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Silicon Valley Has an Empathy Vacuum

newyorker.com

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Re: Silicon Valley Has an Empathy Vacuum

#131

Post by chiefalchemist »

pmoriarty wrote: post #118
teilo wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you fail to comprehend is that your contemptuous attitude is the very thing that isn't working anymore. In fact, the more you crank up the rhetoric, the more you will be ignored. If this election has taught us anything, it is that if we continually scream at and belittle adults, they will eventually ignore us. Every epithet, every word of shame-speak will then fall on deaf ears. We will find ourselves in the ver…

"What you fail to comprehend is that your contemptuous attitude is the very thing that isn't working anymore." You must be kidding me. What do you think Trump himself was doing? He is the epitome of an obnoxious screaming asshole, and he won! His approach clearly works. It's a pity that the Democrats didn't have an anti-Trump on their side. Maybe he could have been the kryptonite that cost Trump the election. As it w…

There's a difference between uppity (over educated Elitist Left) snob and an orange NYC asshole.

Re: Silicon Valley Has an Empathy Vacuum

#133

Post by grzm »

Mao_Zedang wrote: post #132

It is disgusting that this newyorker article is flagged. HN has really jumped the shark, if this isnt on topic nothing is.

There's been a lot of that going around the past couple of months. You feel pretty strongly about it. What makes this submission particularly on topic? Note that even though it was flagged (but not killed), it's garnered 129 comments so far. Reviewing the discussion, what in particular do you find substantive and civil about it? Why do you think users flagged this submission?

Re: Silicon Valley Has an Empathy Vacuum

#134

Post by allemagne »

hga wrote: post #76
allemagne wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Everybody worked for Trump. He couldn’t lose." Hillary comfortably won the popular vote, and something like 100,000 voters in strategic states were what swung the election to Trump. "He couldn't lose" is a lot different from "he could win", and is a ridiculously strong claim that nobody who believes in evidence and logic-based reasoning would have made previous to Nov. 9th.

Hillary comfortably won the popular vote Which is Not Even Wrong, for it implies the unknowable counterfactual that if Trump had been running a campaign for the popular vote, he wouldn't have won that. E.g. lots of people don't bother to vote when they're in "enemy territory" and they know their vote won't count for anything. You can't take a situation based on X strategy, and then change the rules to Y strategy afte…

Are you arguing that there's no way Trump could have lost and there was incontrovertible evidence of that prior to election day or that Clinton did not win the popular vote by a wide margin? That's the extent of what I've contended here.

I don't care to discuss abstract hypotheticals, or whether this means Trump is wonderful or not.

Unless you're disputing in a roundabout way what I've presented there's no reason to be engaging in whatever you're doing.

Re: Silicon Valley Has an Empathy Vacuum

#135

Post by allemagne »

talmand wrote: post #52
allemagne wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Everybody worked for Trump. He couldn’t lose." Hillary comfortably won the popular vote, and something like 100,000 voters in strategic states were what swung the election to Trump. "He couldn't lose" is a lot different from "he could win", and is a ridiculously strong claim that nobody who believes in evidence and logic-based reasoning would have made previous to Nov. 9th.

And voters in two or three counties gave Clinton the popular vote.

Would that mean there was no way Trump could have lost? No.

It is unclear how using counties as a metric is useful. It would be quite significant if Clinton won the equivalent of the population of LA county over Trump.

Re: Silicon Valley Has an Empathy Vacuum

#136

Post by mercer »

rescripting wrote: post #125
mercer wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another option would be to commit to setting aside some of the profits for a fund of some kind to address the externalities in whichever way seems most effective at reducing the negative effects. I'm not saying I expect a company to do this, but why can it not be considered an option?

Because in a competitive marketplace the company that doesn't do that has an edge over one that does. I don't think it's Silicon Valley that lacks empathy, I think it's the system that rewards profits and growth over anything else...

We're still humans within this system, and there are a number of examples of companies that do things differently and stay in business.

To be clear, I agree with what you're saying as an observation of how things work much of the time. I also don't think Silicon Valley is any better or worse than the rest of the 'system' (honestly I don't know).

But generally speaking I'm inclined to believe that 'this is just how things are' is one of the main reason why things don't change. Things don't have to be the way they are and it takes individuals working within (as well as outside) the systems that are in place to change this.

Re: Silicon Valley Has an Empathy Vacuum

#137

Post by talideon »

robbrown451 wrote: post #93
talideon wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't see how the things he discusses have to do with empathy in Silicon Valley. Driverless trucks, for instance, have nothing to do with empathy and a lot to do with simple economics. Someone is going to build them if they can make a buck doing it, and empathy isn't going to somehow stop that. But whether or not you consider what happens to the people who used to drive those trucks and what they, their families,…

Ok, tell me what good it is going to do to consider those things. Are you suggesting that if we all collectively decide that building such things hurts people, no one will build them? And that such an idea is remotely realistic?

> Ok, tell me what good it is going to do to consider those things.

Well, assuming you're American, you can look at the decline of Detroit to see what happens when you don't think of these things. Or Wales and the North of England, if you're from the UK.

> Are you suggesting that if we all collectively decide that building such things hurts people, no one will build them?

No, I'm suggesting that we consider the implications of what we're creating and try to ensure that, even as we build them, we ensure that we don't damage whole swathes of society in doing so. But that's just me, and it might just be that I'm a bleeding heart. All progress comes with its benefits and its downsides, and if you think rendering people unemployed without giving them an alternative means of supporting themselves is OK and/or shouldn't be part of the calculus of how progress is made, then that's your decision.

Re: Silicon Valley Has an Empathy Vacuum

#138

Post by talmand »

allemagne wrote: post #135
talmand wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And voters in two or three counties gave Clinton the popular vote.

Would that mean there was no way Trump could have lost? No. It is unclear how using counties as a metric is useful. It would be quite significant if Clinton won the equivalent of the population of LA county over Trump.

>> It is unclear how using counties as a metric is useful.

It's about as useful as referring to the popular vote in a contest that clearly established beforehand that it would not be considered.

Re: Silicon Valley Has an Empathy Vacuum

#139

Post by Bartweiss »

pmoriarty wrote: post #40
atemerev wrote: post #4

People had voted for Trump not because of lack of empathy, but because they were fed up with being patronized, negged, treated like children, observed, modeled and disempowered, belittled and generally discounted. And this article is not helping it.

And why were they patronized and treated like children again? Oh, perhaps it was because they claimed Obama wasn't born in the US. Or because they denied global warming. Or because they hate Mexicans and Muslims. In short, because they bought in to the steaming pile of bullshit that is the right wing media echo chamber. When they think like children, talk like children, and act like children, they shouldn't be surpri…

You know what children can't do? Elect another child as the goddamn president. If they could, we'd be well-advised to treat them differently.

Democracies aren't run by whoever knows the most, they're run by whoever wins the election. (Record voter split by education this time, for all that achieved.) We just spent an entire year proving, in the most painful way possible, that treating voters like children doesn't work no matter how much you think of them that way.

You're writing about how the right "shouldn't be surprised" as though you're coming from a position of power, educating people who made bad choices. But we (we, even if I hate these tactics) lost. Lost the White House, lost the Senate, lost the House. 25 states with Republican trifectas, 6 with Democratic ones. (Won the popular vote, fine, San Francisco and New York City are crowded but they won't rule anything unless the secede.) We lost ground with minorities, lost ground with young people, lost ground with women - and this against Trump!

In all sincerity: what are you hoping for by treating people like children? What do you expect will happen, if not what just happened?

Re: Silicon Valley Has an Empathy Vacuum

#140

Post by allemagne »

talmand wrote: post #138
allemagne wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would that mean there was no way Trump could have lost? No. It is unclear how using counties as a metric is useful. It would be quite significant if Clinton won the equivalent of the population of LA county over Trump.

>> It is unclear how using counties as a metric is useful. It's about as useful as referring to the popular vote in a contest that clearly established beforehand that it would not be considered.

The popular vote is a relevant example of how the contest was not inevitable. More people voted for Hillary than for Trump... that's not what wins the election, but it's not meaningless to a democratic society. Counties, however, are completely arbitrary. Should winning the least populous 51% of counties matter to anyone?

You're using it as a convenient way to sidestep the obvious implication of losing the popular vote.

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