Just looking at the names in that comment I see US, China, India, and France represented, but if you actually check the full list of authors from one of the papers you'll usually see a pretty broad range of backgrounds.
Why? Google is an international organization and its technical employment is heavily skewed towards these two origins. Also Americans come from other places? Regardless of their last name…
They're making an observation. As you noted, there is a lot of technical people that are immigrants at Google. It is stunning because it implies native born americans are dramatically under represented. Inclusion means include everyone. This is just as bad as CEOs at most companies being all of european ancestry.
Most "Indian looking", forgive me the crude way of saying it, native-born Americans in my kid's school have traditional Indian names.
It is very common for children of immigrants to be high achievers because being a legal immigrant strongly correlates with high personal achievement - which is generally transmitted to children. Of course this isn't exclusive to immigrants, but it's a form of selection bias.
> implies native born americans are dramatically under represented.
Two things:
1. I see few Native Americans at graduate levels in technical fields. Maybe because the American culture, unlike Eastern countries, does not encourage students to go to college? Maybe because there are way more jobs out there that don't require that high-ed degrees? Maybe because Americans already live in the US whereas for a typical Chinese/Indian person, getting a Ph.D. is a ticket to come to the US?
2. DEI policies in the industry and academia sometimes lead to over-presentation of those nationalities (speaking as a foreign national myself). Companies can treat an H1B visa holder any way they want because the visa holder wouldn't get another job if they got fired, but the comapny can't behave like that towards a native American.
> implies native born americans are dramatically under represented.
Isn't London a major location for Google AI expertise?
Also, native-born Americans have family origins, and therefore names, from all over the world. (I'm assuming from context that by native born you don't mean actual Native Americans)
Just looking at the names in that comment I see US, China, India, and France represented, but if you actually check the full list of authors from one of the papers you'll usually see a pretty broad range of backgrounds.
China has the second biggest output of AI/ML research after the US. So not that surprising.
Asians are high achievers. Majority of my employers ML team is Asian. Majority of my spouses top tier school engineering club is Asian.
Why? Google is an international organization and its technical employment is heavily skewed towards these two origins. Also Americans come from other places? Regardless of their last name…
What is this about?
Are you trying to find a controversy?
They're making an observation. As you noted, there is a lot of technical people that are immigrants at Google. It is stunning because it implies native born americans are dramatically under represented. Inclusion means include everyone. This is just as bad as CEOs at most companies being all of european ancestry.
Most "Indian looking", forgive me the crude way of saying it, native-born Americans in my kid's school have traditional Indian names.
It is very common for children of immigrants to be high achievers because being a legal immigrant strongly correlates with high personal achievement - which is generally transmitted to children. Of course this isn't exclusive to immigrants, but it's a form of selection bias.
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> implies native born americans are dramatically under represented.
Two things:
1. I see few Native Americans at graduate levels in technical fields. Maybe because the American culture, unlike Eastern countries, does not encourage students to go to college? Maybe because there are way more jobs out there that don't require that high-ed degrees? Maybe because Americans already live in the US whereas for a typical Chinese/Indian person, getting a Ph.D. is a ticket to come to the US?
2. DEI policies in the industry and academia sometimes lead to over-presentation of those nationalities (speaking as a foreign national myself). Companies can treat an H1B visa holder any way they want because the visa holder wouldn't get another job if they got fired, but the comapny can't behave like that towards a native American.
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> implies native born americans are dramatically under represented.
Isn't London a major location for Google AI expertise?
Also, native-born Americans have family origins, and therefore names, from all over the world. (I'm assuming from context that by native born you don't mean actual Native Americans)
how do you know they're not native born?
I assume if one of the names in the paper was O'Shaughnessy you would immediately think: "Irish immigrant!" Schmidt? German immigrant!
No it was just a bizarrely naive observation -- not even in a racist way, just really dumb and implied things that were not true.
I think the controversy was in making the observation
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