I worked at Google and frequently found myself acting in this capacity. I think I did well at it and was explicitly promoted for doing so. At the time I admired the way the company walked the walk in that regard.
Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors
41–50 of 225 posts
Re: Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors
#42What I object to is mass media and political activists trying to shame or force me to agree with their idea of "ethics" and political positions. I'll decide that for myself thank you very much. When you see activists making noise you can bet there are plenty of people who disagree with them. Unfortunately when you have outlets like the New York Times and mobs of Twitter journalists adding fuel to the fire (for one side of the debate only), speaking out for what you believe becomes incredibly dangerous if you don't go with the mainstream message.
So yeah, I object to everything this article says and stands for. Sadly I can't do that under my real name because I need to keep my job.
Re: Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors
#43Tech needs fewer conscientious objectors, not more. These people rarely know anything about what they're protesting, and resort fearmongering and populism to get what they want without even attempting to resolve things civilly. The most recent example is Google's AI ethics council debacle. Activist employees were so stubborn that they can't won't even let people have a discussion about AI ethics because one of them h…
> Half the authors of the American Constitution thought that slavery should be legal, but they managed draft the foundation of modern day democracy anyways. This is a story of democracy happening in spite of the founding fathers, not because of the founding fathers. It was, as you may know, a long (multiple centuries) and bloody (a pretty big war, plus lots of extrajudicial lynchings etc.) road from what they drafted…
Are you claiming the U.S. founding fathers had an adversarial role in establishing democracy?
Re: Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors
#44It's worth remembering that most of the directly attributable harm we associate with tech was created by small entities like the NSO Group and Cambridge Analytica. Instead of conscientious objectors applying pressure to large companies, it might be better for tech employees who come across small companies doing shady activities to report them. Many times, these smaller firms are more susceptible to pressure anyways,…
Being smaller, though, those companies can simply be up front about what they do during recruiting and people who don't like it won't sign up for them. Succinctly, prudes don't work in porn.
Is there a name for this phenomenon in general? Your phrasing is quite clear but apparently novel, and I think it happens a lot - anti-war clergy don't apply to be military chaplains, so soldiers and commanders hear biased opinions of whether their work is incompatible with their religion compared to civilians of the same faith; people who don't think self-driving cars are a good goal tend not to apply for self-driving car companies; people who think on-prem is better than public cloud tend not to apply for companies that are all public cloud; a company that is known for a certain work culture will tend to get applications who don't think that culture is hostile; etc.
Re: Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do people actually care about privacy or data collection these days, though? It's not clear that most do - see the amount of people who freely interact on Facebook, even though they surely must be aware that everything on that site will ultimately be something that Facebook knows about. Google just doesn't seem very different by that standard.
No, the only place I see the kind of rabid hatred of Google and Facebook for their data collection practices are here on HN. Of course these people want their services, actually expect them for free, continuously at the same standard. They just don't want to be tracked, don't want to pay for them, don't want to be advertised too and don't have any real solutions on how they would be paid for other than some handwavin…
>> don't want to be advertised too
Most people probably don't mind seeing advertisements. It's just completely ridiculous that Google or FB think they need to track individuals in order to provide targeted advertising.
If someone searches for 'football', then just show a fucking ad that is relevant to 'football' along with the search results.
Re: Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors
#46Discussions about ethical, privacy, surveillance issues often get hand waved and diluted here. See yesterday's thread on Google's retaliation as an example. We need a diversity of communities that can represent the the software industry in more dimensions than the VC funded side of things, growth hacking and the singular focus on success that are often in heavy conflict with any kind of value dimension and ultimately…
> Discussions about ethical, privacy, surveillance issues get hand waved and diluted here. Do they? I tend to find that Hacker News often has a lot of discussion of ethics, especially with respect to technology.
Entirely one-sided discussion (to put it kindly), with dissenters finding their comments invisible. For as good as the discussion around here usually is, there are some topics that even HN cannot have an open discussion on, and that happens to be one of them.
Try an experiment: Argue in a thread that Facebook/Google/etc. are anything less than mustache-twirling-villian levels of evil, or that the people that work for those companies sometimes make actual human mistakes.
Re: Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors
#47Tech needs fewer conscientious objectors, not more. These people rarely know anything about what they're protesting, and resort fearmongering and populism to get what they want without even attempting to resolve things civilly. The most recent example is Google's AI ethics council debacle. Activist employees were so stubborn that they can't won't even let people have a discussion about AI ethics because one of them h…
> Half the authors of the American Constitution thought that slavery should be legal, but they managed draft the foundation of modern day democracy anyways. This is a story of democracy happening in spite of the founding fathers, not because of the founding fathers. It was, as you may know, a long (multiple centuries) and bloody (a pretty big war, plus lots of extrajudicial lynchings etc.) road from what they drafted…
It's easy to criticize someone when you're not the doing the work. The world was a lot more racist a few centuries ago, so considering what they had to work with, the founding fathers did well. The alternative is that there still would have been civil war, and slavery could have continued to this day.
Re: Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors
#48Tech has had many conscientious objectors, I've watched them come and go over the decades. Most of them drive trucks now. A few lucky ones became artists or writers, but mostly a lot of bad outcomes. One of these failed truck drivers even makes deliveries to the house of the person who forced him out sometimes, a fact which he loves laughing about.
>> the person who forced him out
Worth noting that probably everyone here has seen something like this happen. Not sure if it is specific to tech, but some of the egos and pathologies are extreme.
Re: Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors
#49This article is premised on the idea that basically everything the Chinese government does is unethical, which is debatable. For one, the Chinese government is largely supported by its population. There might actually be engineers working on Dragonfly who do not believe the project is unethical. It's not that black and white...
Re: Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors
#50This article is premised on the idea that basically everything the Chinese government does is unethical, which is debatable. For one, the Chinese government is largely supported by its population. There might actually be engineers working on Dragonfly who do not believe the project is unethical. It's not that black and white...
How would one know if the Chinese government was supported by the population or not, given that anyone expressing a contrary opinion is likely to be killed?