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Hackers vs. suits: Why nerds become leakers

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Hackers vs. suits: Why nerds become leakers

#41

Post by mseebach »

rayiner wrote: post #27

Hackers tend to be passive, arm-chair, activists. Twittering on the internet and feeding outrage to each other, but never actually getting engaged to solve real issues. How many hackers do you know that have dedicated their entire careers to causes in the public service? In comparison, I look around at my friends who majored in liberal arts. I know a double-digit number of people who turned down six figure jobs to go…

So, being moral and having self-interest isn't mutually exclusive.

There's a false dichotomy between seeking to enrich yourself and doing good for others (one that typically tacitly presumes the fixed pie fallacy). Division of labour still applies: If you're a good software engineer, but suck at politics and want to influence policy, go work on some ads, make a ton of money and give (some of) it to a think tank or activism group that is good at politics. They'll probably achieve more than you'd ever do, waitressing on the side, looking for a rare opportunity to get a non-profit job. And you get to have a lunch budget and an office with a view at the same time.

Re: Hackers vs. suits: Why nerds become leakers

#42

Post by jbooth »

mseebach wrote: post #36
rayiner wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article isn't about whether hackers are more or less effective, as a group, at causes in the public service. It's about aggrandizing their moral character. Who has a greater moral character? Someone who puts all their effort into the public service with the skills they have, or someone who has some positive benefit on the public merely incident to his lucrative job? Inextricable from this evaluation is the fact t…

> Inextricable from this evaluation is the fact that the guy who saved 1% of the electricity used at Facebook could probably have a tremendously larger impact on the environment if he dedicated his skills entirely to the public service. That's not "fact". At all. Some people certainly have great impact in public service, but most are pushing paper around and navigating bureaucracy and a brand of office politics unhea…

I know this is great mythology, but if those people ever existed in the first place, they've been pushed out over the last 15 years of effective budget cuts (compared to costs of employment like healthcare) in most domestic public service roles.

It kills me to see people who get free sodas and 150k while commenting on Hacker News presume that a workplace they've never been is some wasteful USSR-esque bureaucracy. Yes, inefficiency scales with organization size but most local depts are pretty small, and local, state and domestic federal depts have been under budget pressure and salary freezes for years while still having the same job to do.

If you're looking for a corporate mess with no cost accountability, look at the big government contractors.

Re: Hackers vs. suits: Why nerds become leakers

#43

Post by randallsquared »

rayiner wrote: post #33
lmm wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In comparison, I look around at my friends who majored in liberal arts. I know a double-digit number of people who turned down six figure jobs to go into public service for a fraction of the money. One of my best friends wants to save the environment. The summer after our second year of school, I went to go intern at a firm, which gave me a $1k/month lunch budget and a guaranteed job after graduation, while she went…

The article isn't about whether hackers are more or less effective, as a group, at causes in the public service. It's about aggrandizing their moral character. Who has a greater moral character? Someone who puts all their effort into the public service with the skills they have, or someone who has some positive benefit on the public merely incident to his lucrative job? Inextricable from this evaluation is the fact t…

> Inextricable from this evaluation is the fact that the guy who saved 1% of the electricity used at Facebook could probably have a tremendously larger impact on the environment if he dedicated his skills entirely to the public service.

That's not at all clear. I would expect that work in public service is far more likely to go off the rails due to perverse incentives, so that such a worker would find themselves working very hard at something that doesn't create much value. One major benefit to working in a lucrative job is that you have a direct measurement of how much good you're doing, since someone is willing to voluntarily part with your high salary to have you do it. Maybe geeks are just better at personal cost-benefit analysis than liberal arts folk. ;)

Re: Hackers vs. suits: Why nerds become leakers

#44

Post by ciex »

lmm wrote: post #30
rayiner wrote: post #27

Hackers tend to be passive, arm-chair, activists. Twittering on the internet and feeding outrage to each other, but never actually getting engaged to solve real issues. How many hackers do you know that have dedicated their entire careers to causes in the public service? In comparison, I look around at my friends who majored in liberal arts. I know a double-digit number of people who turned down six figure jobs to go…

>In comparison, I look around at my friends who majored in liberal arts. I know a double-digit number of people who turned down six figure jobs to go into public service for a fraction of the money. One of my best friends wants to save the environment. The summer after our second year of school, I went to go intern at a firm, which gave me a $1k/month lunch budget and a guaranteed job after graduation, while she went…

Maybe you are prone to valueing the quantifiable and direct impact a hacker can make higher than the indirect and non-quantifiable impact of someone else. Just imagine the influence someone could have through a conversation with an influential politician at a dinner party. The aforementioned hacker might not have the rethorical abilities, broad academic background and social network to do this. Still, it could have finally had a much bigger impact on the environment. Of course such a conversation does not occur frequently, but I guess reducing Facebook's electricity usage by 1% doesn't either.

Re: Hackers vs. suits: Why nerds become leakers

#45

Post by jakejake »

rayiner wrote: post #27

Hackers tend to be passive, arm-chair, activists. Twittering on the internet and feeding outrage to each other, but never actually getting engaged to solve real issues. How many hackers do you know that have dedicated their entire careers to causes in the public service? In comparison, I look around at my friends who majored in liberal arts. I know a double-digit number of people who turned down six figure jobs to go…

It sounds totally believable that your friends are having trouble finding work. It doesn't sound very believable that they are turning down six figure jobs left and right, though. Unless you just meant that they chose a career path where there are no six figure jobs?

Re: Hackers vs. suits: Why nerds become leakers

#46

Post by dragonwriter »

toyg wrote: post #28
rayiner wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a bunch of egocentric, self-aggrandizing tripe. > are the first army in human history to be less concerned with the acquisition of power and control and more about giving that empowerment to the individuals we fight for. Everyone who calls to arms thinks that. Most radicals end up being more oppressive than the regimes they replaced. Forward progress has, much more often, come incrementally, from the U.S.'s very…

"Conservative revolutionary ideals"? "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" -- this was political and philosophical dynamite in the XVIII century, when kings and gods still reigned supreme over the whole world (in fact, it still is quite an incendi…

> this was political and philosophical dynamite in the XVIII century

No, it wasn't, at least not in England. It was propaganda directed at what were already well-established political norms in the England. Pretty much the whole of the declaration, from the statement of principles at the beginning to the detailed list of particular grievances, was directed at explaining why the upper class landholding gentlemen of England's North American colonies were so upset at the upper class landholding gentlemen of the British Government for not treating them in the way that decent upper class landholding British subjects expected to be treated by their colleagues in government.

Re: Hackers vs. suits: Why nerds become leakers

#47

Post by gyom »

chris_mahan wrote: post #25

"In the long tail of history just following orders is wrong." dang that is a nice quote.

It sounds nice, but when I think about what exactly is meant by "long tail" I can't come up with an answer that would be compatible with the idea of the "long tail" in statistics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail).

It does sounds better than just "in the long run, throughout history, just following orders is wrong". It seems like it's referring to people who are outliers and through which all the change is happening, but technically it's not really saying that. No ?

Re: Hackers vs. suits: Why nerds become leakers

#48

Post by bmoresbest55 »

jenius wrote: post #3

I've gotta agree with Appelbaum - this thesis is ridiculous and unsupported. There are tons of activists in many different fields, and there's nothing about being a computer programmer that makes you more likely to be an activist. Just because this guy cited a couple of activists who were also computer programmers is just not support enough -- if he really wanted a balanced review, he would have talked about any acti…

I would also have to agree with this. Hackers or technologists in general are simply a group of people that are not any more predisposed to activism. I know activist from many backgrounds and they all are at different levels of activism.

Hackers are seen in this light of activism because computer are just the newest frontier of unknown limits and boundaries. Also, a lot of information is shared through computers now, possibly more so than any other medium in the history of the world (large claim, I know).

This puts technology under a large microscope and therefore when a "hacker" comes out and says anything it is seen as extra important or highlighted more so than if it was not under the broad umbrella of technology.

This is not to downplay the seriousness of the NSA scandal. This is something that is unprecedented for everyone, not just hackers. Just happened to be a hacker that is at the center of it.

Re: Hackers vs. suits: Why nerds become leakers

#49

Post by lmm »

rayiner wrote: post #33
lmm wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In comparison, I look around at my friends who majored in liberal arts. I know a double-digit number of people who turned down six figure jobs to go into public service for a fraction of the money. One of my best friends wants to save the environment. The summer after our second year of school, I went to go intern at a firm, which gave me a $1k/month lunch budget and a guaranteed job after graduation, while she went…

The article isn't about whether hackers are more or less effective, as a group, at causes in the public service. It's about aggrandizing their moral character. Who has a greater moral character? Someone who puts all their effort into the public service with the skills they have, or someone who has some positive benefit on the public merely incident to his lucrative job? Inextricable from this evaluation is the fact t…

>Who has a greater moral character? Someone who puts all their effort into the public service with the skills they have, or someone who has some positive benefit on the public merely incident to his lucrative job?

Surely it's whoever achieved the best outcome, irrespective of how they achieved it.

>Inextricable from this evaluation is the fact that the guy who saved 1% of the electricity used at Facebook could probably have a tremendously larger impact on the environment if he dedicated his skills entirely to the public service.

Citation needed. There was an economist article here a few months ago on how the UN's world development goals have been achieved ahead of schedule, not because of well-meaning NGOs but simply because of cheap manufacturing in China. The great thing about working in for-profit industry is that the invisible hand eliminates inefficiencies. In the public and charitable sector the incentives are entirely backwards - good, efficient charities that solve the problems they were created in response to put themselves out of business, while inefficient, ineffective charities just grow bigger and bigger.

>Also, by your reasoning, Goldman Sachs (which donates like $250 million a year to public service causes) is a far greater force for good than the EFF (which has a budget of $3.5 million). Now, the EFF might be more efficient at doing good than Goldman's charities, but is it 70x more efficient?

That's true as far as it goes, but we'd expect a bigger organization to have more impact. It's probably fairer to consider some kind of "goodness factor" - amount of good done as a proportion of market cap or some such measure. But yes, Goldman does do a lot of good that largely goes unrecognized.

Re: Hackers vs. suits: Why nerds become leakers

#50

Post by TeMPOraL »

rayiner wrote: post #27

Hackers tend to be passive, arm-chair, activists. Twittering on the internet and feeding outrage to each other, but never actually getting engaged to solve real issues. How many hackers do you know that have dedicated their entire careers to causes in the public service? In comparison, I look around at my friends who majored in liberal arts. I know a double-digit number of people who turned down six figure jobs to go…

Marry her.

I'm only slightly joking. A couple of a hacker and a liberal-arts major seems like a good way to transfer ideas and understanding between the two communities.

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