Zero tolerance on creepiness and sexual harassment in any form.
Where there should be room for give is on language and joke policing that offends no one in context except liability obsessed PMC types who use that shit to attack the credibility of female complainants.
Happened to me and was hell on top of a workplace culture that reeked of implicit non-local sexism and harassment. Non-local as in systemic but you never see the architects aside from a clunker-Prof John Hennessy. He is the only Prof I have seen associated with Google whom I don’t genuinely hate and distrust completely.
I somehow don’t hate Prof Hennessy but identify him as merely a fellow misanthrope ineptly trying humanism. The difference is I am not shilling rubbish ai or low paid gig work. Just refusing to go back to the era of scarlet letters. I back my guesses about people as they are made inside hell. He is a clunker but not a horrible human being like Fei Fei Li, Peter Norvig, Sebastian Thrun (fraudulent edtech peddling blankity blank), Thomas Insel, Christopher Manning, and that bleep bleep bleep Alex Pentland and other people I cannot seem to discuss without profanity.
The people I met directly weren’t charlatans, creepy or sexist or racist (bully for them!), just not bothered about anything but ass covering while zealously ushering in a PanOpticon for Google/Facebook etc as the solution for open science, bias etc with an execrable “women’s health” module tacked on and methods out of 3-body problem with the kinds of poly crisis promoting technocrats who expect eternal gratitude for fixes to the security issues that go with their buying cheap shit and waving through methods from surveillance capitalists and the least essential type of national security state (aka pointless defense contracting). It was a nightmare to endure. There was one genuinely cool British biology professor whom I liked. He is retired I think. Good for him. That place was a hell.
All I could estimate about the scientists I met was that they were competent, hadn’t engaged in misconduct, weren’t bigoted or sexist. Probably why they piously go around making a virtue of being on display. There was a girl who didn’t seem like that big a pill or that fatuous and a few embattled humans like me and one decent Indian grad student.
That the rest were individually and collectively repulsive human beings still was very on brand.
Well maybe they weren’t that bad. Calvinists without much self awareness or common sense at the very least and shallow thinkers outside narrow areas.
But at least I am pretty sure they never met Epstein and that is the bar for our nauseating and ugly elites.
I can always manage to in any crisis to recommend those people as coldly as possible without kayfabe. But with zero human warmth.
They are still the better people in those systems.
Oh well-no misconduct, no sexual harassment or sexism or bigotry and not dishonest in context is for such ugly people adequate.
But while it is the right thing to do to give such utter assholes the coldest pass possible, nobody could actually personally like any of them except as a cross to bear in a permacrisis their noxious technofascist parasites force.
Besides I no longer accept that that is the only way to do science at a time when garbage politics imperils science funding except when administered by Zuckerberg’s moll or sports billionaire funded tax shelters that claim to back prison reform. That last sentence is called hyperbole, truthiness and creative speculation.
And they can suck it up if they get doxxed as I do daily here in India. We!!!!!
🖕
But by contrast I was genuinely fond of my main postdoc lab. Truly cool people in every way. And my mentor was as elite as anyone anywhere. He just wasn’t a douchebag. Which seems to be the main qualification elite scientists must have to work at Dartmouth, Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Columbia, UPenn, U C Berkeley, Brown etc.
Edit history
Recommendations
0 members have recommended this reply (displayed in chronological order):
= new reply since forum marked as read