主题：NYT一篇抽狗狗耳光的评论 -- 我爱莫扎特

The executives were nothing but furious — so furious that they awoke from their ethical coma, broke their earlier agreement with the Chinese government and stopped censoring search results for controversial political queries.

If Google’s explanations and actions seem to be lacking in logic and coherence, it’s because they are.

So if the sudden change of mind on the issue of censorship was not driven by cybersecurity, what could explain Google’s appetite for self-destruction?

The most plausible explanation seems to be that this is Google’s own, uber-geeky way of doing penance for the evil bargain that it struck with the Chinese government in 2005.

In retrospect, it’s easy to see where Google’s purely utilitarian calculations went wrong. In addition to their “do no evil” motto, Googlers have always been guided by another, much less explicit philosophy: “computational arrogance.”

A company started by talented computer scientists and engineers, Google carefully applied its scientific, heavily quantitative methods to every single business decision and quandary, from book digitization to freedom of expression. This is how they came to reason that having more books online — even if distributed under an inferior copyright regime — is better than having none. Similarly, this is how they reasoned that having more information online in China — even if some of it is mediocre or censored — is better than none.

Reasoning by common sense or intuition is not really an option here: Googlers seem to check all hunches, no matter how good, by their cubicles, for spreadsheets never lie.

But China, too, has plenty of engineers — especially in the leadership of its Communist Party. The Chinese leaders may lag behind Google in matters of computer science, but they are surely ahead in the art of Machiavellian politics.

It wouldn’t be surprising if they followed a very similar thought process: Having mediocre information about human rights activists is better than no information. And who would be better suited to organize it all — to be hacked by China’s own hackers at some point in the future — than the overly ambitious Google engineers?

Guided mostly by its spreadsheets — not historical analysis — Google took the bait and struck a deal with the Chinese government, a deal of which very little is known. We do know that Google agreed to censor certain search results. But was there also something else — perhaps some data-mining feature thrown in to placate the Chinese censors — that Google never told us about? The presence of such a backdoor to user data — which may have been abused by the third-parties — could explain Google's near certainty that Chinese authorities are behind the cyberattacks.

Still, the truth remains that Google failed to do due diligence on China and should bear full responsibility for it. It is unlikely to succeed in whitewashing its business blunders by trumpeting its newly acquired respect for human rights and freedom of expression.