearly a lot of them are specific Hillary supporters, a candidate so unelectable she lost to Trump.

There is a practical difference between pagerank, which is a transparent algorithm, and a non-transparent magic algorithm that is controlled by a group who are clearly not engaged with the idea of corporate political neutrality. Taking the views expressed here as a starting point, logically why shouldn't they try to tilt the election result using their power?

EDIT I'm just going to add this in because it just doesn't sit well. It shouldn't acceptable for leadership in a workplace to stand up and express pain and dismay at the outcome of a democratic process.

[skybrian]

Pagerank is just one factor in a much more complicated algorithm. The full algorithm has always been secret, because SEO is a thing. If you demand a transparent algorithm, you're giving up search that actually works.

However, at a meta-level, there is some public information about how Google decides whether a change is making things better or worse. This doesn't tell you how the algorithm works, but it shows the goal they're optimizing for.

Google has "over 10,000 human raters" that rate search engine results. I don't know how they choose the raters, but presumably it's a variety of people in each country. You can read about them here:

https://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-search-qu...

Also, the guidelines that the human raters are supposed to follow are public, and you can read them here:

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en...

[slg]

>I value political neutrality in the workplace

Political neutrality is just political support of the status quo. That is a perfectly acceptable political stance to take, but you should recognize it is still a political stance.

[skedaddle]

Neutrality is different than support for the status quo. The status quo actually requires constant political activity to maintain. It's changed dramatically in the past decade. To support the status quo you would have had to restrict politics to e.g. Hillary Clinton on one side Marco Rubio on the other. You might consider that "neutrality" but I think what GP meant was rather that they prefer colleagues and management not to talk politics at all.

[threatofrain]

Granted, most people say political neutrality and they mean a homeostasis for what they like, but some people can say the word and mean it -- such as a YouTube platform that really just doesn't look at what gets posted.

[dingle_thunk]

By definition, neutrality is not support of anything.

[slg]

Imagine you are a parent of two children, one 10 years old and the other 7. The two children are fighting with each other. What is the result of staying neutral in that argument? If you don't intervene the 10 year old is almost certainly going to win because they are likely stronger and more mature. By not intervening you are tacitly endorsing the 10 year old's power of the 7 year old.

The same thing applies in any fight/conflict/argument/debate when there is a power imbalance including in politics. This is most obvious in debates about civil rights. When it comes to those issues if you don't support an oppressed people you are endorsing the continue oppression of that people.

[dingle_thunk]

So you disagree with the actual definition of a word? This is absolute nonsense. From a legal and a linguistic perspective, neutrality is well defined. Sometimes people just don’t want to hear your crap, and the particular flavour of crap is of no relevance. Sometimes people just do not wish to be disturbed. It’s not a power struggle, it’s basic human decency. It’s understanding that you don’t necessarily know what other people at work are going through, and it’s also none of your business.

[stanleydrew]

I'm interested in why you believe it shouldn't be acceptable for leadership to express "dismay at the outcome of a democratic process."

I assume you feel it is appropriate for leadership to express dismay about some things, so what makes democratic processes special?

[roenxi]

Well, my position on the subject is complicated and it is a struggle to condense it down into something reasonable.

Basically, there is no way whatsoever that being a capable and talented corporate leader makes your opinion somehow right. If anything, the comforts of great wealth and power make it less likely that their opinion actually represents the best interests of ordinary folk. So my starting point is that the opinion of Google's leaders is not more valid than anyone else's.

Then the second aspect is that they are on that stage in official capacities as leadership of Google. So they are representing the company's views to their employees.

Combining those two, why should republican voters in Google have to experience what is basically a public condemning of their vote? It isn't professional to publicly condemn the views of half your customers and potentially a large percentage of your workforce for no legitimate business reason.

Obviously, the concerns about possible immigration issues I would accept as completely relevant. I'm not sure if that has actually affected Google's business operations - but that aspect wasn't the main focus of the all-hands. The focus of the all-hands was clearly dismay that an unpopular Republican candidate had taken office. It wouldn't have happened had the alternative, an unpopular Democratic candidate, taken office.

So with these thoughts in mind, I don't think it is an acceptable situation. If this were a more traditional public company I'd like to believe professionalism would have been maintained.

[Pimpus]

I agree with you. Bringing up politics in the workplace is rarely appropriate, and the way Google does it here is not only inappropriate but very offensive. I definitely wouldn't want to hear mud slinging about my political views in a corporate environment. This whole meeting is simultaneously childish and deeply disturbing.

[gizmo686]

As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I think search should be regulated, and part of that regulation should be some standard for political neutrality [0]. However, there is no neutral algorithm to this problem. Any algorithm favors certain sites over others. There is almost definitely going to be some correlation between the sites that are favored and the content of those sites, political or otherwise. There is simply no getting around that. The discussion we need to be having is how to do this in an acceptable way.

[0] I do not have a good idea of what such a standard would even look like, and would err on the side of being too lax in this regard.

[lern_too_spel]

If one or more parties is pushing misinformation, the only way to be politically neutral is to give misinformation the same standing as correct information. Society does not benefit from such a policy.

It is better to have a policy of factual correctness at a minimum. Politicians should adjust to accommodate that.

[ryanobjc]

Why should search be regulated?

And I assume ALL search engines should be equally regulated.

Also, you better be pretty specific about what politically neutral really means.

For example, I just started a political party devoted to spreading obvious lies. Political neutrality means I should have top billing, right? Above the fold? Even though no one needs or wants what I’m selling?

[jlebar]

> EDIT I'm just going to add this in because it just doesn't sit well. It shouldn't acceptable for leadership in a workplace to stand up and express pain and dismay at the outcome of a democratic process.

Isn't this exactly what they do whenever they lobby to change an existing law?

[toofy]

Yeah, companies make political statements all the time, on a regular basis, on all political "sides".

-- Whether it is a hunting accessories business advocating for 2nd amendment rights,

-- An enormous craft supply store (hobby lobby) using religious beliefs to decide what their employees insurance will cover,

-- A shoe company (Nike) hiring a controversial spokesperson (Kaepernick),

-- A coffee company (Starbucks) choosing to say holiday rather than pander to a religious sect,

-- A bakery refusing to sell cakes to lgbtq folks,

-- Enormous corps spending massive money to disrupt any employees attempts to discuss whether or not they wish to unionize,

-- A software ceo donating sums of money to groups trying to ban lgbtq marriage,

-- Fossil fuel spending billions to support candidates who support their business interests,

-- Renewable energy industries supporting candidates who support renewable energy projects,

-- A famous software ceo providing substantial funding for lawsuits to bring down popular liberal media sites he disagrees with,

I find it incredibly confusing why people pretend like this is a new thing, or that silicon valley is alone in this, or that the left shouldn't be allowed to use the same tools.

To be clear, I think all business interests and influence should be severely limited from politics, but that just isn't the world in which we live. The world we live in allows a disproportionate amount of influence from all industries, with plenty of real world examples from across the entire political spectrum.

If we want to have a conversation about removing corporate interests entirely, I'm game, but I'm not willing to entertain some false notion that only liberals use these tools and certainly not willing to say only conservatives can use those tools as cudgels.

[toomuchtodo]

> EDIT I'm just going to add this in because it just doesn't sit well. It shouldn't acceptable for leadership in a workplace to stand up and express pain and dismay at the outcome of a democratic process.

The majority can still be wrong, or make immoral democratic decisions. It is our job as citizens, all citizens (even business owners), to rally against unjust law and public policy.

It is the very rights that US foundational documents express as inalienable that allow workplace leadership to express pain and dismay at democratic decisions.

[panarky]

> I value political neutrality in the workplace

If you're doing meaningful work, you're changing things in the world.

Changing things in the world is necessarily and inevitably political.

If the workplace appears politically neutral, then one of two things must be true. Either what you're doing doesn't affect the outside world, or there are hidden, unstated political motives at work.

I would much prefer my company's leadership to acknowledge the politics inherent in our work and openly state their motives and point of view.

Doing otherwise is either meaningless or dishonest.

[roenxi]

> If you're doing meaningful work, you're changing things in the world.

I don't accept that as a truism; most work is maintaining the historically unprecedented comfort that we enjoy as a society and I think that is meaningful.

Providing food is meaningful, providing shelter is meaningful, extracting raw resources is meaningful, taxation and welfare are meaningful, taxation and government services are meaningful. I could go io but that covers the basic point.

And since we are talking about a specific company, I don't even necessarily accept that the folk at Google are changing the world more than anyone else. I don't know anyone personally who's commented that 'wow Google has really changed my life' since the introduction of Gmail about 15 years ago. So, whatever they are doing it isn't very visible. Most of the improvement in the technological world is startups and the work of the circuit people.

[whytaka]

> Providing food is meaningful, providing shelter is meaningful, extracting raw resources is meaningful, taxation and welfare are meaningful, taxation and government services are meaningful. I could go io but that covers the basic point.

I'm amazed to read that you don't think these things don't change the world. And more so that you don't think these things are political!

Agriculture is political. Land development is political. Resource extraction is political. Taxation is political.

As GP said:

> there are hidden, unstated political motives at work.

[michaelt]

Presumably what roenxi means is you can't detect your butcher or plumber or garbage man's political affiliation by looking at their meaningful output; and neither when hiring such a person would you need to filter on political affiliation.

[malandrew]

The problem is when they become involved in political issues that are unrelated to their economic activity.

[whytaka]

Yes, but to Google, the proper representation of facts is related to their economic activity.

[thwy12321]

the open source technologies they have created, Map/Reduce, Tensorflow... they essentially invented large scale cheap computing. This has had massive effect on the technology industry and the world.

[roenxi]

Do you feel that Map/Reduce or Tensorflow are somehow tools of some sort of convoluted leftist, rightist or centerist agenda? Do the communists have an ideological position on large scale cheap computing?

Those technologies do not require Google to be politically active in any way. Saying they are inherently political is like saying a supermarket is inherently political. Might be true in some technical sense, but practically most people are happy to call it a public good.

[panarky]

> like saying a supermarket is inherently political

> happy to call it a public good

Some supermarkets cut prices in half in advance of Hurricane Florence that is expected to make landfall today.

Other supermarkets maximize profitability and eliminated sale prices and discounts in advance of the hurricane.

Some supermarkets have large, prominent displays of unhealthy foods. Others emphasize healthy alternatives.

Sometimes merchandising decisions are purely profit-maximizing, other times they're trying to do good for their community while simultaneously making a profit.

If even a supermarket is political, how do you expect internet giants to be somehow non-political?

Virtually everything that they do involves tradeoffs that some people like and others don't.

[davemp]

This is a blatant false dichotomy.

You can do meaningful work that will generate value/change that is largely unaffected by the political landscape (within reason). Sure every company would love tax breaks and subsidies but let's be realistic here.

> I would much prefer my company's leadership to acknowledge the politics inherent in our work and openly state their motives and point of view.

Most do. Companies just tend to avoid aligning themselves with a party and strictly speak of only specific issues and how said issue should be addressed to benefit their interests.

[jayd16]

Choosing to ignore politics and your ability to change it is itself a political stance.

[Pimpus]

I wasn't aware that cats were political.

What a silly argument.

[tomohawk]

Everything is political. This was partisan, though. There's a big difference between being political and being partisan.

Additionally, advocating for policy changes is far different than acting out like this about specific candidates.

Finally, the fear on display here is mostly the fear that comes from ignorance. It is astounding that a company that prides itself in knowing things would be so ignorant of such a large part of the US population, and would apply such unsavory labels to them and their intentions.

[quotemstr]

You are part of the problem.

Is antibiotics development changing the world? I should hope so. Do bacteria care about which presidential candidate won? Absolutely not. Most fields, in fact, do not involve the acrimonious political issues of the day.

The idea that "everything is political" is a lame excuse that activists use to hack politics into spaces where it doesn't belong. Even if a field has some tenuous connection to some political principle somewhere, bringing the political aspect to the fore only creates distractions and sows division.

Workplaces can and should be non-political and denying that political neutrality is possible is a particularly annoying strain of political activism.

[dang]

> You are part of the problem

No personal swipes, please. Your comment would be fine without that.

[quotemstr]

Noted. Would "This attitude is part of the problem" have been acceptable?

[dragonwriter]

> Do bacteria care about which presidential candidate won?

Bacteria don't care about anything, but the people developing and prescribing antibiotics very often do care, for reasons directly connected to their work (and those concerns may not be in the same direction.)

[fzeroracer]

Let's discuss climate change then, because despite that being a field reinforced by science it is also one that is considered highly political in today's environment. Can you claim you're politically neutral if you are not willing to listen to people who deny climate change?

The problem with attempting to force a politically neutral stance is that it allows politics to invade where it shouldn't. Your logic is fundamentally flawed.

[axlprose]

> Can you claim you're politically neutral if you are not willing to listen to people who deny climate change?

If you're literally not willing to listen to any arguments for/against a hypothesis at all, then sure, you're likely more invested in the political aspect than the science itself. But if you're just arguing in favor of what the majority of the established literature suggests, then no, because being pro-science is orthogonal to politics, and arguing in favor of research doesn't make one political. Just because one particular subset of science gets latched onto by politicians, doesn't make it an inherently political subject any more than people who argue that the moon landing is fake make video/image editing an inherently conspiratorial subject. I also wouldn't be accusing others of flawed logic when making an argument that relies on guilt-by-association.

[fzeroracer]

You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of how the debate works. We're not talking about two rational individuals forming a debate in good faith where they're able to change each other's opinion.

We're talking about people latching themselves to an anti-empirical evidence, anti-scientific approach to things such as climate change or vaccinations. The debate becomes political when there's enough people and policymakers believing in something, scientific process be damned, to actively affect law.

The debate about vaccinations causing autism for example is a absolutely political one, enough that we see people eschewing scientific fact in a way that endangers large portions of our society. Yet when we talk about an environment needing to be politically neutral, then their opinion must be treated with equal weight. We've seen this occur with people who are anti-evolution as well, where they demand their opinions be taken seriously and allowed into the greater debate. And it shows with our current society.

[crazygringo]

Bacteria absolutely care -- or at least we humans care about how it affects bacteria.

Political policy determines how the FDA regulates (or doesn't regulate) drugs, including antibiotics. Political policy determines if taxpayer dollars are spent getting antibiotics to those who need them, or on missiles instead. Political policy determines whether doctors are incentivized to minimize antibiotic prescriptions (and prevent superbugs) or not.

The idea that anything isn't political is unfortunately naive. It's like saying the air we breathe isn't important because we don't notice it.

If we're talking about a company, everything from the regulations it follows, to the ways it negotiates with labor, to the taxes it pays, the liability it passes on to consumers (or doesn't)... it's all political, because it's all determined/constrained by political policy.

Saying that workplaces should be non-political is a political statement, and by definition a conservative one because it embraces the status quo.

You can't escape politics even if you'd like to, and if you're the citizen of a democratic country then one can easily argue it's your civic duty not to escape it, though of course you're free to neglect that duty.

[quotemstr]

> Bacteria absolutely care

Seriously?

> Political policy determines how the FDA regulates...

That's exactly what I mean when I talk about a tendentious excuse for putting activism where it doesn't belong. A drug company might have a lobbying arm that has to care about policy (and that, for pragmatic purposes, talks to all sides!), but a researcher looking at chromosomal recombination isn't going to do a better job of examining the damn chromosomes after being subject to political screeds. If anything, politics in that venue will distract researchers and detract from the business's core. Is that cost worth it so that some people can feel self-righteous?

> Saying that workplaces should be non-political is a a political statement, and by definition a conservative one

So, according to "crazygringo", neutrality is "by definition" supporting the opposition. Much George Bush. Very "with us or against us". Wow.

Re "by definition": see https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cFzC996D7Jjds3vS9/arguing-by...

[dang]

> So, according to "crazygringo", neutrality is "by definition" supporting the opposition. Much George Bush. Very "with us or against us". Wow.

Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines like this?

They include: "Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[sooheon]

> A drug company might have a lobbying arm that has to care about policy (and that, for pragmatic purposes, talks to all sides!), but a researcher looking at chromosomal recombination isn't going to do a better job of examining the damn chromosomes after being subject to political screeds.

If the researcher refuses to politicize, he will be used as a tool by others who will. Play the game and win, or be used.

[unsatchmo]

I don’t know if I agree with crazygringo, but I do believe everything is political to the degree that bad politics can take it all away in a heartbeat. There is some plateau where I think is fine to let politics play out, the place where you draw that line is of course also political. The issue in the past has been that by the time we cross what the vast majority consider to be the line, it’s too late to easily turn the boat around. That is what people you consider alarmists are worried about.

[Aloha]

Doctors are inclined to minimize antibiotic prescriptions because of good medical practice,

[fzeroracer]

How do you maintain political neutrality when the two sides of an argument consist of climate change vs denial? Vaccines vs anti-vaxx? Being pro gay marriage vs against?

There is almost no such thing as polititcal neutrality. Every site, every piece of media and every search engine is likely to have some sort of bias you need to be aware of. There is an argument to be made that Google is a monopoly and should be reigned in, but coming at it from the stance of 'they have a political slant' seems ill-advised.

[liftbigweights]

> That is literally what Google was founded on.

No it wasn't. Google was founded on being agnostic and giving you the most objective and representative view of the internet. If it didn't, it wouldn't have survived. Pagerank was not politically driven. It didn't care whether the links went to webpages that catered to larry page or brin's political ideology.

> [0] In actuality, I suspect that Google's "algorithm" involves a fair bit of "cheating" by having humans nudge the results.

We know it is. We know that they changed google news to appease large media companies. We know google seearch has been changed to appease large media companies. We know youtubee has been changed to appease large media companies.

The "do not evil" google of the 2000s died a long and slow death. The google of the 2010s has been quite biased. No longer is google objectively representing the internet as it is. It's representing the internet as page and brin wants it to be.

I don't know why people are celebrating it just because they are anti-trump. We know that there are tons of saudi, chinese and israeli money and influence in silicon valley. Do we really want a monopoly like google to be politically driven? Do we really want search and youtube to be politically driven?

Just because google is being manipulated in your favor today doesn't mean it is going to be manipulated in your favor tomorrow. It just surprises me so few people here seem to understand that.

[wyldfire]

> That is literally what Google was founded on.

Hooray! Pre-Google search sucked. It was really bad.

> The alternative is to go back to human gatekeepers.

I don't know what this means. Humans have never audited/controlled what gets indexed by crawlers. It's always automata unleashed on the data. It would be terribly unproductive to prune or tune the index with humans. However, using humans as a part of a feedback loop to tune an algorithm is a good idea [presumably all search engines do something like this].

[gizmo686]

Digital computers aren't even 100 years old. Human civilization has existed for thousands of years. We have been able to curate and distribute information without computers, and it involved human gatekeepers.

Even in the early days of the internet, there were manually constructed listing of pages. Then, as the internet grew, there were manually curated listings. Then, these manually curated listings started to compete with crappy search engines. Eventually, as these search engines improved, the manual curation was delegated to a smaller niche of the information distribution market.

We could, in principle, go back to manual curation as the dominate method. That has been the status quo for almost all of human civilization. Doing so would destroy the internet as we know it (and would be politically impossible for that reason).

[wyldfire]

Yes, I misunderstood the point.

> Doing so would destroy the internet as we know it (and would be politically impossible for that reason).

IMO this is what renders this part of the discussion moot. Given this conclusion, it's not a valuable thread to pursue.

[flukus]

> the manual curation was delegated to a smaller niche of the information distribution market

I'd say manual curation is bigger than ever, at least for news, it just happens via sites like reddit and HN.

[unsatchmo]

The post you’re replying to is talking about pre-internet means of distributing information like magazines / newspapers and television which are 100% controlled by human decision makers.

[wyldfire]

I see. Yes, that's clear to me now.