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Facebook Employees Are Quitting or Switching Departments Over Ethical Concerns

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Re: Facebook Employees Are Quitting or Switching Departments Over Ethical Concerns

#251
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a difference as it were between, roughly speaking, stored knowledge and being able to figure things out on the fly, but multi-factor analysis says there's only one factor for being good at IQ tests, oddly enough. And every test of doing mental tasks we know how to create correlates strongly with any other test. There's a good explanation about how the tests work here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nfg0hfrQM…

I'm not saying that the tests are useless, just that they should be renamed, and culture should look at them a little differently.

I would agree with you if you're saying that they're not at all a measure of human worth. I don't get the 'rename' comment, though.

If we don't call one's skill at mental tasks 'intelligence', just how should we label it?

Re: Facebook Employees Are Quitting or Switching Departments Over Ethical Concerns

#252
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working for FB itself during this controversy won't tarnish your resume anyway.

I suppose there will always be work for sociopaths

Please don't.

> Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Facebook Employees Are Quitting or Switching Departments Over Ethical Concerns

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When was the last time the military defended anyone in this country from an external threat? WWII? edit I’m saying that deterrence and defense are different words with different meanings, and you used the word, “defend” somput down the goal posts.

Simply the existence of our military has kept us from being attacked. You're saying we don't need a military?

The existence of our nuclear arsenal does it without having to invade a country every decade or so. Are you saying we need more than 5K+ nukes to be secure?

Re: Facebook Employees Are Quitting or Switching Departments Over Ethical Concerns

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read the comments in reply to that unnecessarily verbose comment. The follow-up comments destroy the original comment quickly.

So what is your alternative solution? If it ends up with "someone else can have better weapons than me"...I think you may want to reconsider.

The alternative is the military can insource these jobs and change their policies so they can hire the people they need to do defense work instead of coopting organizations that do other sensitive work for the public.

Re: Facebook Employees Are Quitting or Switching Departments Over Ethical Concerns

#255

> Facebook engineers are quitting or trying to transfer to Instagram or WhatsApp I find trying to transfer into another product hilarious: it seems to me that they just don't want to have the stigma of working for "Facebook, the product", without really solving the issues working for "Facebook, the company".

And it'll be fun when stuff like this http://time.com/4793331/instagram-social-media-mental-health... starts getting more mainstream traction...

Re: Facebook Employees Are Quitting or Switching Departments Over Ethical Concerns

#256
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would working at Uber be a detractor on a resume? It's major company with assuredly hefty tech - regardless of the HR issues rampant, shouldn't the hire be based on merit not association?

If you work for someone that does a bad thing, you are helping them do the bad thing. You are actively making the bad thing happen, and by doing so, you are also doing a bad thing. I think Uber is a bad thing. If you work for Uber, you have helped create a bad thing. At that point, I do not trust your judgement, and I do not want to work with people whose judgement I do not trust.

Following your logic, then anyone who perhaps simply took an Uber to the interview should be off the list because they're providing revenue and therefore helping Uber do more of the Bad Thing....Uber clearly has an engineering staff still, and you can't tell me they're all Bad People doing Bad Things - that's unreasonable.

Should we bar military veterans from these development jobs because the Military Industrial Complex has a toxic culture of killing millions around the world for profit?

Re: Facebook Employees Are Quitting or Switching Departments Over Ethical Concerns

#257
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying that the tests are useless, just that they should be renamed, and culture should look at them a little differently.

I would agree with you if you're saying that they're not at all a measure of human worth. I don't get the 'rename' comment, though. If we don't call one's skill at mental tasks 'intelligence', just how should we label it?

"Intelligence" is poorly defined in most conversations. The nature of the word and concepts around it lead to problems, even for people who can score high on IQ tests.

It will take me a long time to write out my thoughts completely, but I plan to do it at some point.

Re: Facebook Employees Are Quitting or Switching Departments Over Ethical Concerns

#258
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would agree with you if you're saying that they're not at all a measure of human worth. I don't get the 'rename' comment, though. If we don't call one's skill at mental tasks 'intelligence', just how should we label it?

"Intelligence" is poorly defined in most conversations. The nature of the word and concepts around it lead to problems, even for people who can score high on IQ tests. It will take me a long time to write out my thoughts completely, but I plan to do it at some point.

Mostly it seems to be quick and adaptable thinking, if I understand the test results right. The colloquial usage is all over the place, as usual, but the tests strongly correlate with things like being able to attain advanced education and ability to be successful. Some of it appears to be inherent, whether it's clock speed/RAM equivalent for our brains or what, because it survives twins raised in completely different homes (including large economic differences). That said, there are certainly environmental effects, too, especially in the negative direction (e.g. lead exposure).
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