>What “good faith” motivation could possibly arise from pointing out the color of one’s skin in America though?
Indeed. That is a good question. Wouldn't it be nice to know what the context around this kind of statement was instead of trying to guess what it was? Wouldn't that be an example of good journalism to provide this information in a balanced objective way, instead of leaving it out there so that people either assume the worst or dismiss the claim as clearly hyperbolic? After all, there are gradations to these kinds of things - how are we, the readers, supposed to know where on the spectrum this lies (or if this is even true at all)? Are we supposed to use our own biases and lack of knowledge of the situation to guide us to a conclusion?
OK. Let's try that by taking a step back and examining the situation as laid out. Race, in 2021, is a very sensitive topic, and has been for years. Silicon Valley is one of the most progressive areas in the world and regional tech companies as a matter of policy, as well as their employees from a personal perspective (because they live in the present culture and in the progressive area), are highly sensitive to issues around race. Given those facts, are you sure the article is presenting you with enough context to actually make a balanced and objective judgment as to the veracity of the claims? In other words, I don't trust the reporting of NBC News here. I don't think you can read this article and understand the context of these claims and therefore you can't make any sort of judgment and assign fault or blame on any party.
You don’t have to make any judgment about the parties involved in the story. If you want to critically think about both sides of the argument, you’re going to have to ask anyway whether there exist “good faith” motives for pointing out a new coworker’s skin color in corporate America, because if there’s an answer to that question, then doubting (not knowing) the intentions of the former Google employee would be justified.
So, when is pointing out a new coworker’s skin color actually okay?
>So, when is pointing out a new coworker’s skin color actually okay?
Let's start with the fact that this article is presenting one side of the story. We don't know if this person is truthful. We don't know if this person is hyperbolic, or if they left out some key details or played certain facts and suppressed others, or just misconstrued the comment. We just don't know what the situation actually is. So the first question back to you is, why are you engaging in this creative writing exercise? It's abundantly clear that you don't know happened there because at best, you have a one sentence summary of the situation (actually a half of sentence, literally: "when a colleague told them that their skin was much darker than she expected"). But let's set that aside.
The framing of your question is also absolutely ridiculous. Are you really trying to claim that you have traversed the near-infinite space of potential interactions and deemed them all 'NOT OK'? All of them? What if this comment was in context of a sun-tan because you, your new coworker and other people were talking about about their sun-tans and your new coworker pointed out they tan really quickly (or not at all)? Is that too silly? What if your new coworker was the one who brought up their skin tone and you politely agreed with them? Too contrived? Don't like this creative writing exercise? How is that different from what you're doing ... except you're not only taking the absolute worst and most ugly interpretation of a half-a-sentence reference from this article, but also categorically stating that there is no context under which it would be 'OK' for two co-workers to reference skin color. Insanity.
> why are you engaging in this creative writing exercise?
Because I'm responding to the very top comment about assuming good intent and the people already agreeing with it. I'm not arguing that what happened in the article is verified true.
> Are you really trying to claim that you have traversed the near-infinite space of potential interactions and deemed them all 'NOT OK'? All of them?
I made no claims. I asked the question.
> What if this comment was in context of a sun-tan because you, your new coworker and other people were talking about about their sun-tans and your new coworker pointed out they tan really quickly (or not at all)? Is that too silly? What if your new coworker was the one who brought up their skin tone and you politely agreed with them? Too contrived? Don't like this creative writing exercise? How is that different from what you're doing ... except you're not only taking the absolute worst and most ugly interpretation of a half-a-sentence reference from this article, but also categorically stating that there is no context under which it would be 'OK' for two co-workers to reference skin color. Insanity.
Then you're just assuming good faith on behalf of the offending party in the article based on certain "what ifs" that you conjured, which isn't so different from my engaging in conversation with HN re: the boundaries of workplace racism based on the "what if" that the article is, in fact, true.
>Because I'm responding to the very top comment about assuming good intent and the people already agreeing with it. I'm not arguing that what happened in the article is verified true.
And this is the frustrating part about this terrible article. There is simply not enough information to make a value judgment. The principle of "assuming good intent" may be a great general principle but of course, it will not and should not apply in every situation. Should it apply in this situation? I don't know. We're left having to speculate because the journalist in question didn't even bother to do basic due diligence.
>I made no claims. I asked the question.
OK I answered.
>Then you're just assuming good faith on behalf of the offending party
Like you, I made no claims either way. I wish journalists would be more responsible.
I maintain that we don’t need this article to be true to debate with the response about assuming good intent, precisely because ”assume good intent” is a statement on its own and it is being positioned as general advice, therefore it is independent of the facts of the article. I get what you’re saying but I don’t think it’s relevant because no one is really picking sides between Google and the former employee.
Google is an international company with lots of immigrants not familiar with modern American norms, where (say) complimenting a colleague's hair can be a reportable HR offense.
I don’t understand your point here—if I’m traveling to a foreign country and I’m asking about what’s offensive because I don’t want to offend the locals and be an annoying, insensitive tourist, then I’m just automatically being “woke” instead of trying to genuinely learn about the indigenous culture from the point of view of the locals? Are you saying that I should be asserting my own perceptions of the world to the people whom I am visiting?
Not the previous poster, but the point was that "I love your curly hair!" is not a statement that would cause offense pretty much anywhere in the world except in certain "woke" US corporations.
Also, while said companies go to extreme length to tell their employees how to handle any hint of racism, sexism, etc, they do not actually define what any of these terms mean in practice, meaning even the "indigenous" are walking on eggshells. There's also a difficult continual doublethink required to simultaneously celebrate diversity while avoiding any hint of appropriation, all while pretending to ignore everything about the actual people you're working with.
Sort of; is the company offering cultural integration training? If not, then no, if so, and they willfully ignore it, then yes.
But a lot of it will be down to the company, I think.
One big part of moving to my country (the Netherlands) is to partake and graduate in an integration course and exam - you need to have an adequate grasp of both the language and the culture to be able to get a Dutch citizenship: https://www.nt2.nl/en/dossier/kennis_nederlandse_maatschappi...
Check out your iPhone’s Settings > Privacy and scroll to the very bottom. You’ll see “Analytics & Improvements” and “Apple Advertising”, which both contain toggles and details about the data that has been gathered so far. There was also an iOS update in the past where the onboarding flow asked me to grant these permissions, though I vaguely remember seeing it on every major iOS version update.
Now, that’s not to say that the iPhone setting guarantees that Apple is not up to something sketchy. We can’t tell what’s going on under the hood or in their servers, but if we really wanted to be extremists about privacy, then we have to resort to apps that we’ve built and self-hosted ourselves.
If you’re just using analytics to look at how effective UI designs are in making business conversions, couldn’t you still measure that by checking the backend and looking for a spike in activity towards the API endpoint that the UI invokes? Couldn’t you measure effectivity with a spike or drop in sales? I mean, good UX doesn’t so much rely on Google Analytics but on a UX engineer’s depth of knowledge about human psychology.
> couldn’t you still measure that by checking the backend and looking for a spike in activity towards the API endpoint that the UI invokes?
You could have multiple UIs hitting the same endpoint. Also, why limit yourself with such crude metrics?
> good UX doesn’t so much rely on Google Analytics but on a UX engineer’s depth of knowledge about human psychology
UX in theory, and UX in application are two different things. You could have the best models of how users will interact with your site, but until you deploy and measure, you have no idea what will happen.
You can still parameterizethe API calls if you want to attribute user activity to a specific flow, and that way you wouldn’t be “feeding the beast” that is GA.
How you mark/report the events is different from where you report them. You could use any one of self-hosted solutions on your own domain instead of GA without changing much the way you report back.
There's plenty of alternatives to Google Analytics, including open-source software you can self-host so it doesn't share your users' private data with a third party. You don't need to roll your own just to avoid GA.
A 1x1x1 km landfill (they are actually holes in the ground) can contain the entire waste of the US for three years. How many of those can we hide in the western US without anyone ever noticing? Howa bout a 100x100 km patch, that will hold 30,000 years worth of trash. Meanwhile we can focus our energy on the only problem that really matter - the climate problem.
It seems more ethical to bury our trash in our own backyard than bury in a poor country’s backyard or chuck it in the ocean. In the US we definitely have an out-of-site/out-of-mind problem where “recycling” can often really be “another guy’s landfill (e.g. China)”. We value not trashing our own environs with scant recognition that in terms of the global impact of our consumption, it doesn’t matter who’s landfill it goes in. But we’re the same way with strip mining.
Airports and golf courses, on the other hand.. many uses for surface area besides living. I don’t know (truly) if the issue is really toxicity (in a well designed, reclamated landfill) or the simple fact that city services like sewer, water, gas, electric were never under-grounded there by design. You’d think settlement would be a cause for concern too, but I’d also think they have that solved if airports are made atop them.
“Do what you love” is not so much a privileged thing to say. It’s just an ideal to aspire towards, a north star of sorts, even if you’re currently in a position where you’re only doing what pays the bills. Doing what you love is life advice on how to live a good, happy, and fulfilling life—do what pays the bills isn’t.
Whenever people say this, I wonder whether they are considering the possibility that once the internet goes in the direction of fragmentation, more states would swoop in with regulation to barricade their own internet in the same way that China has a great firewall. There are plenty of incentives into banning US-based tech companies--states would then have access to data about their citizens instead of being at the mercy of Facebook or the US, and local software companies would begin to thrive.
> A more apt comparison would be a group in a corner having a conversation at a rock concert. Suddenly this argument appears less apt.
This is a tired old argument and it isn't convincing or effective. There's a big difference between having a conversation in a corner at a rock concert, and having a conversation in an online service hosted by someone else outside of that conversation, in a territory owned by a state where the host has to comply with laws which place the accountability of user-generated content on the host. A more apt comparison would be... I don't know, I actually don't have any idea. How about simply not being deliberately offensive or hateful or using whatever rhetoric that could ultimately translate into real-world violence?
Do you want a change in this society? I'd guess you do, most people want to change something. Espousing a desire for any change will always be offensive to someone, and so wanting any improvement necessarily includes being deliberately offensive. The right to speak is the right to offend.
Real world violence, sure. Let's ban that. And asking people to be nice, that's not a bad thing. And banning name calling in your private forum to promote substantiative discussion, that's probably a good idea. But deciding what unappetizing ideas are allowed and are not allowed to be discussed is a bad idea, I thought we learned that lesson in the last century. Free speech isn't what leads to fascist dictatorship, control of ideas does.
All this and I just want to remind you that we are discussing a web site using "white supremacist Nazis" as a pretext to prevent people from organizing against wall street hedge funds.
> Espousing a desire for any change will always be offensive to someone, and so wanting any improvement necessarily includes being deliberately offensive.
This is not true. Whatever you’re disagreeing with another person, you don’t have to call that person any politically incorrect slur, which is really the kind of “offensive” that we are talking about here.
Doesn't the fact that Twitter posts (mostly) stay incentivize conscientiousness, precisely because it doesn't take away the reality that words have consequences? It's still not an excellent representation of how forgiveness and personal development exists in the real world (i.e. we can forget about the details of what's been done in the past, but what we post stays in some database), but without the longevity of Twitter/FB posts, people just wouldn't think twice about what they're saying and this is a time when we do need more critical thinking.
> without the longevity of Twitter/FB posts, people just wouldn't think twice about what they're saying
You clearly have not yet witnessed the bad parts of Facebook and
Twitter. I've seen people calling for genocide on Facebook under
their real name and that's not even remotely the worst.
Facebook's content moderation teams are basically getting
PTSD[0] by default as they enforce rules that specify under what
circumstances photos of things like animal abuse or decapitation
are acceptable(!).
The assumption that people behave normally on the internet when
they're not anonymous is provably false. You might think that
intuitively, but that's because you're a decent person.
I mean, I didn’t sleep through 2016 onwards but people threatening violence still get banned, people with bigoted views still get called out or damage their real-world offline relationships, and it’s possible that there’d be even less people who’d be mindful of what they say without those feedback mechanisms.
Many of those people facing real-life consequences don't
identify themselves, though. I agree that it helps to some
extent, but that kind of individual often doesn't care about a
possible backlash or just avoids platforms without anonymity in
the first place.
The only real solution I see is to keep such online platforms
small or segmented enough that they can be effectively
moderated. Troublemakers will not go away no matter what rules
are in place; but if those rules are properly enforced they can
be kicked out before causing too much damage.
It's not about making everything a safe space, it's making sure
kids on social media don't get sent gory pictures, radical
extremists aren't able to incite violence on a massive scale,
shooters don't get to livestream their mass murders and school
kids don't commit suicide due to cyber bullying.
This issue isn't black or white and your edgy worldview doesn't
improve the situation. Just so you know, even 4chan is heavily
moderated and so are many other places the average person would
usually avoid.
>Why does Facebook need to moderate the populations talking points?
Why do you think?
>The us government literally drops bombs on people's homes.
Ok.
>Humanity is full of all kinds of bullshit. I wish people would stop trying to make everything online a fucking safe space.
Waheoo, I know you deliberately caught the coronavirus to spread it as part of your Jihad. I shared your address on my Facebook wall. I'm sure you don't mind; you don't need a fucking safe space.
Newtonian physics is only coincidentally correct. It’s not “wrong” in the sense that the math isn’t sound or that experiments aren’t reproducible within earth, but it’s not the correct model for what really happens in physical phenomenon regardless of scale.
What? It's not "coincidentally" correct, and yes, it absolutely is a correct model for phenomena at a certain scale (in fact, for the vast majority of phenomena in engineering disciplines for instance).
It's really not a correct model even at the scale of the phenomena for which it is correct, that's why it can't explain what's beyond its scale, nor can anyone draw a line to clearly define the boundaries of the scale in which it is correct. I'm afraid I don't have a more profound argument than that. The math of Newtonian physics merely coincides with what's actually going on in reality, but what's actually going on in reality is as explained by Einsteinian physics. We're only keeping Newtonian physics around because it's close enough as an approximation of natural phenomenon and therefore it is pragmatic, but pragmatic does not mean correct and it remains an estimation nonetheless. It's not the correct model of what's actually going on.
I wonder if removing the Touch Bar has something to do with prepping up the line for gaming. I personally don't dislike the Touch Bar except when I'm playing video games, and Apple Silicon is on a trajectory to be able to run games on a Mac with fairly decent graphics.
