Saturday Commentary and Review #158

Google's "Culture of Fear", Wall Street's DEI Retreat, Paving the Way For End to War in Ukraine via Negotiations, Machiavelli on Political Origins, Some Actual Great News

Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.

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It’s become passé to complain about Google’s search engine these days, because it’s been horrible for years. We all recall its early era when its minimalist presentation effectively destroyed its competition overnight. Only us olds remember AltaVista’s search engine, for example. So ubiquitous is its core function that the word “google” entered our lexicon.

Roughly 85-90% of the readers who have subscribed to this Substack have used a gmail address to do so. It’s a great product, although it could be better. Like many of you, I have several gmail addresses, and use email services from other providers like Protonmail. Gmail is incredibly easy to use, and works very well on all the devices that we operate on a daily basis.

Google is a tech behemoth, and is in a monopolistic position when it comes to both of these services. It has used this position to hoover up an insane amount of cash, taking a battering ram to many other businesses in the process, especially news media outlets that rely on advertising revenue. Yet it has not scored any big victories since its rollout of gmail all those years ago.

Pirate Wires

says that it hasn’t had to for some time….until now. The explosion of AI tech means that its core business is now at threat of extinction unless it can win the AI arms race. Its first foray into this war via its rollout of Gemini has been an absolute disaster. Mike Solana chalks it up to many factors, primarily the “culture of fear” that seems to permeate the tech giant.

The summary:

Last week, following Google’s Gemini disaster, it quickly became clear the $1.7 trillion-dollar giant had bigger problems than its hotly anticipated generative AI tool erasing white people from human history. Separate from the mortifying clownishness of this specific and egregious breach of public trust, Gemini was obviously — at its absolute best — still grossly inferior to its largest competitors. This failure signaled, for the first time in Google’s life, real vulnerability to its core business, and terrified investors fled, shaving over $70 billion off the kraken’s market cap. Now, the industry is left with a startling question: how is it even possible for an initiative so important, at a company so dominant, to fail so completely?

The product rollout was so incredibly botched that mainstream media outlets friendly to Google (and its cash) are doing damage control on its behalf.

Multiple issues:

This is Google, an invincible search monopoly printing $80 billion a year in net income, sitting on something like $120 billion in cash, employing over 150,000 people, with close to 30,000 engineers. Could the story really be so simple as out-of-control DEI-brained management? To a certain extent, and on a few teams far more than most, this does appear to be true. But on closer examination it seems woke lunacy is only a symptom of the company’s far greater problems. First, Google is now facing the classic Innovator’s Dilemma, in which the development of a new and important technology well within its capability undermines its present business model. Second, and probably more importantly, nobody’s in charge.

It’s human nature to want to boil issues down to one single cause of factor, when it’s usually several all at once. We humans also have a strong tendency to zoom in on one factor when presented with many, mainly because the one that we focus on is something that we know and/or are passionate about.

The “culture of fear”:

Over the last week, in communication with a flood of Googlers eager to speak on the issues facing their company — from management on almost every major product, to engineering, sales, trust and safety, publicity, and marketing — employees painted a far bleaker portrait of the company than is often reported: Google is a runaway, cash-printing search monopoly with no vision, no leadership, and, due to its incredibly siloed culture, no real sense of what is going on from team to team. The only thing connecting employees is a powerful, sprawling HR bureaucracy that, yes, is totally obsessed with left-wing political dogma. But the company’s zealots are only capable of thriving because no other fount of power asserts, or even attempts to assert, any kind of meaningful influence. The phrase “culture of fear” was used by almost everyone I spoke with, and not only to explain the dearth of resistance to the company’s craziest DEI excesses, but to explain the dearth of innovation from what might be the highest concentration of talented technologists in the world. Employees, at every level, and for almost every reason, are afraid to challenge the many processes which have crippled the company — and outside of promotion season, most are afraid to be noticed. In the words of one senior engineer, “I think it’s impossible to ship good products at Google.” Now, with the company’s core product threatened by a new technology release they just botched on a global stage, that failure to innovate places the company’s existence at risk.

Some specifics about the Gemini rollout catastrophe:

First, according to people close to the project, the team responsible for Gemini was not only warned about its “overdiversification” problem before launch (the technical term for erasing white people from human history), but understood the nebulous DEI architecture — separate from causing offense — dramatically eroded the quality of even its most benign search results.

Roughly, the “safety” architecture designed around image generation (slightly different than text) looks like this: a user makes a request for an image in the chat interface, which Gemini — once it realizes it’s being asked for a picture — sends on to a smaller LLM that exists specifically for rewriting prompts in keeping with the company’s thorough “diversity” mandates. This smaller LLM is trained with LoRA on synthetic data generated by another (third) LLM that uses Google’s full, pages-long diversity “preamble.” The second LLM then rephrases the question (say, “show me an auto mechanic” becomes “show me an Asian auto mechanic in overalls laughing, an African American female auto mechanic holding a wrench, a Native American auto mechanic with a hard hat” etc.), and sends it on to the diffusion model. The diffusion model checks to make sure the prompts don’t violate standard safety policy (things like self-harm, anything with children, images of real people), generates the images, checks the images again for violations of safety policy, and returns them to the user.

“Three entire models all kind of designed for adding diversity,” I asked one person close to the safety architecture. “It seems like that — diversity — is a huge, maybe even central part of the product. Like, in a way it is the product?”

“Yes,” he said, “we spend probably half of our engineering hours on this.”

Diversity as the “central part of the product”, with half of the engineering hours spent on it. This can be viewed in many different ways, but to me it seems like a huge waste of productivity and drain on resources in order to benefit ideology.

Solana then zooms out and reports that most people employed at Google are indeed happy to be there, but that the culture has grown “soft” and isn’t in shape to fight the AI arms race. He lays the blame squarely at the feet of current CEO Sundar Pichai, criticizing him for a “lack of vision”, among other things. One of those other things include how Google is “siloed off”, making cross-unit collaboration both difficult and cumbersome:

Among higher performers I spoke with, a desire to fire more people was both surprising after a year of massive layoffs, and universal. “You could cut the headcount by 50%,” one engineer said, “and nothing would change.” At Google, it’s exceedingly difficult to get rid of underperformers, taking something like a year, and that’s only if, at the final moment, a low performer doesn’t take advantage of the company’s famously liberal (and chronically abused) medical leave policy with a bullshit claim. This, along with an onslaught of work from HR that has nothing to do with actual work, layers tremendous friction into the daily task of producing anything of value. But then, speaking of the “People” people —

One of the more fascinating things I learned about Google was the unique degree to which it’s siloed off, which has dramatically increased the influence of HR, one of the only teams connecting the entire company. And that team? Baseline far crazier than any other team.

As we all know, HR Departments are the Political Commissars of the Corporate West.

Stupid stuff:

Before the pernicious or the insidious, we of course begin with the deeply, hilariously stupid: from screenshots I’ve obtained, an insistence engineers no longer use phrases like “build ninja” (cultural appropriation), “nuke the old cache” (military metaphor), “sanity check” (disparages mental illness), or “dummy variable” (disparages disabilities). One engineer was “strongly encouraged” to use one of 15 different crazed pronoun combinations on his corporate bio (including “zie/hir,” “ey/em,” “xe/xem,” and “ve/vir”), which he did against his wishes for fear of retribution. Per a January 9 email, the Greyglers, an affinity group for people over 40, is changing its name because not all people over 40 have gray hair, thus constituting lack of “inclusivity” (Google has hired an external consultant to rename the group). There’s no shortage of DEI groups, of course, or affinity groups, including any number of working groups populated by radical political zealots with whom product managers are meant to consult on new tools and products.

Solana also reports overt discrimination against White males in hiring/promotions. He also argues that Google will not learn its lesson from the Gemini debacle, and will repeat it again in the near future. His prognosis for the giant:

Google is sitting on an enormous amount of cash, but if the company does lose AI, and AI in turn eats search, it will lose its core function, and become obsolete. Talent will leave, and Google will be reduced to a giant, slowly shrinking pile of cash. A new kind of bank, maybe, run by a dogmatic class of extremist HR priestesses? That’s interesting, I guess. But it’s not a technology company.

Its wild success and monopolistic position has made it grow fat, lazy, and worst of all, stupid.

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DEI in the business world came about because corporations didn’t want to expose themselves to legal liabilities stemming from charges of workplace discrimination. To reduce the exposure to such charges, HR was tasked with promoting internal cultures of diversity. This resulted in HR departments carving out their own empires, to the horror of many employees.

It now seems that an overreach took place, and thanks to the SCOTUS ruling that ended Affirmative Action, Corporate America is now “tweaking” its DEI initiatives due to fears of lawsuits going the other way i.e. “reverse discrimination”. Bloomberg reports that Wall Street’s DEI retreat has officially begun:

From C-suites down, American finance is quietly reassessing its promises to level the playing field. The growing conservative assault on DEI, coupled with pockets of resentment among White employees, have executives moving to head off accusations of reverse discrimination. It’s not just Wall Street. In recent weeks, Zoom Video Communications Inc. cut its internal DEI team amid broader layoffs and Tesla Inc. removed language about minority workers from a regulatory filing.

The seemingly small changes — lawyerly tweaks, executives call them — are starting to add up to something big: the end of a watershed era for diversity in the US workplace, and the start of a new, uncertain one.

“We’re past the peak,” said Subha Barry, former head of diversity at Merrill Lynch.

The impact of people like Elon Musk and Bill Ackman:

Publicly, executives insist they’re as dedicated as ever. Goldman Sachs and other major US banks say they remain committed to attracting and promoting people from a range of backgrounds. Privately, however, many acknowledge that the high-profile campaign against DEI— amplified by billionaires including Elon Musk and Bill Ackman — threatens to set back what progress Wall Street has made.

Recruitment programs aimed at women and minorities — a key tool for recruiting diverse talent — are being reworked. In-house affinity groups, specific workforce targets and even boardroom diversity initiatives are all up for review, executives, consultants and lawyers say.

It’s a remarkable turn. Less than four years ago, amid lofty talk of a “racial reckoning” and an “inflection point,” America’s CEOs were vowing to embrace inclusive hiring, promote minorities and narrow the gender pay gap.

Fear of litigation:

Bankers and lawyers contend they have little choice but to reframe or pause new diversity initiatives and to get ahead of the blowback and potential litigation.

“People are all over the place,” said Valerie Irick Rainford, who oversaw programs to promote Black leaders at JPMorgan Chase before leaving the bank in 2019.

Colour-Blind Goldman Sachs:

At Goldman Sachs, lawyers have advised senior executives to remove references to race and gender in college recruitment programs, according to people familiar with the matter. They’ve also warned against hosting exclusive events for specific groups, such as women and people of color.

Corporate Diversity Consultants are worried:

One influential Wall Street banker said he’s observed that the sway executives in charge of diversity recruitment used to have with decision makers has diminished. Asking for anonymity to describe the recent changes, he said that colleagues who'd been willing in recent years to be open to diverse recruitment are reverting back to the way they were before George Floyd’s murder.

Rainford, who consults on diversity for companies including financial firms, said one client told her recently that it was wondering whether it needs to pause its diversity programs altogether. “If you didn’t have the conviction in the first place, it’s easy to say, ‘We’re not doing that anymore,’” she said. For now, her client is sticking with its diversity programs, she added.

A reaction:

Meantime, Stephen Miller, the architect of anti-immigration policies under former President Donald Trump, has emerged as a key figure in preparing a hardline conservative agenda in the event Trump returns to the White House.

Miller is bent on eradicating diversity initiatives in business. His advocacy group, America First Legal, has accused dozens of companies of discriminating against White men.

It’s not just conservative activists, either. Pushback is coming from within:

Still, conservative activists and politicians aren’t the only ones challenging DEI. So are some Wall Street workers, albeit far more quietly.

The pushback inside the industry is real, according to Barry, the former Merrill executive, who now leads DEI advisory firm Seramount. She’s had White women ask her what opportunities their sons will have if Wall Street focuses solely on promoting underrepresented groups.

“Are they doing it publicly? Vocally? Of course not,” Barry said. “But they’re doing it. And when they do it, you have to listen.”

The moms are speaking up for their sons :)

I do not think DEI is going away anytime soon, as it is a powerful weapon to wield, especially globally as it gives so many advantages to western corporations. At the same time, it is dawning on the business world that DEI significantly drains resources and hampers productivity, two very bad things in a competitive environment.

…but then again, the story preceding this one argues that giants like Google still haven’t learned this important lesson.

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Since the failure of the much-vaunted Summer Counteroffensive, there has been a deluge of negative reporting from the front in Ukraine. (Mostly) gone are the calls to defeat Russia militarily, with realism seeping into dispatches.

All of us have taken this new trend as a sign that the US-led West is ready to wind this conflict down, having extracted as much as it could from it as the law of diminishing returns has set in, with the added fear of an actual Ukrainian collapse and the negative impact that it would have on American prestige. Vicki Nuland’s resignation only solidifies this view (I will publish a piece on her immediately after I finish the next entry on the Spanish Civil War series).

Running in parallel to the doom and gloom pieces from the front have been calls for negotiations between the warring sides to begin. The Biden Administration fears a Ukrainian collapse during an election year, as it would significantly hurt Joe’s increasingly declining chances of a second term in office. Without further ado, here is another call from the foreign policy blob to begin the process towards negotiating a settlement to this war, courtesy of the CFR’s Foreign Affairs publication, authored by think tankers from RAND and the European Council on Foreign Relations:

Ukraine and its Western backers have precious little common ground with Russia. Yet all the key players seem to agree on one critical issue: the war in Ukraine will end in negotiations. As Russian President Vladimir Putin told the conservative broadcaster Tucker Carlson in a recent interview: “We are willing to negotiate.” A spokesman for the U.S. National Security Council, while casting doubt on Putin’s sincerity, retorted in a statement that “both we and President Zelensky have said numerous times that we believe this war will end through negotiations.” The absence of decisive battlefield outcomes over the past two years have made the alternative to a negotiated end (one side’s absolute victory) seem like a fantasy.

Despite the absence of a viable alternative to eventual talks, there is no sign that the belligerents will start negotiations any time soon. Both sides believe that reaching an acceptable deal is currently impossible; each fears that the other won’t compromise or will use any pause to rest and refit for the next round of fighting.

Even if a deal is presently out of the question, all parties should take steps now to bring about the possibility of talks in the future. In the middle of a war, it is hard to know whether an adversary is genuinely ready to end the fighting or cynically talks of peace only to further the aims of war. The challenge of discerning an adversary’s intentions is nearly impossible in the absence of dialogue. Therefore, it is necessary to open channels of communication so as to be in a position to take advantage of the opportunity to pursue peace when that opportunity comes.

This is just another tacit admission that defeating Russia on the battlefield in Ukraine is simply not happening.

Pleading:

But in this case mistrust is compounded by pervasive assumptions of maximalist intentions. Kyiv believes that Moscow is still seeking to install a puppet government in Ukraine and will use any respite in the fighting to gather strength before opportunistically resuming the battle. Russia, as Putin recently noted, sees the West as intent on using Ukraine as an instrument to ensure Russia’s “strategic defeat.” If an adversary’s objectives are truly maximalist, one faces a simple choice between capitulation and continuing to fight. As a result, both sides appear resigned to the inevitability of a long, hugely destructive war that both claim not to want.

It is possible that each side is right about the other’s maximalist goals. But neither side can know for sure without talking. In the absence of a channel of communication, any proposition about the other side’s true intentions is an untested one.

Not testing this proposition comes at a very high cost. The war of attrition is killing enormous numbers of soldiers and civilians and grinding up military and financial resources. U.S. officials estimated in August 2023 that almost 500,000 Ukrainian and Russian troops have been killed or wounded since February 2022. The war is also disrupting international security in ways that serve no one.

The removal of Victoria Nudelman is the removal of a maximalist from the chessboard. Nothing signals US intent for winding down this conflict more than her disappearance from the playing field.

Pressuring Kiev:

For Kyiv’s allies, the opening gambit is to begin talking about talking among themselves. Some will need convincing; others are already convinced and simply need a sign that diplomacy is no longer taboo. U.S. officials have already repeatedly said they expect the war to end in a negotiated settlement. But they have not communicated to the other allies what that means in practice nor explicitly oriented the strategy for ending the war around a negotiated outcome.

Eventually, the discussion of conflict diplomacy needs to begin in North Atlantic Council and G-7 meetings, as well as bilateral engagements between allies at the highest levels. Talking about talking does not entail any changes in policy in the short term. Time and effort need to be spent on developing a diplomatic strategy long before negotiations actually start.

In parallel to the intra-alliance discussion, the issue needs to be brought to the table in engagements between allies and Ukraine. Kyiv justifiably worries that a move toward negotiations will mean an end to military assistance. As they begin to talk with Kyiv about talking, allies should therefore keep up or even increase security assistance.

The United States and its allies can start by soliciting Ukraine’s views on the subjects of communicating with the other side during the fighting and the nature of the war’s endgame. Right now, these issues are not on the agenda. Once Ukrainian officials begin to hear the same questions being asked by multiple interlocutors at multiple levels, they will engage in internal discussions to identify their preferences and approach to conflict diplomacy. Weaving the subject of talks into discussions concerning long-term military and financial assistance would also underscore an important reality: no amount of aid can ensure Ukraine’s security and prosperity without an end to the war.

“Adjusting rhetorical emphasis”:

Adjusting Western officials’ rhetorical emphasis in public statements would be a modest but important signal. For example, officials could restate their openness to conditional sanctions relief as part of a negotiated outcome to the war. But talk is cheap and Moscow will likely not believe it. Therefore, the United States and the European Union should also consider appointing special representatives for conflict diplomacy. Even though these officials would spend months engaging with allies and Kyiv before talks with Moscow are even considered, the appointments themselves would signal to Russia that the United States and Europe are prepared to engage in eventual negotiations.

Ideas to bring the sides together to the negotiating table:

Kyiv and Moscow have more opportunities for signaling, because they are the belligerents. Moscow, especially, needs to find ways to signal; Russia should indicate that its war aims are limited, that it is prepared to negotiate an end to the war, and that it will abide by the terms of a settlement. In addition to appointing a diplomatic point person to serve as a counterpart to the new U.S. and EU representatives, Moscow could suspend strikes on Ukrainian cities, indicate a willingness to enact an all-for-all prisoner-of-war swap, and cease its inflammatory rhetoric about the Ukrainian leadership.

Kyiv, in turn, could soften the September 2022 presidential decree that established “the impossibility of conducting negotiations with the President of the Russian Federation, V. Putin.” Kyiv could clarify that the decree applies only to the Russian president and not to other representatives of the Russian government. And if Moscow stopped striking nonmilitary targets in Ukraine, Kyiv could reciprocate by ceasing strikes it has been conducting in Russia.

I’ll translate this entire essay for you in one sentence: The West is in a panic.

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My name is Niccolo Soldo, but it isn’t. Niccolo is an Italian name (the South Slavic variant is Nikola), but I’m not Italian. I am an Italophile, most likely caused by growing up around so many of them and the cultural affinities that I share with them. I also have long admired Niccolo Machiavelli, the famous Florentine political philosopher. My use of ‘Niccolo’ is in honour of him.

I also like origin stories. In fact, my favourite book in C.S. Lewis’ Narnia Chronicles is “The Magicians Nephew”; the second-to-last book that was published chronologically in the seven-part series, but that dealt with the origin of Narnia and the entire world that he created for us kids. My favourite entry in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series is “Prelude to Foundation”, which was published three decades after the famous trilogy first appeared. It too dealt with the origin of the world that he imagined and gifted to us.

What do these two things have in common? David Polansky explains how Machiavelli was himself fixated on origin stories, particularly those of political societies:

Niccolò Machiavelli is better known for his hard-headed political advice – it was he who wrote ‘it is better to be feared than loved’ – but he was also preoccupied with the role of violence in establishing (and re-establishing) political societies. Few thinkers have dealt so thoroughly and so troublingly with the theme of political origins as Machiavelli, leading the French philosopher Louis Althusser to call Machiavelli the ‘theorist of beginnings’. For Machiavelli, origins are chiefly of interest for two reasons: first, they reveal essential truths about the impermanence of political life that are otherwise obscured by ordinary politics; and, second, their violent conditions are in principle replicable always and everywhere.

Putin recently sperged out about Russian history of the past one thousand years while talking to Tucker Carlson. Origin stories put present conflicts into context for many, especially for those of us who reside in the Old World.

Machiavelli’s perspective is moreover useful to us – because of the way he stands outside of our liberal tradition. Every society in history has had its origin stories, but the question of beginnings poses particular challenges for those of us living in the kinds of modern states that first began to take shape in the 17th century. For their legitimacy rests upon their deliberative and representative character. Nearly all existing states – even non-democratic ones – have some claim to represent a given people. Representative government is one of the ways that we assure ourselves that political power isn’t mere domination, and its rules and processes are intended to preserve the rights of the people who establish them. Consequently, we locate the origins of political society with that moment of establishment. The great liberal philosopher John Locke, for example, insists in the Second Treatise of Government (1689) that ‘the beginning of politic society depends upon the consent of the individuals, to join into, and make one society; who, when they are thus incorporated, might set up what form of government they thought fit.’

Polansky poses some good questions:

However, what about the right of any given people to establish political orders in the first place? And if some do claim to establish a new political order, who gets to decide which individuals are included among ‘the people’ and which are not? Who decides what territory is rightfully theirs for establishing government? And how did it happen in the first place?

The inability of liberals to face these questions:

These are questions that modern liberalism is largely unable to face. John Rawls in A Theory of Justice (1971), perhaps the most influential work of political theory in the past 50 years, admits that his considerations of justice simply assume the existence of a stable and self-contained national community. Earlier, Thomas Hobbes and, later, Immanuel Kant had faced this question more squarely, but both warned against enquiring about the origins of our societies at all, for, as Hobbes wrote in 1651, ‘there is scarce a commonwealth in the world, whose beginnings can in conscience be justified.’

It is not that the liberal political tradition (which is the tradition of most of the world’s developed countries) is simply unaware of political origins; but it deals with them in a deliberate and abstract way that is removed from the messy historical realities behind the formation of states and nations. The opening words of the ‘Federalist’ essay, written by Alexander Hamilton in defence of the nascent US Constitution, posed the question two and a half centuries ago:

whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.

The US founders, in other words, consciously sought to create a wholly new society based upon just principles rather than the contingent events that gave rise to past governments, thus providing a model for future liberal constitutions. But accident and force are simply mainstays of history. And, as it happens, they are also Machiavelli’s bread and butter (or bread and olive oil).

Click here to read the rest of this interesting essay.

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We end this weekend’s SCR with some very, very good news: Cystic Fibrosis is no longer an early death sentence as those afflicted with it can now expect to live into their 80s…and not horribly, either:

Then, in the fall of 2019, a new triple combination of drugs began making its way into the hands of people with the genetic disease. Trikafta corrects the misshapen protein that causes cystic fibrosis; this molecular tweak thins mucus in the lungs so it can be coughed up easily. In a matter of hours, patients who took it began to cough—and cough and cough and cough in what they later started calling the Purge. They hacked up at work, at home, in their car, in bed at night. It’s not that they were sick; if anything, it was the opposite: They were becoming well. In the days that followed, their lungs were cleansed of a tarlike mucus, and the small tasks of daily life that had been so difficult became unthinkingly easy. They ran up the stairs. They ran after their kids. They ran 10Ks. They ran marathons.

Cystic fibrosis once all but guaranteed an early death. When the disease was first identified, in the 1930s, most babies born with CF died in infancy. The next decades were a grind of incremental medical progress: A child born with CF in the ’50s could expect to live until age 5. In the ’70s, age 10. In the early 2000s, age 35. With Trikafta came a quantum leap. Today, those who begin taking the drug in early adolescence, a recent study projected, can expect to survive to age 82.5—an essentially normal life span.

It’s nice to share some good news for once ;)

Click here to read the rest.

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