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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

#241

Post by Natsu »

JoshMnem wrote: post #205
mmrezaie wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the whole point of IQ test is being stable independent of age.

It seems like a goal of IQ is to assign a single, unchanging score to someone's cognitive ability, but it is a severely flawed concept. The test should not be called "intelligence quotient" but something like "cognitive battery" instead. You don't have an IQ. It's a test that you take that can provide some useful information, but it isn't a fixed score, and "intelligence" (a word that is too ambiguous to use without…

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=Nfg0hfrQMFM

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

#242

Post by sametmax »

raverbashing wrote: post #240
sametmax wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are capable of building the most powerful weapon on earth, you are capable of guessing it will be used on something else than your current designated target, later. But they didn't think about that. They don't mention that they thought that they were working on something that could literally end humanity. And the thing is, we didn't even use the bomb to win against the Nazi. That the bomb was a good decision o…

> If you are capable of building the most powerful weapon on earth, you are capable of guessing it will be used on something else than your current designated target, later. Yes, however the point is moot if your adversary hits you with it before you are finished. Pacifists get shot first.

You are creating a false dichotomy, between pacifism and the use of a doomsday weapon. There are other options. And we actually won against the nazi without using the bomb.

Now given the cold war event, I can't say for sure if the bomb was a good or a bad thing.

But's saying "we had no choice" is a really dangerous way of putting things.

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

#243

Post by sametmax »

njarboe wrote: post #173
sametmax wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are capable of building the most powerful weapon on earth, you are capable of guessing it will be used on something else than your current designated target, later. But they didn't think about that. They don't mention that they thought that they were working on something that could literally end humanity. And the thing is, we didn't even use the bomb to win against the Nazi. That the bomb was a good decision o…

Oppenheimer recalling the Trinity test: It brought to mind words from the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I'm sure those scientists thought about it and discussed it among themselves, but they were in a super top secret lab in the middle of nowhere. Not much opportunity to leave an historical record of what they thought (letters highly censored, etc).

The Feynman biography cover in length the what happened, but it doesn't mention much debate about this.

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

#244

Post by sametmax »

bronson wrote: post #212
mrec wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And we are talking about brilliant minds with very positive personalities. Do you think "very positive personalities" were a plus in this case? Obviously you don't want homicidal sociopaths on the team, but someone whose first thought was "What's the worst possible thing that could happen here?" might have come in handy.

The worst possible thing that could happen here was the Germans create the bomb first.

But we didn't use the bomb to win against the nazi.

And saying having the bomb is the only way to counter the enemy building one is excluding the search of any other possible solution.

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

#245

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

sametmax wrote: post #101
alxlaz wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feynman's own country, though, was at war; when he was recruited into the team that would eventually work on the Manhattan project, the Pearl Harbour attack had already taken place and irrevocably wounded and scarred the American public consciousness. Many other members of the Manhattan project were from countries or communities that had suffered tremendously at the hands of the Axis' power. War in Europe had been ra…

You can replace facebook with google, apple, ms or amazon and you have the same picture though. And they got the best projects and the most money. Yet when I said to my relatives, 5 years ago, that I refused an interview from google and facebook, they questioned my sanity. I don't pretend to have the moral high ground here, as i made enought bad things in my life, but this kind of pondering work opportunities doesn't…

> I refused an interview from google and facebook, they questioned my sanity.

You were prematurely anti-facist.

(It's an old phrase: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/premature_antifascist )

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

#246

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

ballooney wrote: post #204
IAmEveryone wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” —- J. Robert Oppenheimer, after watching the first test

"Sometimes someone confesses a sin in order to take credit for it." -- J. von Neumann, about Oppenheimer

Doubleplusgood, speaking as a bit of a quotation hound who hadn't come across that one. There's a whiff of La Rochefoucauld to it, too.

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

#247

Post by newscracker »

I have wondered for a long time why Facebook employees were even around. It's not like the Cambridge Analytica scandal was the first time an ethically problematic issue had happened because of the way Facebook was designed to work. The people working on the platform created all these issues in some way or another (due to not understanding the implications or management direction).

My guess is that employees of Facebook mostly stay for the money, with a second reason being for some kind of exposure on working on things on "planet scale". I find it difficult to understand anyone being fine with Facebook's ethics all these years and then changing their minds now. It is quite weird.

Facebook is a soulless company. If you're a Facebook employee and haven't understood that yet, I cannot even sympathize with you (while being frustrated and worried about the implications for billions of humans).

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

#248

Post by newscracker »

rm999 wrote: post #153
rout39574 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. My basis is the conversations I had when I interviewed there. They did not extend an offer, so read what you will into my own biases. :) But a repeated theme of the conversations was me trying to get inside their heads: I said: "Your job is to figure out when I'm going to be making a decision, purchase or whatever else, and make sure that your advertisers' message is in front of my eyes just as it's occur…

I'm not one to normally defend Facebook, but I disagree. Advertising was not prioritized for a huge chunk of Facebook's history, so I'd argue it's not part of their core ethos (it's a necessary evil, if you will). While a lot of their more recent product decisions have been made around revenue generation, I don't think that's what keeps their leadership up at night. Keeping a monopoly on user attention (euphemism is…

> Advertising was not prioritized for a huge chunk of Facebook's history, so I'd argue it's not part of their core ethos (it's a necessary evil, if you will).

Perhaps it was not prioritized because a certain amount of scale, in terms of active members, is required to be very successful (to the extent of getting to "rule the world" kind of level)? Many companies start with fewer user hostile items until they reach a massive scale so as to protect their turf from competitors who may use that against them as well as to keep people coming back to the platform often and for long durations.

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

#249

Post by JoshMnem »

Natsu wrote: post #241
JoshMnem wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like a goal of IQ is to assign a single, unchanging score to someone's cognitive ability, but it is a severely flawed concept. The test should not be called "intelligence quotient" but something like "cognitive battery" instead. You don't have an IQ. It's a test that you take that can provide some useful information, but it isn't a fixed score, and "intelligence" (a word that is too ambiguous to use without…

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.

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

#250

Post by ascendantlogic »

saagarjha wrote: post #52
ascendantlogic wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because there are plenty of sociopaths in positions of power at companies all over the world that would probably gladly hire skilled coders that either have no moral compass or are fine with their moral compass spinning wildly while they cash their paychecks?

> there are plenty of sociopaths I think that's too strong of a word. It doesn't take a "sociopath" for a company to get to a bad place; merely the efforts of many engineers each doing something slightly immoral. Hopefully there are less of these now that they see what can happen to a company where such engineers work.

as you rise up the chain and the decision-making power of the people in question goes up I feel the sociopath label starts to stick.
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