[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.

[axlprose]

> Yet when we talk about an environment needing to be politically neutral, then their opinion must be treated with equal weight.

No, that is absolutely not how science works. There's a reason why scientists undergo a peer review process to publish papers, and why journals have an "impact factor" score: it's because they're not all equal, and it takes an incredibly long time to become established as credible inside of academia.

If you're referring to the casual layman bickering that happens in the peanut gallery surrounding certain scientific results, then sure, all kinds of people with ulterior motives jump on those kinds of bandwagons and flamewars. But the scientific process itself does not (or at least tries not to) work that way, thus serving as a counterpoint to the idea that "everything is political".

[fzeroracer]

This topic had never been about ensuring political neutrality in sciences and the scientific process but rather political neutrality in the layman's workplace. You're attempting to drag this argument to somewhere it's not.

And even then to counter your opinion: Who do you think helps fund and provides resources for said scientific research? This is part of the claims made by laymen that connects politics to the scientific process.

[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

[quotemstr]

Noted.

[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,