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A Dishonest, Indifferent, and Toxic Culture

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Re: A Dishonest, Indifferent, and Toxic Culture

#101

Post by moksly »

feralimal wrote: post #61
tobmlt wrote: post #19

I want to express sympathies in a particular way: When I had a job I didn’t want, in a city i didn’t want, no kids, no wife, and prospects abounding, it was easy to speak truth to power. I did it, and I was right technically, businesswise, and morally. What a win...(?) Now, I have my dream job, my dream location, my own damn house, and my family. -Whole thing feels like a dream I might wake up from if I am not carefu…

"I was right technically, businesswise, and morally." ... and in third place, morality. And now lost in the distance. I'm not a Christian, but this is worth considering by everyone: "For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his soul? Or what will a man give as an exchange for his soul?"

There is an old punk saying. The guilty don’t feel guilty, they learn not to.

Re: A Dishonest, Indifferent, and Toxic Culture

#102

Post by [deleted] »

atoav wrote: post #60
tobmlt wrote: post #19

I want to express sympathies in a particular way: When I had a job I didn’t want, in a city i didn’t want, no kids, no wife, and prospects abounding, it was easy to speak truth to power. I did it, and I was right technically, businesswise, and morally. What a win...(?) Now, I have my dream job, my dream location, my own damn house, and my family. -Whole thing feels like a dream I might wake up from if I am not carefu…

Totally understandably so. However I think that it is also a matter of perception: If we view it as a matter of living the dream while some intrusion might endanger that dream, surely minimizing the damage done to the dream is a logical consequence. But what if the intrusion stops making your job a dream job? I was in a similar situation where a superior demanded that I breach the trust our users had in the privacy o…

[deleted]

Re: A Dishonest, Indifferent, and Toxic Culture

#105

Post by yowlingcat »

pm90 wrote: post #69
lixtra wrote: post #39

From the suicide note: > Considering that this will have an impact on my career in the future and my reputation in the area of Computer Architecture, my future life will be worse than death and I will be totally in a dilemma. Maybe we also need to change academic culture to allow people to confess academic fraud, receive punishment and than be forgiven and continue academic careers. Currently once you started, there…

I don’t think that’s a good idea. The analogy with financial debt is misleading: people go bankrupt even if they don’t do anything “wrong”, things don’t pan out, or disasters hit. For people that do commit financial crimes, they are prosecuted and face criminal punishment and often lose their ability to continue to be involved in finance. Academia doesn’t have that kind of strict laws, likely because academic fraud d…

> For people that do commit financial crimes, they are prosecuted and face criminal punishment and often lose their ability to continue to be involved in finance.

Wealthy white-collar criminals often only face minor fines and are able to keep operating. The industry perception of people who get caught (who are known to still be only a small percentage of those who commit them) is almost universally "they were stupid enough to get caught."

I wonder whether this is yet another tendril of the student loan debt bubble and the privatization of a public good (education) contributing to deep, structural rot in American society. Most of the quality academic talent gets picked off into the industry, where there are real opportunity costs for mis-execution, and a much more healthy and liquid market for labor supply and demand. Does that mean that maybe the only plausible end-state for academia is a market for lemons?

Re: A Dishonest, Indifferent, and Toxic Culture

#106

Post by DyslexicAtheist »

tobmlt wrote: post #19

I want to express sympathies in a particular way: When I had a job I didn’t want, in a city i didn’t want, no kids, no wife, and prospects abounding, it was easy to speak truth to power. I did it, and I was right technically, businesswise, and morally. What a win...(?) Now, I have my dream job, my dream location, my own damn house, and my family. -Whole thing feels like a dream I might wake up from if I am not carefu…

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair

Re: A Dishonest, Indifferent, and Toxic Culture

#107

Post by coldtea »

Don't let the Chinese name of the professor fool you. This happens all the time with Americans, Europeans, Chinese, Indian, etc professors and "peer" reviews.

It's just that usually there's no conscience to take it bad from the student, on the contrary, it's the thrill of being published that prevails.

Re: A Dishonest, Indifferent, and Toxic Culture

#108

Post by darkerside »

atoav wrote: post #60
tobmlt wrote: post #19

I want to express sympathies in a particular way: When I had a job I didn’t want, in a city i didn’t want, no kids, no wife, and prospects abounding, it was easy to speak truth to power. I did it, and I was right technically, businesswise, and morally. What a win...(?) Now, I have my dream job, my dream location, my own damn house, and my family. -Whole thing feels like a dream I might wake up from if I am not carefu…

Totally understandably so. However I think that it is also a matter of perception: If we view it as a matter of living the dream while some intrusion might endanger that dream, surely minimizing the damage done to the dream is a logical consequence. But what if the intrusion stops making your job a dream job? I was in a similar situation where a superior demanded that I breach the trust our users had in the privacy o…

It sounds like he didn't understand what he was asking for and was thankful for you informing him. Seems like a reasonable case, although maybe there's something about the initial demand that made it more of an intimidation tactic?

Re: A Dishonest, Indifferent, and Toxic Culture

#109

Post by coldtea »

feralimal wrote: post #61
tobmlt wrote: post #19

I want to express sympathies in a particular way: When I had a job I didn’t want, in a city i didn’t want, no kids, no wife, and prospects abounding, it was easy to speak truth to power. I did it, and I was right technically, businesswise, and morally. What a win...(?) Now, I have my dream job, my dream location, my own damn house, and my family. -Whole thing feels like a dream I might wake up from if I am not carefu…

"I was right technically, businesswise, and morally." ... and in third place, morality. And now lost in the distance. I'm not a Christian, but this is worth considering by everyone: "For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his soul? Or what will a man give as an exchange for his soul?"

>"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his soul?

It will profit them, well, the whole world. Duh!

(Yeah, I know what the Christian sentiment means. But it requires the belief, if not in soul, in some trancedental good, for people to care about "loss of soul" over "gaining the world". Which, alas, we don't have as much...)

Re: A Dishonest, Indifferent, and Toxic Culture

#110

Post by coldtea »

M277 wrote: post #99
lotsofpulp wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not a Christian, but this is worth considering by everyone: >"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his soul? Or what will a man give as an exchange for his soul?" This would only affect people who assume “they” have an immortal component, i.e. a soul.

Even if you don't subscribe to that belief, you still have something to lose -- conscience. Conscience doesn't really die overnight (and this is from my experience of living in a corrupt society), it's a death-by-a-thousand-cuts situation. The beginning is "Come on, everyone is doing it" and you can guess the end.

>Conscience doesn't really die overnight

Well, some are ruthless and competitive without coscience even as kids, and continue so...

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