Let this be a lesson to all: intelligence does not in any way correlate with self awareness. It's likely that 'smart' people are just as likely to be unaware of their own follies or inabilities, I would argue, maybe more so as a lot of smart people tend to be 'inwardly focused' and less concerned about their direct environment.
This kind of thing happens all the time among Exec. level, but normally we'd expect it from Ford CEO, not Google types. It may be an odd sign of industry maturity.
That said, we shouldn't discount how often this kind of stuff actually does work. Watching the crowd at the Oracle conf. eat up Larry Ellison's huffery as through he was some kind of market visionary was the lesson at the other end of the spectrum, and it's that 'If you're rich and stand on stage and say something that 'sounds credible', a lot of people with just believe it'. Of course there's more to it than that.
But this one is Comedy Gold.
It might be a sign that Susan does not have a fully trusted team around her ... I would beg my boss in stark words to not do something so ridiculous to themselves.
"It might be a sign that Susan does not have a fully trusted team around her ..." => It might be a sign that team around her is afraid to tell her how ridiculous this is... Maybe they made good proposals in the past and where turned down and they now don't want to make good suggestions again...
I'm currently tickling my brain with the hypothesis that this is a next-level move by her team, to get her to publicly "emphasize the importance of free speech and the role that YouTube plays in protecting it", so that it will become more inconvenient for her (or for the rest of Youtube) to do more things that interfere with free speech.
Analogize this to publicly praising a corrupt general for doing or planning something good that he hasn't actually been doing. It's difficult for him to turn down the praise ("No, I seriously haven't done anything to deserve this"), and meanwhile it focuses eyes on him and pressures him to actually do the thing. I read about the tactic in a fictional book once, I'm sure it works. :-)
Well that won't work... former President Barack Obama received the Nobel Peace prize but he went on to involve the United States in additional foreign wars and went ham with drone strikes.
I saw an article recently where some school was being renamed for the sort of reasons people call "cancel culture" these days and they explicitly rejected renaming it after Obama, because he was an "oppressor" due to the (allegedly very vigorous) deportation of undocumented immigrants during his terms.
For me, he's the greatest President because of the ACA.
Precisely this! Not having any insurance in my late 20s, I voted for him thinking ACA was for the good of people. Then I got married, had 2 kids, business flourished, and purchased a house only to realize that ACA accounts for half of my mortgage. Currently paying $1k per month with all healthy members and without any pre-existing conditions!
I think that all people have a right to their opinion. But the minute your opinion becomes an order and starts scratching my turf, I got a problem with that!
If you meant to respond to me, I'm not sure what you are trying to say. What are you comparing?
It's not a matter of opinion that you have to pay property taxes. It is a matter of opinion that you should have health insurance - as you may recall there isn't even a nominal financial penalty for not doing so any more.
But based on your comments so far, you see the situation as the opposite? I don't understand what you think you are being ordered to do.
Obama sucked at his job. Like, nearly Carter-level blindness to political reality, but with more personal arrogance. Obama was better than Shrub. Shrub was a war criminal, so you'd have to hope Obama was better.
The ACA was emblematic of Obama's unwillingness to lift a finger to help build the Democratic grassroots. The Democrats in Congress allowed the ACA to be loaded with poison pills due to Obama's insistence on a bipartisan vote. The result: no votes from the Gops, but it did cause the Democrats to lose the House since -- due to the Gop amendments -- the good parts didn't kick in until well after the midterm elections and the bad parts started immediately.
So popular was the ACA, in the end, that it only survived the Trump years because McCain lost his temper on the day of the Senate vote to repeal it.
I don't compare him to FDR, because I have no real perspective on presidents way before I was born. I don't know if he was better than Millard Fillmore either. I do know many people hated FDR with a passion and probably still do to the extent they are still alive.
It's easy to be evil when you have a benevolent press on your side. Still people think Obama's biggest scandals were wearing a tan suit and ordering Dijon mustard.
That's more the fault of the Nobel committee. You can't hamstring a leader by giving them an award for no reason and hoping that affects their decision making in the future.
Bush started wars in two countries, Obama started wars in another five. The fact they didn't rescind the prize is disgusting, and shows you what a joke the committee is, as well as the award itself.
What's most disgusting is that it was a political ploy based on the fact that President Obama was America's first black president. There's no other logical conclusion that any thinking person could arrive at, because at the time he received it, he had done, quite literally, almost nothing of substance.
As I said - it was a rebuke of Bush. The United States was at a very low point in world public opinion, thanks to his efforts at the time.
None of this excuses the imperial adventures that followed. Libya's still in a civil war, by the way. (Although to be fair to Obama, Europe was chomping at the bit to go to war with it.)
> "...so that it will become more inconvenient for her (or for the rest of Youtube) to do more things that interfere with free speech."
This is a good theory, I don't think it reflects the situation though. She used her 'acceptance speech' for this absurd accolade to emphasise the importance of censorship in ensuring freedom, that war is peace, freedom is slavery, so on so on. If this was the aim, it clearly didn't work.
Given her speech, the irony is either totally lost on her, or she legitimately thinks that YouTube is such a monolithic entity that the truth is whatever she says it is.
It also indicates to me that the leadership at Alphabet is totally out to lunch. I would have thought they had the sense to stop this but apparently not.
And not only sister in law. Executive leader of that highly successful project, Google Video, which ended with Wojcicki being so beaten that she had to tell Google management to buy her only competitor for over a billion dollars.
I recall Google Video being the better platform when it was first released. Had a clear interface, integrated with google search, and better performance. I have no idea how Google failed to gain the lead.
Some engineers wrote a couple of insightful internal post-mortems about Google Video after the YouTube acquisition. It's telling, I think, that the deep analysis of what went wrong came from front-line engineers rather than the executives you'd be expecting to produce it as part of their job. I read them many years ago so what follows might be a bit garbled by time and bad memory, but the gist of it went like this:
1. YouTube bet on user generated content. One of Wojcicki's primary decisions was to focus on commercial high-end content by trying to cut deals with firms like Disney.
2. YouTube bet on Flash Video. Google Video used a VLC-based browser plugin that never worked as well and didn't have as much distribution. This was partly driven by the first decision, because Flash didn't support the video DRM that movie houses wanted, and was optimised for small low bandwidth, "postage stamp" sized video instead of high-def full screen that commercial content wanted. YouTube had no formal strategy around commercial content beyond turning a blind eye towards the piracy on their platform, that let them outsource their video tech to Macromedia, who were quite good at it.
3. YouTube bet on social. They had comments, thumbs up, thumbs down, channels and other social features when Google Video was still a search engine badly welded to a video store. Google didn't "get" social at that time and GV/Wojcicki saw it as a net negative anyway because does Disney really want their premium content to be shown next to a bunch of inane comments from anonymous trolls?
4. YouTube was implemented in Python. Google Video was implemented in C++. Python allowed the YT guys to iterate way faster and throw features out the door way faster, at a cost in performance and reliability. But a social website doesn't really need much reliability and whilst the performance costs were killing them, Google bailed them out after the purchase by rewriting and porting large parts of their stack to their in house tech.
I think those were the main problems identified in the post-mortems.
What's interesting is that of course the general themes here are identical to what is causing YouTube problems now. Wojcicki was obsessed with professional/authoritative content. It killed Google Video then because there was a competitor who bet on the little guy, but now she controls that competitor she's doing it all over again. YT is actively suppressing the little guys in favour of big media, they've added a video store, their recommendations aren't social anymore but rather just promoting whatever political elites are saying today, she's removing other social features like downvotes, etc etc. She never learned anything from her prior failure, and why would she? When Vic G failed at Google+ he was immediately fired, but Wojcicki cannot be penalised for failure. Whether that's due to her familial connections, her gender or what is hard to say, but the contrast between her and what happened to other execs that failed to beat their competition is hard not to notice.
I think it says much more about how they see the consumers. They're probably counting on 99% of people not noticing the absurdity of it, or the irony in boasting about your industrial scale censorship when accepting your free speech award.
They are counting on people not noticing the absurdity, because they don't notice it themselves. They live in an ideological bubble where those who are True Believers prosper and heretics are punished, so even those who disagree have to go along and hope they aren't discovered. Or they have to leave. So no one inside will be heard to disagree. So anyone on the outside who disagrees with what we all agree is true is spreading "misinformation", according to everyone on the inside who feels able to speak freely. Surely it is no impediment to the free expression of truth to ban lies, right? Right! Does anyone here disagree? No? Of course not. Only a nazi would object to preventing the spreading of lies.
So in the Puritan Village, the ministers give themselves freedom of religion awards for their contributions to freeing the True Religion from all impediments to its universal imposition.
Yeah but even then I feel it shows they do not understand their audience. Hating on Javascript/consoles/Windows/OS X is something we nerds do. Free speech on YouTube is something I've seen discussed in friends groups that I would consider "normal people".
As I like to summarise it, 'the smarter someone is, the dumber beliefs they can rationalise'.
Combine that observation with the Flynn effect and it explains why common sense is never as common as it used to be... Maybe Google's best bet at this point is to hire people with a wide diversity of IQ scores.
Thank you for that compliment! You actually can save it, if you click a comment's time stamp you can then click 'favourite' and it'll show up on a list in your profile.
Not parent but would assume that "google types" are more likely engineers first, with the assumption that those types are likely likely to have spatial / problem solvin awareness.
Contrast Vs traditional traditional CEOs more likely to be hired on the basis of their network and charistma vs actual engineering chops?
Susan Wojcicki started out as a marketing manager, not an engineer. By contrast Mary Barra, the CEO of GM, started out as an assembly line worker and moved up through engineering positions into management. I think people have some pretty backwards assumptions about tech vs traditional industry.
The Hacker News crowd (mostly the Google types) endorsing the statement implying the Google types are somehow superior to the Ford types itself shows the lack of self-awareness for the Google types.
> It's likely that 'smart' people are just as likely to be unaware of their own follies or inabilities,
Just look at the recent debacle with the proposed (and now thankfully failed) football SuperLeague in Europe, you have 12 billionaire owners thinking that they could go ahead with killing the spirit of the game that is ingrained in the social fabric of the continent just like that, almost by fiat.
I have something that I call 'Potato-Law' for this.
It's like how the potatoes in discounters always say 'premium quality' or 'premium potatoes' but if they are, they wouldn't be so cheap or you couldn't buy them at the discounter. OTOH, if you go to a specialty goods shop, they don't write premium on their products. So if something has to be labeled on how good it is, it's probably not.
Right in the crotch. I recently put small bag of potatoes in the shopping cart and only back home and from the price on the receipt I learned they are "premium potatoes". So pissed off.
I would even make the case that self-awareness and success may be inversely correlated in fact.
I've heard many people say similar things over the years... Why is that? Is it some kind of kin selection? Is this total lack of self-awareness a requirement for getting into positions of power?
It's so obvious, I even wonder if they're just pretending to be hypocrites? It seems so simple and obvious, how can they not see the logical contradiction?
Are most of our leaders complete nutjobs?
Maybe humanity is a hierarchy with all the nutjobs at the top, mirroring back their insanity inside their filter bubbles; not realizing that their lives have nothing to do with reality.
It's probably a lop sided u-shape. Most people lacking in self-awareness are either really smart or true outcasts, with 'high conscientious + good communicators' occupying most middle management ... but it does take a kind of hubris sometimes to overlook one's faults, even worse, to completely ignore them otherwise. Without being controversial I see hints of this in Jobs, Ellison, Trump, Musk, Page, Zuck etc. (again I'm not condemning here, if any one of us put our thoughts online consistently there'd be a few we would seriously regret).
“Why you fool, it's the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything.”
Q anon believers are at most are a tiny proportion of who is described by that. Judging an entire population by the worst few of them that you can think of, is questionable.
Also, you don't really know the distribution of where these 'believers' came from.
Today, or when Q first showed up? I happened to have a front row seat to the first few Q threads and it began as a highly intellectual set of puzzles with the community providing a lot of the weird coincidences that make for an interesting conspiracy theory. One might say that the average Q believer in the first few months was a poet. Didn't remain that way of course.
Edit: And come to think of it, that kind of intellectual soft flex is actually exactly the kind of thing the Lewis quote refers to, just presented in a different venue. It's my understanding Daesh recruitment propaganda has a similar tone.
For sure, the world is much more complicated and the inability to read between the lines and not taking everything at face value certainly isn't limited to "educated people". But there is a lot of truth to this quote nonetheless. For what it's worth, all of those wacky theories about Q-anon or even flat earth don't beat the fact that people somehow managed to subvert and obscure the fundamental truth about nature that's shared between every living being, reproduction, and made educated people believe that biological sex is simply irrelevant or not even a valid concept. Covid's another thing, I get that there are wacky theories about that too, but there are many pretentious, insufferable people who are acting like they're better than everyone else, because they blindly believe any propaganda about it that's pushed by the "official sources".
You’re sending me a lot of red flags, so I’m hesitant to engage, but I feel the need to point out that defending the rights of the individual is not motivated by some desire to defer to authority on how one should orient themselves sexually. In fact, it is quite the opposite.
The quote has no truth. It’s a fantasy used as anti-intellectual propaganda. Anyone can say a clever platitude.
I haven't said anything about the motivations behind it. It's probably just a feeling that you're doing something good. But that's basically what I'm talking about, the biological sex is obscured with words like "orientation" or "identity", despite that the premise of this entire theory at least used to be that sex, gender and orientation are separate things. You can't change your biological sex, it's immutable. If you were born as a man, you won't be able to bear a child. It's supposedly defending individual rights with what is a plain deception. I cannot even imagine any example that would top that in terms of what wacky theories people could believe.
I'm sure that criticizing Q-anon is a red flag too for some people.
>You can't change your biological sex, it's immutable.
I assume you mean nobody can presently create fully functional organs for someone that wasn't born with them. I don't know who disputes this.
But when you make such a declaration, it sounds (to some) like you are denying biological reality yourself; claiming that there is no such thing as intersex, that chromosomes are always in alignment with physical characteristics, and so on. There are complex processes necessary for the emergence of typical characteristics, and just because it's strongly bimodal doesn't mean that's 100%. Anyone educated knows it isn't, completely apart from politics.
If one agrees that such things are well-known for a long time and not controversial, and that there appear to be gender related differences in the brain, then it's not reasonable to declare that "an X brain in a Y body" is impossible or delusional. You can't know, and it's particularly antisocial to go around telling people stuff about themselves when you can't possibly have rational grounds for it.
Find me an intersex person that can both bear a child and impregnate a woman. From my understanding, it's still falls under either this or the other, not a literal third sex. And even if, that's a tiny fraction of what already is a tiny fraction of intersex people. It does not disprove the general notion and it does not justify changing the entire culture around it and basically terrorizing people who are stating these basic facts. You could be born with six fingers and that doesn't invalidate the fact that human species have 5 fingers at each hand.
And yeah, I talked to people who were saying that biological sex doesn't exist and gender is all there is to it.
> Find me an intersex person that can both bear a child and impregnate a woman.
If male == can sire children and female == can bear children, then infertile people don't have a sex which is nonsense.
> It does not disprove the general notion
Yes, it does. Counterexamples do that.
> You could be born with six fingers and that doesn't invalidate the fact that human species have 5 fingers at each hand.
Yes, it would. Humans only usually have 5 fingers on each hand. But it isn't important to emphasize that there are 6-fingered humans because no one denies that 6-fingered humans are humans to start with.
> If male == can sire children and female == can bear children, then infertile people don't have a sex which is nonsense.
Your conclusion is nonsense, the premise is not. A broken computer is still in essence a computer, even if it can't actually do any computing as a result.
> Yes, it would. Humans only usually have 5 fingers on each hand. But it isn't important to emphasize that there are 6-fingered humans because no one denies that 6-fingered humans are humans to start with.
It's some kind of genetic disorder, an anomaly. With your standard you can't describe anything, as almost nothing is true 100% of the time.
> Your conclusion is nonsense, the premise is not.
My conclusion is derived from the premise. Since it's nonsense so is the premise.
> A broken computer is still in essence a computer, even if it can't actually do any computing as a result.
An infertile woman is broken then?
> It's some kind of genetic disorder, an anomaly. With your standard you can't describe anything, as almost nothing is true 100% of the time.
Of course you can. 100% of non-broken computers can be used for computing -- the "non-broken" part is usually implied when talking about them. Same for lots of other categories. If the members of a category don't have any shared traits -- i.e. something that is true for all of them -- then what is it even useful for?
I don't know if I would necessarily use this particular word as it's mostly associated with lifeless objects, but in a sense - yes. Similarly to how having a disability or being an amputee is, for the lack of a better term, being "broken", as your body fails to function is some manner. Life is more nuanced and it's not all about that of course, but you get the idea.
> Of course you can. 100% of non-broken computers can be used for computing -- the "non-broken" part is usually implied when talking about them.
So a broken computer is no longer a computer? I'm too stupid to delve into a philosophical debate about what truly makes a thing a thing, but I just don't accept that.
Even still, there is always a chance that the computer will randomly malfunction and do something unexpected at any time. Unlikely, but possible. So you can never say for sure that an operation of 2 + 2 will result in 4.
> If the members of a category don't have any shared traits -- i.e. something that is true for all of them -- then what is it even useful for?
If it's accurate enough then it's useful for making predictions. You know, science and stuff.
I wonder, how would you describe what a 'human' is?
> Even still, there is always a chance that the computer will randomly malfunction and do something unexpected at any time. Unlikely, but possible. So you can never say for sure that an operation of 2 + 2 will result in 4.
Your point?
> If it's accurate enough then it's useful for making predictions. You know, science and stuff.
If there is a counterexample to a scientific hypothesis, it's considered falsified. Not "useful for making predictions", but simply wrong.
> no one denies that 6-fingered humans are humans to start with
I see what your issue is. I haven't noticed this previously, but I think you're just attacking a straw man at this point. Rarely you can say something with 100% certainty and science takes account for that. It's fine to make generalizations. If we didn't do that and only sought absolute truths, we wouldn't get too far and it'd invalidate entire fields of science.
You cannot prove a hypothesis with 100% certainty, that is true. But you can falsify it – with even a single counterexample – and then you are certain it is false. Anything else is pseudoscience.
And it's particularly not okay to make generalizations about people. That's how you get sexism, sexism and other bigotry.
I've never heard anyone claim that biological sex is irrelevant or not a valid concept. (I'm sure some people do, just as some people believe Barack Obama was born in Kenya. But I don't see any sign that it's a widespread belief.)
But in many contexts biological sex is irrelevant. There's room to debate exactly what contexts -- e.g., in professional sports that are segregated by sex so that women can have competitions in which they aren't obliterated by men who are just stronger, you might want to keep people with Y chromosomes out of the women's events, or maybe you should do that by measuring testosterone levels or something. But by and large, if you aren't (1) providing medical care to someone or (2) having sex with them, you get better outcomes for everyone by paying attention to how they prefer to live than to their chromosomes when those diverge.
"But people are getting cancelled just for saying that biological sex is real!" Eh, no. But to whatever degree anything like that is happening, a key part of the reason is that it turns out that people who make a big deal about how biological sex is real almost always actually have a bigger agenda that goes way beyond affirming that biological sex is real. If e.g. you want to keep trans women out of women's public bathrooms, or make sure gender-dysphoric teenagers aren't put on puberty blockers, or not have to call someone "he" if they look more like a "she" to you -- none of those things follow from "biological sex is real".
I think there's an ambiguity here. Let's give names to some more specific things.
Proposition A: "Chromosomes, genitals, and sex hormones are real things. For the large majority of people, each of these falls into one of two fairly well separated classes, and they agree with one another. In some contexts -- e.g., providing someone with medical care, or having sex with them, or predicting how much weight they will be able to lift if they train hard -- these things provide useful information."
Proposition B: "The term 'biological sex' has a clear and universally agreed-on meaning, and refers to something that is useful in some contexts, as in Proposition A."
Proposition C: "The term 'biological sex' has a clear and universally agreed-on meaning, and refers to something that is useful in some contexts, and is the only thing we should care about when deciding whether to refer to someone as a man or a woman, or choosing what pronouns to use for them, or deciding what contests they can enter, what bathrooms they can use, etc."
Proposition A is uncontroversially true, and (I claim) essentially no one disagrees with it.
Proposition B is fairly uncontroversially false, because in fact there isn't a universally-agreed way to decide someone's "biological sex" in complicated cases such as when they have complete androgen insensitivity. But for many purposes it's approximately true.
The bit of Proposition C that goes beyond Proposition B is highly controversial.
I originally took your statements about "biological sex" to be expressing Proposition A. The author of the CNN article is denying Proposition B.
Perhaps you always meant Proposition B (or even Proposition C), in which case I retract my statement that no one disagrees with that, but instead point out the bit of Proposition B that's controversial is not expressing a "fundamental truth" about reproduction but a highly disputable claim about language, and that the further bits of Proposition C that are controversial are again not expressing "fundamental truths" about reproduction but controversial and essentially political claims about how we should relate to people for whom "biological sex" and "gender identity" don't tell a single simple coherent story.
Out of interest, on proposition B why can we not claim that the presence of a Y chromosome in your DNA makes you a "biological male" and the absence makes you a "biological female". That should be a binary division. (Where these terms are only used in the contexts you describe as being useful; no disagreements there).
You absolutely can claim that, and it gives a nice clean division into two classes, that's sometimes useful and usually lines up with other assessments of sex and gender.
But it's not the only way to do it, and if you do that you won't necessarily agree with other people about a person's "biological sex".
For instance, there is a condition called "complete androgen insensitivity syndrome". A person with CAIS has one X and one Y chromosome, just like a typical man, and they produce male sex hormones much like a typical man does. (Maybe exactly the same? I'm not sure whether there are feedback loops that might go wrong.) But the cells in their body that are meant to respond to those hormones don't, and as a result a person with CAIS looks pretty much exactly like a typical woman does. Breasts, mostly-normal-female genitalia, not much body hair, higher-pitched voice, etc. But^2 they don't have a uterus, they aren't fertile (either "as" male or female), and there are internal genital differences that may have adverse consequences for their sex life if nothing is done about them.
If you just go by chromosomes, you will classify people with CAIS as male. But these people are all assigned female at birth, and they usually have no idea until puberty that there is anything at all unusual about their sex or gender. Their gender identity is almost always F rather than M, and they are generally heterosexual in the sense of being attracted to men.
So, what is the "biological sex" of someone with CAIS? I think several answers are defensible, but none is clearly correct or universally agreed. So "biological sex" is not a term with a clear-cut meaning in every case, contrary to "Proposition B".
I'm not sure how to respond other that it's interesting how people switched from accusing everyone of being ignorant to demanding from them to be ignorant. Or was it always some kind of doublespeak? Not sure.
I'm a fairly open minded person and I can change my mind if something makes sense to me. I assumed that maybe here I will find someone who can explain this thing to me, but so far I'm not impressed. The mean of perpetuating our species seems to be a too important detail to accept "it's none of your business" as an answer. I also think that if it's taught to children then it is a public matter.
That's true, because a 100% open minded person would believe anything uncritically, without questioning it. That's why I said fairly open minded. But if you refuse to discuss it then what else can I say.
"Smart" and "intelligent" people are just people born in relative financial ease with enough time to focus on studies and very likely with parents in academia or similar fields who made their children aware of the inner workings of the fields.
Physics PhD people are not people fallen from skies with a little extra brain. They just got the time, opportunity, and tips to be there. Same goes for other "smart" people. There are, of course, exceptions like von Neuman, Turing, Feynman, Einstein, etc. But these people are exceptions. Perceptions abourt other people in those fields should not be formed with the image of these guys.
The abstract mentions people with 170 average IQ. Hawking had 169 IIRC. Physics PhDs are averagely on the range 130~145. That's much lower than people on the study.
IQ is not taken seriously as a measure of intelligence or success anymore. And people can be trained to score high on IQ tests.
On the debate of Nature vs. Nurture, I do not think that inherent intelligence viz. good genes do not play a role. But I tend to belive that nurture has a larger to play.
100% true, these people are not smart at all. They are parasites and criminals that are destroying society and they must be stopped. Youtube manipulates what people see all over the world and most of it is pure trash.
You should watch the video of her accepting the award. She talks about censoring people for violating the terms of service and the four responsibilities, one of which is to their advertisers. All this in an acceptance speech for freedom of speech. Talk about digging your own hole.
You would have to return to definition for 'freedom of speech'. There is a good chance that somebody may have very different concept of what it means.
Someone can consider banning hateful speech as activity towards 'more' freedom of speech. I do not subscribe to this, but be aware that a lot of people are not willing to admit they are against freedom of speech, so they redefine the term.
Further. It is "Free Expression Award". So there is even no gymanstics required in definitions. "Free expression" is something that anybody can define any way as there is no contesting an idea that is not commonly recognized.
I think people here are fundamentally misunderstanding what happened here. There is a nonprofit, the "Freedom Forum Institute" that awarded this award. Only the award ceremony was sponsored by YouTube. It's common practice for nonprofits to use awards like this as an opportunity to ask for donations, and for the company associated with that person to offer to sponsor the awards ceremony.
I don't see anything to indicate that this award was created by YouTube or that YouTube decided to award this to her.
Even if you completely ignore whatever sponsorship YouTube has with the organization, the sheer idea of awarding YouTube a prize related to freedom of expression/freedom of speech is what's laughable.
I suspect some people think the only possible reason YouTube could win this award is because of the sponsorship of the award ceremony. Because how else would you explain it?
It seems that companies do not care about hiding their rotten values anymore. Law enforcement does not punish them and consumers keep buying, why care?
In the case this goes viral, they will post a copy from some previous non-apology, take a hit for a couple of weeks and do it all over again.
Oh. I don't care that there is some thirdparty. Its negligable, the only important actors in the event are:
- Susan the CEO of Youtube
- Youtube team
- Google/Alphabet team
- People/Users
People share the optics of the event.
The fact this institute got into this mess is kinda sad, but their impactfulness here is really 0.
Despite all that it seems like shade scheme to nominate some rich ceo and beg for money to make some fakish award. But like I said nobody cares about them... there are worse scams to fight against.
You're right, it's really just an average non-profit money-waste, dedicated to congratulating mainstream news figures for defining what mainstream news is.
Giving the award to Susan, who fought valiantly to narrow the Overton window on YouTube to align better with that of mainstream news, makes perfect sense.
Actually, most fundamentally understand what's happened. We've all seen these things before; the embarrassing identifying characteristics of unchecked power.
I think this reflects the fact that no one is particularly happy with Youtube. Between the bans, increasingly aggressive (and abusable) copyright strikes, and constantly shifting rules around content and monetization most Youtubers I watch express unhappiness about some aspect of Youtube on a regular basis. Many have started seeking alternative revenue streams to mitigate platform risk.
I'm sorry, but I simply can't believe that "no one is particularly happy with YouTube" while so many people still use it, including the vast majority of the people who are supposedly "not particularly happy" with it.
When people ask, "Why hasn't someone disrupted YouTube?" I think the more boring answer that keeps getting overlooked is that it still meets the expectations of enough users, and the dissatisfied constitute a small percentage.
> Many have started seeking alternative revenue streams to mitigate platform risk.
What's wild about this is that the content creators doing this still use YouTube! Even after fully acknowledging the problems, and actively mitigating those negative consequences, they still return to the platform.
I just don't see how that'd happen if it were actually a "bad" service.
Youtube being a place to put videos for free is pretty hard to casually compete with when your pockets need to match google's. I've been surprised to see YouTube actually partially out-compete twitch for streaming and entrench itself as a place where a lot of old media places its broadcast (from PBS to the Colbert Report).
For the first time I think they've got a real competitor though - Nebula has managed to somehow eek out a year long survival and is now scooping up a lot of creators on the educational/informational side of things - and it looks like the platform is essentially a co-op structurally where everyone involved is getting a much larger share of the take home. I think the big question coming up for Nebula is what it will do about "The Algorithm" - will they try and create a suggested feed and invest into that sort of algorithmic video promotion or entrench harder into the "see what you subscribe" approach that will end up hurting small creator discoverability - oh also their platform needs some UX work but I don't think that will be a serious concern.
The interesting long term view for me is that I think subscription based services are going to win out over the freemium ones as those freemium ones continue to dig deeper and deeper into the dark magics of advertiser based revenue - freemium services aren't free, instead of demanding cash for your product they're devaluving their product to recoup their costs.
Nebula is in a rough place. It’s essentially subsidized by CuriosityStream and many of their founding creators have pulled out of the project. More fundamentally, Nebula is explicitly curated, which isn’t an inherently bad thing but it does mean they’re unlikely to solve any “freedom of expression” issues with YouTube. I see Nebula less as a YouTube alternative and more as a premium monetization mechanism for the small clique of YouTubers who are involved in it.
> When people ask, "Why hasn't someone disrupted YouTube?" I think the more boring answer that keeps getting overlooked is that it still meets the expectations of enough users, and the dissatisfied constitute a small percentage.
I've seen a couple of attempts come and go. The ones
that wrote a post-mortem after closing often emphasised
how many resources—human, software, and hardware—video
hosting websites consume. Not even because of the storage
or the reencoding, but the sheer amount of bandwidth
one needs to run such things globally. And it won't
get profitable until a few years later, if ever.
The goog is simply one of the few companies
that can actually afford doing that.
I personally have been glad that alternatives like
Nebula[1] are popping up still. Even if their model
is different.
More troll posts... I guess people haven't seen your username enough yet to realize what your game is, so on behalf of those who haven't picked up on it:
The reason YouTube has no competitor yet is because you'd need $10 billion just to get the platform off the ground - that's servers, developers, datacenters, peering agreements, etc.
Very few people have $10 billion lying around, and no one is interested in tackling Google on their home turf.
You wouldn't need anywhere near that to launch a comparable competitor, unless the plan is to be at youtube scale on day one, which of course would not be realistic.
YouTube's brand and network effects are a huge moat, in a market that is massively expensive to build a competitor in. There are only a handful of companies in the world with the available tech talent and capital to create a serious competitor and they apparently aren't interested in trying to attack that moat at this time.
YouTube can absolutely be widely disliked and keep chugging along for the foreseeable future. All it needs to do is not be so bad that people would rather spend their time on something completely different. There is no BingTube with a robust ecosystem that users can easily jump to.
From the user's perspective, these are the same benefits the parent poster was referring to however. Giving people the most value for their money is indeed a huge moat for competition.
Microsoft could - along with Apple - but I think both of those companies are way too smart to try and enter the market now.
Youtube gets a sort of pass for the crap it's pulling since it's pretty much alone (Sorry - who's this Vimeo fellow you're talking about?) but any other major video service would be held up in comparison against Youtube, as is the way with society, the negative will shine through. If you start writing video suggestion algorithms today how long will it take you to be confident that "Pussy cat strolling across the back porch on a wet afternoon" isn't immediately followed up by WAP?
Actually they were testing out hiding the number of dislikes. Not quite the same as removing the dislike button. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if they did end up choosing to completely remove the button.
I found it amazing that they could not find more than 53 persons to like the video. Don't she know more than 100 persons/friends who could be happy for her to win that award ?
How funny it would be if Youtube starts shadow banning/censoring this video so people don't see this? What if they test their like/dislike removal on this?
Isn't it standard practice not to allow people involved in the process to participate?
I mean, even if you deserve it, it is an obvious conflict of interest and makes the award worthless.
I mean, if say, Tesla sponsors an electric car award and a Tesla car wins, it will sound like a farce. Even though it would be expected for a Tesla car to win an electric car award in an independent contest.
As a child in the 80s/early 90s I played little league baseball. Our annual fundraising drive would get capped off by a random draw amongst all the players on the team, performed by the coach at home, and he'd tell us at the next game who won. Prize was 50$, a not-insignificant sum for 8 year olds in 1989!
Sadly, child-me didn't realize that it was a tad fishy that the coach's son won the draw two years running. What fantastic luck!
In the video, she calls speech they don’t agree with “censorship” and actual censorship “freedom of expression”. If this isn’t a prime example of doublespeak I don’t know what is.
She's probably addressing her advertisers, not us, in order to ensure them that they have total freedom of expression of "facts about their wonderful products" in a world totally absent of vile critique. That YT is a safe haven, for them, so to speak.
There was also an episode of The Office (US) about this. Dwight suggests to Jim he starts an employee-of-the-month award, then rigs it so Jim wins so that everyone turns on Jim. Jim at least had the good sense to decline the award.
We can't really tell what is going on behind the curtain but my optimistic view is that no one in the room realized that receiving this award would have some terrible optics and that the awarders chose YouTube genuinely - if you have a narrow view of the content on there (and nobody sees everything) there are some segments where youtube does try to reinforce free speech sorta... maybe I'm being too charitable though.
My cynical hope though is that Youtube pressured the award committee to give them one for hosting it - please someone in Youtube leak a memo about putting pressure on the committee it would be so absolutely delicious.
I thought this was the unwritten rule of how industry awards work. You sponsor them and then they give you an award. The people running the awards get money, and the people sponsoring them get something they can impress prospective clients with. Everyone wins!
Crazy. Now that you say that, I honestly thought it was a parody even showing up here in HN. Took me a few seconds to realize it was not when reading the article, and had to watch part of the video to convince myself. But then again, most news these days read like an Onion article of yesteryears. Just sad, not funny anymore.
This is the most Soviet thing I've heard in a while. The Ministry of Culture awards itself for upholding the Soviet principles of cultural enlightenment!
Yes, I hate awards. In my own experience, awards have only inflated my ego, and has not led me to become more productive or passionate about the things I excel at.
It made me complacent and less likely to go above and beyond at work, possibly because I have the feeling that I've already "reached it", whatever that means.
The piece price is awarded by a committee selected by the political parties of Norways Parlament - for Americans, you can think of this as the Democratic Party in an (almost) mono-ethnic white small 5mil country.
Alfred Nobel set it up such because he thought Norwegians would be more peaceful than Swedes. The science and literature prices are given by the (nonpolitical) Swedish royal academy. This is the reason why the peace price is so different from the other prices.
I'm not sure if you consider Obama to be unique or are being a bit ironic...
You know among the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize have been Henry Kissinger, Mikhail Gorbachev, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin, Yassir Arafat, Jimmy Carter, FW de Klerk...?
>All of which earned their prize AFTER their political achievements
Rabin and Arafat earned their prize AFTER their achievement of ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
"We have not given the prize for what may happen in the future. We are awarding Obama for what he has done in the past year. And we are hoping this may contribute a little bit for what he is trying to do," noting that he hoped the award would assist Obama's foreign policy efforts. Jagland said the committee was influenced by a speech Obama gave about Islam in Cairo in June 2009, the president's efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation and climate change, and Obama's support for using established international bodies such as the United Nations to pursue foreign policy goals.[11] The New York Times reported that Jagland shrugged off the question of whether "the committee feared being labeled naïve for accepting a young politician's promises at face value", stating that "no one could deny that 'the international climate' had suddenly improved, and that Mr. Obama was the main reason... We want to embrace the message that he stands for."
The description more or less applies to a lot of recipients, so it could mean Obama, or it could be intentionally a set up for those who think Obama was the only one.
That’s awesome. I worked for this one startup a long time ago where the CEO would call a company-wide meeting every other month to announce a new achievement award and then promptly award it to his co-founder. You can’t make this kind of shit up, it’s comedy gold. It was also great for morale every time we saw the cofounder get the use of the CEO’s Ferrari or that $25k bonus check. We were always so excited for him!
I'm not sure how the HN ranking algorithm works, but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26880262 seems to have been removed from the front page despite receiving 350+ upvotes within an hour of posting.
I refreshed the HN home page and, for a brief moment, on the same page there was "YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki Gets 'Freedom Expression' Award Sponsored by YouTube" right above another link about YouTube CEO banning videos which don't align with COVID19 WHO guidelines...
We live in a clown world.
Even if people thought that what she did was a good thing (which is debatable), it's a ridiculous idea to reward someone for enabling 'free speech' when in fact they've been suppressing it.
That makes no sense at all. It's cringeworthy that anyone would not realize that this award is a prank.
I wonder if the people who issued this award and the person receiving it know that it's a prank...
It's become part of corporate elite politics that "freedom of expression" means having "trolls", "Russian bots" and "conspiracy theorists" removed from the conversation.
This has also crippled any kind of political conversation on the website that isn't full of people saying codewords and secret phrases to avoid the ban hammer.
It's amazing how disconnected from reality Susan is... I don't think she even knows it. YouTube is probably the poster child for censorship in the context of genuinely free (1A-protected) speech.
I have no idea how this self-stroking "award" can be taken seriously by those who actually monitor freedom of speech (excluding porn, which I don't consider 'speech').
First Amendment wouldn't apply here unless you were to somehow bring something like the state actors doctrine into it. It only regulates government behavior. Strictly speaking under the First Amendment YouTube is incapable of censorship.
Under a more expansive concept of free speech, where we include things like monopoly market power or illegal use of force as government action; then you could argue that YouTube does censor things due to their large size. It's genuinely difficult to start your own video site and speak without being buried in hosting fees; so I think it's useful to talk about them censoring things in some contexts. However, we've also strayed far away from the First Amendment.
Outside of those concepts; however, I don't think the word "censorship" is very useful. If Hacker News decides to ban me, I can go to many thousands of other private forae in order to speak. Perhaps we should use the term "para-censorship" to refer to these situations in which third parties decide to refuse to do business with you.
Honestly I wonder if they even noticed. Based on reading comments under op-eds in newspapers I don't believe the executive or media class actually ever look at prole-feed like comments and like counts. The only YouTubers who might have noticed this don't have the power to yank videos and comments, not are they going to point them out to Wojcicki.
Wait this isn't remotely true. Maybe from a specific American perspective that could be true but for the vast majority of people and countries Youtube has promoted free speech by allowing people to share their opinions and stories globally, especially in countries like China, Russia and the Philippines where dissent is punishable with jail time.
It is because those dissenters have no effect on US elections.
The moment they do and it seems to be helping the opponents of Youtube's preferred candidates (which they have made clear that they have), those foreign dissenters will get flushed down the algorithmic memory hole too.
> How do you make sure that everybody has a voice but also feels safe?
That question was never directly answered and, frankly, I don't think there it's possible to strike that balance. Even now there are simultaneously people who complain that their voice is denied or concealed on the platform while others who complain that the platform doesn't do enough to block or steer viewers away from problematic content.
> We've always since the beginning of YouTube had community guidelines because we've realized that there's certain types of content... like some from the very beginning... we wouldn't allow adult content, hate content, dangerous content... all of those types of content could really make it that YouTube was no longer a platform that was viable for all these other voices out there.
The terms she uses to describe content ("adult", "hate", and "dangerous") are all extremely vague - purposely so that YouTube can ban or allow content seemingly however it pleases them.
And what does she even mean by those types of content could really make YouTube no longer viable for other voices? YouTube is just part of the web - a much larger platform which very much allows those types of content. That hasn't made other voices any less viable. Whether or not it should be YouTube's responsibility to silence those voices, their existence clearly does not inherently reduce the viability of other voices.
> We're always updating our policies and when content is violative of any of the policies unfortunately we need to remove it. And so we removed 9 million videos last quarter and almost all of them - over 90% - we removed with machines, which is good because it means if there's content that's violative we find that really quickly.
...
This is a "Free Expression" award, right? Am I playing the wrong video?
> We also want to protect creators like you who have built businesses with really really valuable content and make sure that we don't have a situation where advertisers pull their spend because there's some content on it that they're not comfortable with. So we want to make sure that we're protecting all the valuable creators like you.
Sure. You're protecting the creators. By demonetizing their businesses. Right.
I think you should take a little broader look, US is not the whole world. YouTube is the only channel where anti-government information is allowed in many countries, where government controls the mass media and censors the internet, but comes short of blocking Youtube, due to its popularity. Probably this is the reason why that prize has been awarded.
The only thing missing in the youtube video of youtube ceo receiving youtube award are ads. Every few minutes it should be interrupted with unskippable ad of Coca Cola, Mercedes, Lays, and Iqos.
It is 30 YouTube engineers testing if the upvote button still works on the video after receiving tickets from upper management saying that “it can’t be that this video doesn’t have thousands of upvotes”.
What censorship you are talking about people? Russia sponsored trolls enjoy full freedom of expression on this platform even to bully,make fake accounts, threat, insult and delete comments that trying to argue with their lies and deliver the truth. If they disturb to russian aggressive propaganda machine and not overwhelmed by it then those comments are disappearing without any explanation/notification. If that is not a freedom of russian expression then what is?
Hate, lies, propaganda are all fine as long as they are in Russian and support Moscow point of view. I heard that even the disputes in Russian are rerouted to Moscow office!
Unfortunately Ukrainians do not have such freedoms, many comments are deleted, accounts are banned and many attempts to deliver the truth are prosecuted or overwhelmed by Moscow bots but since Moscow doesn't consider Ukrainians as people or humans with rights anyway I think it's ok in the eyes of Youtube's CEO (judging by the actions)? Or she simply doesn't know?
I mean who would dare to censor Moscow point of view , it would be a censorship! Even if they already attacked Ukraine and gather huge army near the border to kill milllions. Who cares ... right?
PS: Since I prognose downvoting desires I want you to pay attention, that Russian Bots is a huge problem. I've seen them acting in Russian, now they are using this technique in English speaking communities. Do not underestimate the threat. It's not a joke, they literally bully and shut up anyone who dare to oppose them. They work 24h so at some point you have no power to resist in your spare time to that machine. If you downvote this comment that tries to rise awareness of this huge problem because it's not entertaining, conser yourself helping to this propaganda machine and be sure soon it will come to you together with war, like it came to Ukraine in 2014. No one thought it would happen, just like this week many underestimate the real danger of a huge war to destroy young democracy in Ukraine.
Is there any hard evidence for this bogeyman that gets regularly used as apologia? Or is this Pizzagate for folks on the left of the political spectrum?
At some point they implemented what they called a 'Limited state', which stripped almost every functionality, like comments, likes, embedding or sharing on videos that did not violate their ToS, but were simply disliked by YouTube. They removed it after a while, I assume because of Streisand effect, but I'm not sure.
Then they changed their ToS that they could ban you for literally no reason whatsoever. They retracted that since as well, but are still doing basically just that, it just gives them plausible deniability I guess.
Youtube's algo gaslighted me about the suicide of a childhood friend, by picking content that mocked his life after I learned the bad news.
I had already curated my feed to two specific science topics, and the top rec was a blaring million IQ evil AI punching me in the gut with an Iron Fist. I've never been the same since. Florence Nightingale effect.
People such as Wojcicki have poor moral compasses, or they aren't accountable.
A childhood friend committed suicide, I found out, then the next day or so my science-curated youtube feed suddenly showed me a totally out of context video in the top spot with content that mocked my friend's life.
It appeared as though google/youtube algos used the data point about my friend's suicide to perform a psychological experiment on me. At the least, this was amoral, but appeared malicious to me. I fail to see how it is ever appropriate to customize content based on the suicide of a friend.
I would like to ask anyone here on hn who has the appropriate authority at Google to briefly investigate this incident: Why did google/youtube use the suicide of a childhood friend as a data point for personalizing content, what was the intention, and whether this has changed. Or, perhaps it would help to have an explanation as to why my understanding of this incident is incorrect.
The simple answer is no algorithm is that smart. It's just picking up your "interests" and trying to tailor that. AFAIK people do try to tune recommender systems to avoid this but it's an inscrutable problem to solve with today's state-of-the-art.
My youtube feed had been purposely curated to two science topics for weeks prior. How does the suicide of a friend factor into an "interests" algo that all of a sudden overrides my customizations? I was not doing any searches etc for suicide at that point but I did learn of the suicide via SMS from someone who uses an Android phone. (likely infiltration point for google to initially gather the data point User.FriendsSuicide.WasInformed)
I'm willing to accept the innocent explanation but not on conjecture. This was blatant and fucking hurt me badly and I haven't recovered since. It was the worst possible gaslighting.
Recently: tweeting about my suicidal ideations and having twitter respond with personalized trends such as "He's dead" and "Rope" while shadowbanning me doesn't look good.
Also recently: Facebook showing me a long string of county sheriffs as "people you may know" when a guy i knew long ago was scheduled to be released from a long term federal stint, doesnt look good either. Makes it clear that I've been on a "associate of bad guy" list since Season 6 Ep 12. Is it possible that some kind of social credit algos have been deployed by American tech companies, in a limited fashion? I suspect the architectural arrangements at big tech companies offers compartments for performing limited use-case experiments totally out of view of the rank and file engineers. By design, those ouside that clearance zone won't even know it exists. "CIA middleware" might be appropriate
It seems unlikely to me that the google incident was just a random fluke based on my "interest" in learning of the suicide of a childhood friend. However, only google has the logs, data, and algorithms. I find it unlikely that Google will ever give a straight answer but to me its evidence that Google's data and algos need to be turned over to the justice dept. A big part of Google's power is their impunity to perform such experiments with total deniability. They are worth a trillion dollars yet any damage, incidental or intentional, inflicted on a user goes totally unchecked.
Google is loyal to google/shareholders. They dont give a fsk about me, and I fully expect that no response is forthcoming. There's no accountability, and these services start to look more like public utilities. If it isnt transparent then any such malice can easily be played off with statements claiming that some kind of intelligence is needed for an algo to be malicious
An algo doesn't have to be "smart" to gaslight a person. All you need is their personal data, especially intimate data such as:
* Childhood bully's name
* Subsequent taken name of your ex wife who you were heartbroken to lose
* Suicide of a childhood friend
* Other personals such as siblings' names
Worse yet is rumors. An algo can use info related to rumors to gaslight a person. Just use keywords from the rumors for personalized content. None of this requires any complex algos. Just incompetence and/or malice.
I'm sorry to hear about your friend, and that you've had some bad experiences with recommendation systems recently, whether it be on YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook.
I also had a similar experience after a friend was killed in a home burglary, and my news feed started pushing all the latest updates on the case as well as similarly tragic news stories. For a long time, these recommendations were a painful and unwanted reminder of my friend's murder. Even worse was that the algorithm was definitely trying to push increasingly extreme and fear-mongering content about home invasions, all to try to get my clicks, and perhaps unintentionally radicalize me in the process.
As for why this type of thing happens, I think this part from your last point is pretty much right on the mark, "none of this requires any complex algos". All it takes is data of your browsing habits, the webpages you visit, the keywords you search, the webpages your friends and contacts visit, etc. There don't need to be any database fields explicitly encoding this information, which is why it's so worrying, such a system can push personalized traumatic content a global scale with precision, all from keywords and algorithms intended to maximize click revenue.
The other side of the equation is the content that gets recommended. I'm not sure who created the YouTube video that mocked your friend's death, but in my experience I was pushed content from typical local news outlets, then less reputable outrage content farms, and finally even more despicable sources, like white supremacist sites. That's something about this experience that really disturbed me. I've seen uncannily accurate product predictions before, but usually the 3rd party was relatively reasonable. I hadn't really ever been recommended radicalizing propaganda before, not to this degree. I've read articles about some of the operators of such sites, and they often don't even believe the content that they're pushing. They know that it triggers something in people who are vulnerable, and they exploit that for profit. That whole ecosystem just seems pure evil to me. At least the recommender systems work most of the time, usually just showing me stuff related to my hobbies, cute cats, etc.
Anyway, the combination of incomprehensible recommender systems and toxic content on the web is definitely not good for anyone's mental health. Hope you feel better in the future.
sorry for your loss. i totally see where your comment is coming from but i do not believe that youtube deliberately ran an experiment on you.
youtube, along with most social media, doesn't know how to handle the dead.
it always pains me to see videos of dead youtubers show up in my feed. i highly doubt that the "monetization" money goes to the families. and i can't bring myself to unsubscribe to their channels either.
This kind of thing happens all the time among Exec. level, but normally we'd expect it from Ford CEO, not Google types. It may be an odd sign of industry maturity.
That said, we shouldn't discount how often this kind of stuff actually does work. Watching the crowd at the Oracle conf. eat up Larry Ellison's huffery as through he was some kind of market visionary was the lesson at the other end of the spectrum, and it's that 'If you're rich and stand on stage and say something that 'sounds credible', a lot of people with just believe it'. Of course there's more to it than that.
But this one is Comedy Gold.
It might be a sign that Susan does not have a fully trusted team around her ... I would beg my boss in stark words to not do something so ridiculous to themselves.