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A “Silicon Valley” actor is terrified by what’s happening in Silicon Valley

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Re: A “Silicon Valley” actor is terrified by what’s happening in Silicon Valley

#101

Post by sanbor »

skybrian wrote: post #33
sanbor wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the second time that I read that WikiLeaks is classified as "hostile intelligence agency". Isn't the purpose of intelligence to gather information to gain advantage over adversaries? It sounds to me like a redundant term like "hostile military". And BTW WikiLeaks leaks are public so all other intelligence agencies and citizens can learn while state agencies try to keep things obscure as much as possible. Who'…

It doesn't seem that hard to understand? In the context of a U.S. Congressional hearing, "hostile" probably means "hostile to the U.S."

Good point! But depending on your interests/POW you could consider NSA as "hostile to the U.S." given they're spying on their own citizens.

Re: A “Silicon Valley” actor is terrified by what’s happening in Silicon Valley

#102

Post by dwaltrip »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #87
dwaltrip wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great post. However, it seems also that it is impossible to build the world based solely on official policy and law. We need people to continually make moral decisions in their own lives, to the best of their ability. This involves making sacrifices and ignoring incentives at times. How do we find this balance? I'm not sure. I think we may always be searching for it.

I agree. What I mean is recognition of human nature. We do respond to incentives, there's no working around that (at least for now; maybe we'll have some mind-engineering tech in the future). We want people to do good, and to achieve this we need to both strengthen individual sense of morality and shape the incentives and engineer systems that protect from pressure - because we recognize no human is immune to incenti…

Fully agree, I just wanted to stress both aspects. I do think the systemic and incentive based side of things is more difficult to understand, so it's good to articulate those concepts. Either way, I think it's important to keep having these conversations.

Re: A “Silicon Valley” actor is terrified by what’s happening in Silicon Valley

#103

Post by oceanghost »

aphextron wrote: post #38
nemild wrote: post #18

In the vein of Kumail's critique, if it's useful to anyone, I wrote some thoughts about software engineering and ethics from my own experiences: A serial tech entrepreneur in Silicon Valley once asked me to design a “social stockade” for his financial services customers. It would lock people out of their social media accounts and tweet out/FB share to their friends when they hadn’t paid a loan. He pitched it to prosp…

>Every software engineer I’ve worked with has had a strong sense of personal values and ethics, but the organizations we work for can take actions that are at odds with these. I’d like to highlight a few of the key challenges you’ll face and provide feedback for living your personal values. Most importantly, it’s critical that you think about the impact of your work and consciously set your personal values in advance…

As a profession, we need a set of ethical standards.

I tell companies I "Won't build products that hurt people."

You wouldn't be surprised how many doors this closes.

Re: A “Silicon Valley” actor is terrified by what’s happening in Silicon Valley

#104

Post by kharms »

noam87 wrote: post #64
kharms wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikileaks leaks are selective. "Public" only describes the things they release. The hostility is in the choice of releases.

There's no denying they promote a certain narrative in their PR, but are there known examples of leaks withheld by Wiki Leaks, where the whistleblower had to go elsewhere?

Here is one example, where they refused to publish leaks from/about Russia:

http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/17/wikileaks-turned-down-le...

I recall another case when Wikileaks itself advertised a Russia leak and then never released anything.

Re: A “Silicon Valley” actor is terrified by what’s happening in Silicon Valley

#105

Post by observation »

rtpg wrote: post #35
sanbor wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the second time that I read that WikiLeaks is classified as "hostile intelligence agency". Isn't the purpose of intelligence to gather information to gain advantage over adversaries? It sounds to me like a redundant term like "hostile military". And BTW WikiLeaks leaks are public so all other intelligence agencies and citizens can learn while state agencies try to keep things obscure as much as possible. Who'…

If an American spy plane showed up over the Soviet Union, the plane would get shot at. If an American spy plane showed up over France, they wouldn't get shot at. Of course there's an understanding that intelligence agencies are all ultimately looking at everything, but there's a degree of cooperation. Even in the current state of affairs Russian and American intel agencies work together on anti-terrorism stuff. Howev…

> WikiLeaks does work with an objective of embarassing American interests.

I think it's a contrarian media organization. I recall when the conservatives were all "kill this guy" during the Bush administration, now they they think he's the rescuer of Western Civilization.

If you have any belief in 'checks and balances' as an anti-corruption mechanism then this is a positive.

Who could regulate the 4th Estate, the academies? Not the government, they would be accused of corruption or despotism. Enter WL.

Think about it: who is 'the establishment'. It can't be the President/White House can it, not when the majority of pundits, journalists and intellectuals were against him.

Re: A “Silicon Valley” actor is terrified by what’s happening in Silicon Valley

#106

Post by peoplewindow »

dcow wrote: post #99
peoplewindow wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but so what? It's very easy for people who don't actually make things - like actors and academics - people who never face tradeoffs in their life, to get up on their high horses about people who do. If Kumail wants to comment on the ethics of the computing industry he should man up and write an essay in which he lays out his case, and shows why his preferred tradeoffs are better than those chosen by industry. Li…

I don't think it's Kumail's fault how this got published. I got the impression this was a report on comments he made not any intention of an exhaustive essay on the state of computing. I mean I am professionally in the industry so let me say: I agree that computing across the board lacks an ethical framework and when I talk about this I usually am met with similar responses: apathy or ignorance.

I think you get that response because the computing industry has been constantly attacked with very flimsy, weak and agenda-driven accusations of unethical behaviour, for a very long time. So these sorts of accusations have lost their power, there were too many boys crying wolf.

A large part of this was driven by the decline of the newspaper industry. At some point Murdoch decided that Google was evil because of Google News, and the future of news was the iPad. This from a guy who never even uses email. So he gave some speeches and the orders went out and the Murdoch press immediately started attacking Google with very dubious stories, alleging unethical behaviour. I remember this inflection point quite well. For instance the WSJ paid someone to go digging and they found that the behaviour of Safari had changed with respect to third party cookies, in ways that weren't following the specs, and now some old code Google used was setting cookies too widely or something. This regression had of course not been noticed by anyone because everything still worked. So they blew it up into a major drama and claimed it was all an evil conspiracy, instead of a bug in Safari. Meanwhile Apple got glowing praise and a free pass.

It wasn't just Murdoch of course. The whole industry started attacking internet companies and it was all about money. See the "Google Tax" in Germany, Spain etc. So the supposedly unethical behaviour they were trumping up was very often not unethical at all, or only unethical by some totally meaningless redefinition of the word (e.g. all advertising being considered unethical).

So when Kumail tweets - and the purpose of tweeting is to get noticed and spread a message, so I give him no slack for that - and this gets picked up and inflated by the media, my impression of Kumail goes from neutral to bad. Twitter is not a reasonable place to start a debate about the ethics of technology and if he was an engineer and not an actor, he'd know that. But he's just an actor. So why give a shit?

Re: A “Silicon Valley” actor is terrified by what’s happening in Silicon Valley

#107

Post by thomastjeffery »

dredmorbius wrote: post #67
thomastjeffery wrote: post #3

The heart of the problem is that popular communication networks are centralized and unencrypted.

Good protocols don't cure bad ethics. Mind: I would like to see decentralisation and better encryption protections, generally, but those by themselves won't solve the problem (you still need to address ethics, rights, and power imbalances), and still leave certain of present attacks in place. David Gerard, author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain , makes the exceedingly good point in an FT interview, that Bitcoin a…

> cure bad ethics.

I don't see "bad ethics" as a disease, but a difference of opinion.

Why should I compel others to share my opinion?

Re: A “Silicon Valley” actor is terrified by what’s happening in Silicon Valley

#108

Post by dhoulb »

sebular wrote: post #41
dhoulb wrote: post #25

I got into a conversation once that I think frames this well. We had WILDLY different views on whether going to Mars was a good idea (like, violently polar opposite views). The strength of our disagreement surprised me. I was arguing that we should “race to Mars”, mainly because the value of having a second planet dramatically increases the odds of survival for our the human race, as a whole. Thus Mars is one of the…

There's enough straw in your comment to make an army of men, and almost too much cringe to handle. For starters, you're putting a mountain of words in Kumail Nanjiani's mouth. It's odd that you must be told this, but when you use quotes to summarize your opposition's arguments, you're supposed to actually wrap them around words that were actually used. A quick Ctrl+F on that page leaves one having to guess at whether…

Tough crowd.

Re: A “Silicon Valley” actor is terrified by what’s happening in Silicon Valley

#109

Post by dhoulb »

skybrian wrote: post #27
dhoulb wrote: post #25

I got into a conversation once that I think frames this well. We had WILDLY different views on whether going to Mars was a good idea (like, violently polar opposite views). The strength of our disagreement surprised me. I was arguing that we should “race to Mars”, mainly because the value of having a second planet dramatically increases the odds of survival for our the human race, as a whole. Thus Mars is one of the…

Yeah, I don't see how you can put a good spin on saying that you don't care if 95% of humanity dies. Treating people equally means it only solves 5% of the problem. Probably far less than that. It rounds to zero.

Yeah, I totally should’ve phrased that bit more carefully

The clearer, fuller argument would would be: if something terrible was to happen to Earth it would be objectively better (though obviously still a tragic and nightmarish event) if we only lost 95% of living humans vs losing 100%.

Also though it might also be worth a teensy bit more risk of near-complete wipeout to gain a backup. (e.g. the risk of migration to Mars causing economic or political issues back here that cause a terrible war or something). It’d be crazy hard to do the maths on that though.

You would also kind of assume though that as long as a tiny percentage lived, they would turn a lot more people than are currently alive over a few 1000s of years? So even if the worst happened the ethics would eventually balance out.

Given the amount of really really bad stuff that could happen to humans on Eart (disease, asteroids, super volcanos, sea level change, nuclear war, etc) having 5% safe somewhere else sounds like a great situation to be in. Doubt we’ll get there though.

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