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MIT's student newspaper criticizes MIT's convenience-based ethics

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Re: MIT's student newspaper criticizes MIT's convenience-based ethics

#51

Post by cup »

darawk wrote: post #43
fatjokes wrote: post #29

If it makes MIT feel better, I don't think "ethics" when I think of MIT. I think technological leadership and excellence, but definitely not ethics. For starters, they have plenty of collaborations with the military (e.g., MIT Lincoln Labs; not saying that can't be ethical... but it usually means someone's going to die). Nothing to be ashamed of. Somebody's gotta do it...

What's unethical about collaborating with the military? We don't exist in a vacuum. American military hegemony has been an extremely powerful stabilizing force, post-WWII. This idea that it is unethical to build weapons is profoundly wrong, short sighted, and morally selfish. Not to overly pick on your comment, since you did say that it can be ethical, of course. But i've seen this sentiment that military work is une…

>an extremely powerful stabilizing force

For the American empire. Less so for the rest of the world.

Re: MIT's student newspaper criticizes MIT's convenience-based ethics

#52

Post by thaumasiotes »

dragonmum wrote: post #47
evanpw wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides ), the suicide rate at Foxconn during that period was lower than the overall Chinese or US suicide rate.

> the suicide rate at Foxconn during that period was lower than the overall Chinese or US suicide rate. Please allow me to change your opinion on this. The comparison being made there is the ( number of suicides at Foxconn / number of Foxconn employees ) vs number of suicides in China / population of China. At first glance, this looks like a valid comparison. But it is not. It is actually comparing apples to oranges.…

Why do you think the Foxconn suicide figures don't include all suicide attempts by employees?

Note that one of the attempts catalogued on Wikipedia states that one Mr. 刘 "threw himself from the sixth floor of a dormitory building". That would tend to imply that the statistics cover the workers while they're on or off the job -- the statistics are for suicide attempts on campus, but the employees live on campus.

And that would tend to imply that the appropriate comparison is indeed "how many people commit suicide anywhere?", not "how many people commit suicide in the office?".

Re: MIT's student newspaper criticizes MIT's convenience-based ethics

#53

Post by meri_dian »

saagarjha wrote: post #36
hueving wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quote in question is "slavery built everything we love". Explain how slavery built the Internet or triggered the space race.

No, the quote is "great things accomplished without great human suffering or slavery".

Yeah, that's just being dramatic too.

A tremendous amount of things in the past were created by skilled artisans, workers, farmers etc.

And in those cases where people had to do difficult work and suffered, that was because there were no other ways of accomplishing that work.

It's not that there was some cabal of evil leaders making life hard for the masses, it's that in order to accomplish things like mining and large scale public works without machines, hard manual labor was necessary.

Of course we could have just not done any of this, but then we would still be hunter gatherers.

Re: MIT's student newspaper criticizes MIT's convenience-based ethics

#54

Post by meri_dian »

prepend wrote: post #25

I just figured MIT was making “easy” ethical statements. In general the examples that MIT spoke out about had no opposing parties, had no impact to MIT, and no repercussions. So MIT didn’t really have to care or make a sacrifice to speak out for Dreamers or against Charlottesville and whatnot. But for anything that requires sacrifice like MBS not giving an endowment, they suck it up. This is what sucks as wishy washy…

"MIT is likely concerned with increasing its power. Thus is part of the establishment. Doing lots of great things, but part of the establishment."

Almost all organized groups exist in order to increase their power/influence. Those who try to destroy centers of power without either redistributing power or accumulating it for themselves are destroyers, nothing more.

Re: MIT's student newspaper criticizes MIT's convenience-based ethics

#55

Post by bobthechef »

cup wrote: post #51
darawk wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's unethical about collaborating with the military? We don't exist in a vacuum. American military hegemony has been an extremely powerful stabilizing force, post-WWII. This idea that it is unethical to build weapons is profoundly wrong, short sighted, and morally selfish. Not to overly pick on your comment, since you did say that it can be ethical, of course. But i've seen this sentiment that military work is une…

>an extremely powerful stabilizing force For the American empire. Less so for the rest of the world.

To be sure, there is plenty that the American empire can be criticized for. But if not the American empire, then whom? You think that power vacuum wouldn't be filled with something worse? Look at the contenders. The US, with all its flaws, is preferable. I am not endorsing American evils, but keep in mind that this kind of trivialization of geopolitical realities is unwise. It's better to focus on repairing what the US does wrong instead of suggesting that the entire empire must fall without thinking about the resulting clusterfuck that would ensue.

Re: MIT's student newspaper criticizes MIT's convenience-based ethics

#56

Post by darawk »

knuththetruth wrote: post #50
darawk wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's unethical about collaborating with the military? We don't exist in a vacuum. American military hegemony has been an extremely powerful stabilizing force, post-WWII. This idea that it is unethical to build weapons is profoundly wrong, short sighted, and morally selfish. Not to overly pick on your comment, since you did say that it can be ethical, of course. But i've seen this sentiment that military work is une…

I think as human consciousness, morality, and our understanding of history have evolved, the question we now ask is “Stability for whom?” Certainly not for Latin America during the Cold War, for example. Those who oppose collaborating with the military do so because “America military hegemony” has been used for all kinds of horrors, including recent events like the Iraq War. There’s nothing naive about not wanting to…

The fact that violence has happened does not mean that it isn't substantially less than it was. The decrease in rates of violence in modern history is profound, and has been discussed at length, here's a chart:

https://ourworldindata.org/slides/war-and-violence/#/6

Do you see how it goes down since 1950? The fact that the US has been involved in conflicts is not evidence that the US, on balance, creates more violence.

Does that mean the US military has made no mistakes? No, of course not. It's made plenty. But the world is a real place where decisions are made by people, and order is imposed by force. Someone is going to impose it. Surveying the landscape of world powers today, i'll take the US over anyone else, any and every day. And that is the only decision that matters. Talking about civilian deaths de-contextualized from the reality of the alternatives is exactly what I mean by 'naive'.

Re: MIT's student newspaper criticizes MIT's convenience-based ethics

#57

Post by bobthechef »

maxxxxx wrote: post #26
komali2 wrote: post #4

A lot of righteous, eloquent fury here. I had nearly forgotten about the foxconn suicides, and now that I think about it I don't remember anything really happening except nets being put up. Louis CK (RIP our opinion of him, but still) put it pretty well once, something along the lines of "slavery built everything we love. We just throw human death and suffering at a thing until it's done. There's no end to what you c…

Just look at all the beautiful castles and churches in Europe. They were mostly built on the backs of peasants. Or all the generals we revere who sent thousands or hundreds of thousands of people who had not much to gain from the war to their deaths.

> Just look at all the beautiful castles and churches in Europe. They were mostly built on the backs of peasants.

That's not accurate. Skilled workers built those.

> Or all the generals we revere who sent thousands or hundreds of thousands of people who had not much to gain from the war to their deaths.

Who exactly? That does not sound representative.

Re: MIT's student newspaper criticizes MIT's convenience-based ethics

#58

Post by mlazos »

tclancy wrote: post #41
valuearb wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything is relative but it’s much more dangerous than assembling iPhones. And it is one of the reasons why whenever Foxcon is hiring the applicant lines are so long.

Can we get a citation for these claims? Otherwise it feels a lot like something one says while rocking themselves to sleep at night. The whole thesis of "Sapiens" is exactly the opposite of this, that "progress" has been mainly a way of making life harder. The idea rural farming is somehow more dangerous than moving to a city and working long hours in a factory seems worthy of some numbers. If you basically learn, "D…

https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/04/the-most-dange...

This cites some numbers from the CDC, looks like in America farms are dangerous, can’t imagine what it’s like in China. It says farmers are 2x as likely as police and 5x as likely as firefighters to die on the job. My intuition is formed from knowing that logging is one of the most dangerous jobs in America, I kind of assumed farming wasn’t so far off.

Re: MIT's student newspaper criticizes MIT's convenience-based ethics

#59

Post by [deleted] »

dragonmum wrote: post #47
evanpw wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides ), the suicide rate at Foxconn during that period was lower than the overall Chinese or US suicide rate.

> the suicide rate at Foxconn during that period was lower than the overall Chinese or US suicide rate. Please allow me to change your opinion on this. The comparison being made there is the ( number of suicides at Foxconn / number of Foxconn employees ) vs number of suicides in China / population of China. At first glance, this looks like a valid comparison. But it is not. It is actually comparing apples to oranges.…

[deleted]

Re: MIT's student newspaper criticizes MIT's convenience-based ethics

#60

Post by rosege »

bobthechef wrote: post #57
maxxxxx wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just look at all the beautiful castles and churches in Europe. They were mostly built on the backs of peasants. Or all the generals we revere who sent thousands or hundreds of thousands of people who had not much to gain from the war to their deaths.

> Just look at all the beautiful castles and churches in Europe. They were mostly built on the backs of peasants. That's not accurate. Skilled workers built those. > Or all the generals we revere who sent thousands or hundreds of thousands of people who had not much to gain from the war to their deaths. Who exactly? That does not sound representative.

How about this one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_invasion_of_Russia
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