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

thetech.com

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

#81

Post by MartinCron »

TallGuyShort wrote: post #80
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…

I must have missed some intersection between pop culture and some political bubble. What happened to our opinion of Louis CK?

Sexual harassment. Self admitted. Ugly stuff.

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

#82

Post by tempagain567i »

temporama wrote: post #7

Mbs is not trying to make himself look like a positive transformative figure, he actually is one. The war in Yemen is equally the fault of Saudi Arabia and Iran but I don't hear anyone calling for sanctions on Iran. I am astounded that such ignorance could come from one of the worlds pillars of higher education. Consolidation of power such as that recently performed by mbs is routine and it was done in a very humane…

Can dang or someone please unflag my comment? I haven't violated any guidelines and it's important that an opinion be heard that goes against the dominant narrative.

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

#83

Post by maxxxxx »

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.

"That's not accurate. Skilled workers built those."

The skilled workers did the difficult parts. Getting the materials to the construction site and other (often dangerous) tasks were done either by children or peasants that had either been forced or attracted by false promises. In addition the churches and kings often didn't pay the promised money. Just read some history books. The top guys always wanted to keep as much to themselves as they could. No difference to now. They could be even greedier back then because the little guy had no rights.

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

#84

Post by whatshisface »

fatjokes wrote: post #73
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…

That's exactly what I meant when I said it's nothing to be ashamed of, somebody's gotta do it. Just don't kid yourself that it makes you ethical. Sure, you could argue that you're "better than the other guy" or "they started it", but that's a pretty low bar. It just means you're both unethical.

Combining unethical and necessary defeats the point of identifying some things as unethical: if you're going to do them anyways, why bother calling them wrong? The motivation behind bringing ethics into the workplace is that broader human interests are that engineers and other front-liners (operators, doctors, technicians, soldiers) should refuse to do things that are excessively bad. If you think they should just suck it up and get the job done, then don't bin the job you want them to do in with other things that they clearly shouldn't.

It needs to be considered acceptable to tell your boss no on ethical grounds.

To make this concrete, we want there to be one bin for "putting live viral payloads in to vaccines destined for a foreign country," and another bin for "annoying shoppers with eye-level advertisements," and maybe another bin for "improving the efficiency of infrastructure." Ideally, irrespective of where the profit motives lied it would be impossible to recruit anybody for sufficiently nefarious purposes, with the recruitment difficulty scaling with how much harm they knew they were going to do to the world.

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

#85

Post by Donald »

varenc wrote: post #68
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…

Can you elaborate on MIT's problems with sexual assault? That's news to me. If true, I'm pretty sad to hear about this. As an aging alum, MIT is still a place dear to my heart but over time it feels like the institute I remember is slipping away... (or I'm just becoming more aware of reality) (also not clear if you're referring to MIT or some other 'well respected engineering school').

Is MIT '09 really an aging alum?

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

#87

Post by skookumchuck »

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…

> slavery built everything we love

Not at all. The repudiation of slavery built everything we love. The Confederacy went to war with the Union to protect its failing economy. Their loss in the Civil War resulted in the utter destruction of the slave economy and what it produced.

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

#88

Post by tempagain567i »

I must re-iterate my opinion here because of flagging abuse. In the article, mbs's consolidation of power is criticised. This is naive and incorrect. Mbs is in fact a positive force for progress and reform. Detracting him only serves to aid the people of sa and the religious bodies of sa all of whom wish to remain cemented within the traditional and brutal interpretations of the Koran that MIT seems to dislike so much. The rebels and Iran are just as responsible for the innocent deaths as sa and us are. This is difficult to explain in such short form but it is true and if you disagree then you can tell me why instead of flagging my comment. This way I can promptly respond to you and our disagreement can be settled. It's very important for non-mainstream narratives to be heard, especially when they are correct as in this case.

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

#89

Post by lopmotr »

hokus wrote: post #63
thaumasiotes wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Its much simpler actually. If you have a bunch of companies trying to keep their shit together while barely able to make their product and then someone kills himself simple because the situation is no longer worth living - then it is a sad thing. If the product is one of the most successful things in human history the suicide is a design goal. If we don't stand up to it and at least voice our objection we will all be…

This contains a common logical error in most of the poor-people-suffer-to-serve-us-rich-people arguments. That is to ignore anyone whose suffering has no causal link from us. For example, an isolated tribesman may die from an easily treatable disease because he has no medicine and we don't blame rich people for that. But if he moves to town to earn money for medicine and then dies in a construction site accident, we blame ourselves for causing the construction site to exist. We forget that he may have been in greater danger or suffering more before getting involved with us.

It applies to low wages for illegal immigrants too. Once they're in our country, we feel responsible for them. Before they got here, we don't care at all how little they earn. Some people even go so far as to want to kick them out to save them from earning low wages. Really it just saves us the guilt but makes it worse for the individual.

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

#90

Post by skookumchuck »

goldenkey wrote: post #44
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.

Sorry to dissapoint but see below: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun#Slave_labor "More people died building the V-2 rockets than were killed by it as a weapon" ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun#NASA_career "American authorities then chose to use von Braun and his German team's experience with missiles to create an orbital launch vehicle. Wernher von Braun had such an idea originally pr…

The production of the V2 was done by slave labor, but the research and development of it was not. As far as I can tell there were no slaves at Peenemunde.
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