Live data from Hacker News

The tech sec­tor might be evil

tbray.org

151–160 of 233 posts

Re: The tech sec­tor might be evil

#151
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like the guy pulling the lever in the gas chamber.

There's a big difference though. A country without a solid defence sector is not really sovereign - it has to buy its weapons from other countries, which can cut the supply at any time, or just refuse to sell you current-gen tech altogether. There simply would be no USA without its defense sector - it is essential to its existence. Citizens of other countries (France, UK, Sweden etc.) understand that and you don't he…

Well, as a citizen of the UK who’s currently living in Sweden, I’ll provide the counterpoint that I refuse to work with any of our morally corrupt ‘defence’ industries and always bring it up as a red line with any company I interview at.

Re: The tech sec­tor might be evil

#153
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as that Twitter comment goes: I've always found Bray to be a bit too pleased with himself and not as clever as he would like to think he is. In that context, it's not a humorous bit of side eye but a tedious manifestation of his superiority complex.

He's also 100% correct, Twitter should be de-listed and treated as a utility. It's too much of a public good to get gobbled up by Google or whoever.

What makes Twitter "too much of a public good" in your opinion?

Re: The tech sec­tor might be evil

#154
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve seen quite a lot of suggestions on here that X shouldn’t be allowed to fail by the state, but I don’t really get it. Taking Twitter, it’s not like they are a railway or fuel company that if it shut down would cause massive disruption for many people and industries. And let’s not even begin to get into complications about the state (US government) owning them. How would that affect the privacy of users in other c…

Twitter is the medium about what's happening RIGHT NOW. In before you would open the TV or the radio to get information about what's happening right now but these days many people would look at Titter to get information about "RIGHT NOW". It could be mundane things about the lives of other people or it could be an event that's affecting large number of people. If something is happening, there would be reports of obse…

Before tv or radio, there were telegraphs, and before that, there were newspapers. News traveled at the speed of horses and the stamina of riders.

I would argue that the immediacy of information comes at the cost of deliberation and the moderation that encourages. I'm not sure the result is a net gain.

Re: The tech sec­tor might be evil

#155

Data Science is evil :) There are a couple of big "tech-is-evil" forces that I think are responsible for a good chunk of this sentiment. The first is advertising. Ads are slightly evil anyway. You're going to make us watch an ad during intermission, and that'll make us buy your brand of washing powder? Sounds kind of evil. It never sat right with people, but it funded free news and entertainment so... we're used to t…

It's far more efficient

I'm not sure we know this yet. They sell it like it is, and it seems like a good idea that makes sense, but at this point online ads perform in the same way as TV ads: They give us brand exposure. Most of the time I do an internet search I am not trying to purchase something, and I've never seen an ad that made me say as a result of that search "I need that" and make a purchase.

When I'm doing an internet search I am looking for information. When I want to buy something I go to Amazon and search their inventory. From everything I've seen on HN I'm not alone in this.

Re: The tech sec­tor might be evil

#156
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably it's a medium for unimportant things happening right now. anecdotal but I see maybe 1% useful tweets and 99% garbage.

The TV is also criticised for low quality content but still it is a fundamental medium and the way it is managed is regarded as a basic benchmark for democracies.

So of it isnt twitter. We can agree that we as a society need a social sounding board.

Re: The tech sec­tor might be evil

#158
post #86
post #2

Good summary of the current political climate around the tech sector. To be honest, this has been a long time coming -- I've been reading pieces with disdain for "Silicon Valley technocrats" for a while now. It is picking up pace now, though... and the EU has already fired quite a few shots. "I left out Twit­ter be­cause it’s not ac­tu­al­ly a com­pa­ny, it’s a dys­func­tion­al non-profit that ac­ci­den­tal­ly pro­vi…

If a company is not making money but there are lots of people trying to keep it around it probably means that the company is making money for these people but it's not reflected to the books directly or the payment is due for later time. It's bit of like building roads that on the books may look like unprofitable venture but the utility they provide makes possible for other businesses to flourish so the roads are kep…

Do I really want to see Twitter gone? Yes. I despise the trend of writing news articles where tweets are treated as sources, and most of the article is a series of tweets. One of the headlines I avoid ends with the phrase "and the Internet/Twitter goes ".

Twitter has only one logical paying customer that I can see: the media. The media immediately grabbed on to Twitter, pushing their handles on broadcasts. Back in 2007 I remember saying that CNN should have a rack with their name on it at Twitter's data center. Twitter has been trying to find a way to make advertising work, but if anyone wants to save Twitter (if it actually needs saving), it would be the media, maybe in the form of something like the AP, a service that everyone uses and pays into.

Re: The tech sec­tor might be evil

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And at the end of the day, your friends have their own moral codes, just like you do. If they feel that the work they do fits their code, then that's their decision. That's either vacuous or bullshit. If you mean that they do in fact decide what they do ... well, yeah? But that does not say anything about whether they should be doing it, nor whether I should agree with it, nor even whether I should try and do somet…

>If your moral code says that you should kill witches, that does not justify anything at all. Although I agree, I think it's worth asking "why not?" to introspect our own position. I'll take a stab at it from my perspective. We might say it doesn't justify anything because we have some moral code that we think everyone should abide by, and part of that might be "Don't go around killing people". Some people turn some…

> Although I agree, I think it's worth asking "why not?" to introspect our own position.

Well, sure, nothing wrong with asking the question, though the direct answer is pretty trivial: Because justification is by definition about reducing one claim to another (set of) claim(s), while "my moral code says I should kill witches" is simply a synonym for "I think I should kill witches", and as such just structurally is not a justification at all (as opposed to a bad or insufficient justification) when the question is "Why do you think you should kill witches?" because it just rephrases the same claim in different words.

> But at a level above law, what is the authority that determines that killing people is absolutely wrong and not just personally repugnant to the majority of the world's population?

That question doesn't really make sense to me. What does "absolute wrong" even mean? That seems like an undefined term to me. And why would this standard of an "absolute wrong" be something that we would have any use for?

> In other places and times laws might say, for instance, that to combat overpopulation we need to euthanize those under a certain threshold of contribution.

So?!

> To fight this, we either need to come to terms with the idea that morals and laws are just a matter of personal taste, in which case there's nothing really justifying our own position either and we're just fighting for our personal preference

That's both false and kindof self-contradictory.

A major part of justification is exactly about convincing other people, or you could say "fighting for our personal preference". In that regard, exactly that which convinces other people is the justification.

Another component of justification is about self-consistency and consistency with knowledge about the external world: Independently from trying to convince other people, you can try and find ways to falsify your moral claims, either by trying to find contradicting evidence in the external world, or by trying to identify internal inconsistencies within your moral framework. If you don't find any inconsistencies, that is a tentative justification for yourself.

> or we need some higher authority beyond ourselves/consensus/law that justifies our "don't kill people" position and condemns their "euthanize the parasites" position.

How would that solve anything? You just have pushed back the problem of justification to the question of why this particular authority should be the one to use as the standard, haven't you? I don't see how that would possibly be an alternative?!

> There can be no definition of moral truth within the system of morality. We need some external system to define moral truth.

That seems like a category mistake to me?! Why is moral truth something that needs to be defined, let alone defined within itself, rather than just something that needs to be discovered, and formulated as tentative conclusions subject to revision, as all empirical discovery is?

Re: The tech sec­tor might be evil

#160
post #21

Not to mention the many (ex) friends working for "defense" contractors. Ex because I really can't be friends with them any longer. Evil quotes deployed because calling it defense is a farce considering what the systems they are developing are used for.

If persons employer determines your friendship status with them, then maybe they are better off not being associated with you.

I suppose that is true. Then they won't have to be bothered by being asked to consider what the systems they are developing are used for. They won't have to rationalize that the many thousands of children who are killed as collateral damage when the systems they designed are used to attack terrorists in far away lands are a justifiable cost of maintaining the American way of life.
Post reply on HN