FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord • Hacker News Board

Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord

#421

Post by luckylion » Fri, Sep 18, 2020, 8:28 AM UTC

4ggr0 wrote: post #419

luckylion wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such as ... food production? "But your food is consumed by literal fascists"... water supply? "Did you know that evil people also drink the water you are providing and hydrate their bodies so they can do more evil things?" For people who believe that everything is political, there are no projects with less moral ambiguity, it's just more or less openly visible.

What a weird example to pick... Food and water production has VERY big ethical issues. Palm oil, mass-slaughter of animals, deforestation, Nestle taking away water from locals, CO2 emmissions etc. So yes, there are problems in the food and water industry, but I don't really get what your point is? Should we just close our eyes, ears and mouths and say "fuck it, not my problem"?

> Palm oil, mass-slaughter of animals, deforestation, Nestle taking away water from locals, CO2 emmissions etc.

Not at all what I was aiming at. The problem people have with FB isn't how they produce the product, but who uses it.

The problem with food and water in the equivalent scenario, would be in who consumes it. If you let everyone consume it "woah, that's a political choice". But it really isn't. It's the default, deviating from it is a political choice.

Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord

#422

Post by vl » Fri, Sep 18, 2020, 8:28 AM UTC

daveFNbuck wrote: post #410

greencabs wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They will, in fact, just hire somebody else. American companies have access to an unlimited supply of labor. Better to stick around and try to unionize. It may not happen in your lifetime, but the other fact is the United States is a corporate hellworld. Workers have no say in anything. Until that changes, the corporations won’t.

If they have an unlimited supply of labor and we're living in a corporate hellworld, why do they pay so well and include so many perks? They sure seem to be acting like a company that's competing for a limited talent pool.

Because it makes business sense to hire best of the best. Football clubs have unlimited supply of players, yet they pay ridiculous amounts of money to their players.

Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord

#423

Post by thu2111 » Fri, Sep 18, 2020, 8:34 AM UTC

dangus wrote: post #406

greencabs wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They will, in fact, just hire somebody else. American companies have access to an unlimited supply of labor. Better to stick around and try to unionize. It may not happen in your lifetime, but the other fact is the United States is a corporate hellworld. Workers have no say in anything. Until that changes, the corporations won’t.

I don’t know that this level of defeatism is justified. Quitting does help. Why does quitting help? Consider IBM. Their revenue is about 20% of its peak. It used to be seen as a monopoly power. Now we barely think about them. I think that IBM has made itself an unattractive place for employees where it used to be seen as an extremely prestigious place to work. And I think poor quality employees, along with average to…

Quitting doesn't help. For it to mean anything, there has to be a plausible alternative plan that the quitters are supporting.

What is the plausible internal plan of the agitators and activists inside FB and other firms? They have none, beyond systematically ban more and more users who violate ever more bizarre and ad-hoc purity rules. That's not a plan.

Moreover, quitting over this stuff isn't a one way street.

Facebook is not an evil company. I wouldn't work there today but that's exactly because of their vicious internal partisan politics that make these firms so unfriendly to anyone who isn't strongly on the left. For anyone who thinks corporate diversity programmes are sexist against men, Brexit is a commendable move towards localism, that sometimes Trump actually might have a point, etc, Facebook is just not attractive to those people today.

It sounds like Zuck may be getting a grip on his workforce and professionalising it. If so, for every activist quitter they'll suddenly find they're more appealing to 10 more normal employees who just don't want their workplace to be a political battleground. Moreover people get more conservative as they age, and they also get more experienced. So they may suddenly discover they have access to more experienced senior engineers who were previously, uh, content with their current job.

Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord

#424

Post by tpxl » Fri, Sep 18, 2020, 8:36 AM UTC

luckylion wrote: post #396

Reedx wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once you realize how things work from the inside, you realize that the majority of people do want to make the world a better place It's hard to square that with the algorithmic feed, likes, etc, which are making the world worse every single day in favor of engagement metrics. We've known for many years how destructive these are. Facebook and Twitter could literally make the world a better place simply by disabling…

> Facebook and Twitter could literally make the world a better place simply by disabling those kind of features. Just remove them. I'm not sure about that. I agree that the world might be better, but I'm not sure they could just disable them. The next smaller competitor who won't will have more user engagement and grow. If something is a very effective advantage, I believe you can only remove it by coordinated action…

Ah yes, the "if we don't do it, someone else will" defense, that has been shown to have merit time and time again.

If you don't want to make the world a worse place, you don't do it. Hiding behind such logic means you're really just virtue signalling.

Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord

#425

Post by thu2111 » Fri, Sep 18, 2020, 8:39 AM UTC

ketzo wrote: post #280

travisoneill1 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have worked with many LGBT colleagues who never bring up politics at work. This "existence is political" thing is just a bullshit phrase that the obnoxious people who can't go an hour without bringing that crap up use to justify it.

Correction: they never brought up politics to you . You don't know that they weren't political in their discussions with other colleagues. Perhaps it is worth considering why that might be the case. People whose existences are deeply politicized (and they do indeed exist) are not often excited to have political conversations with people who say things like "'existence is political' thing is just a bullshit phrase." I…

You've set up an unfalsifiable belief there. No matter what evidence is brought up to the contrary, you can just blow it off by claiming said people never reveal the truth to whoever is arguing with you. It's a fallacious way to shut other people down and that is, kind of, a little bit dickish.

Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord

#426

Post by thu2111 » Fri, Sep 18, 2020, 8:43 AM UTC

paganel wrote: post #76

rsynnott wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd give that about 10 minutes before someone started claiming that their baby was immune to covid, and then you're right back where you started.

> claiming that their baby was immune to covid Some people are indeed immune to covid, babies too, most probably. I've personally heard of numerous cases of persons not getting the virus at all while their spouse was in intensive therapy or worse.

It's hilarious that in a thread about misinformation the idea that children are immune is being treated as not true. Death rates for COVID for people under 20 are ~zero. Babies are in fact immune, perhaps due to relatively lower levels of ACE2 expression compared to adults.

HN readers seem to have totally lost it w.r.t. COVID and misinformation. It's practically guaranteed that in any thread about misinformation/FB/Twitter/etc someone will state something about COVID that's true and then describe it as misinformation, or state something about it that's false and then decry the conspiracy theorists who don't believe it.

Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord

#427

Post by cheph » Fri, Sep 18, 2020, 8:43 AM UTC

praptak wrote: post #409

jyrkesh wrote: post #382

> Ctrl+F -> "quit.", "quit " I see so much debate about what's right to do within FB, "how will people change the structure from the inside with this rule?", etc. QUIT. Just quit. Seriously. Make it public why you quit. Quit en masse. FB is not a good company. Your talents are useful in many other places. Yes, I'm privileged in saying this. No, I wouldn't feel comfortable quitting my job right now. But if you believe…

Quitting may make you feel better but it doesn't fix social problems. There's just too many people who can't afford to take a lower paying ethical job.

I for one would be okay if I was not subjected to social problem solutions that facebook employees think are best.

I did not vote for them and I would rather have the people I did vote for (and that I can stop voting for) solving those problems.

That is just me though. I'm sure many other people would much rather have their problems solved by Facebook employees than elected representatives, I mean I for one also think that most people elect literally the worst people in the world and would rather have them ruled over by unelected clerks at facebook.

Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord

#428

Post by dexen » Fri, Sep 18, 2020, 8:44 AM UTC

luckylion wrote: post #388

ashtonkem wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Work on projects that have less moral ambiguity.

Such as ... food production? "But your food is consumed by literal fascists"... water supply? "Did you know that evil people also drink the water you are providing and hydrate their bodies so they can do more evil things?" For people who believe that everything is political, there are no projects with less moral ambiguity, it's just more or less openly visible.

Upon reading your, and GP, it occurred to me that we've lost the idea that it is the buyer that is responsible for the purchases.

It used to be that people and organizations making unethical purchases were the ones we considered, and held, responsible. For a long time we've had good, positive movements centered on informing the buyer. We added expiration dates, ingredient lists, nutritional value information, crashworthiness scores and reliability ratings, country of origin labels, even ethical sourcing labels. Perhaps too much of a good thing caused information overload and resulting numbness? Somehow, between the Prohibition, the "war on drugs", and the supply side moral regulations, we've lost the spirit of "well informed free agents making decisions".

Most of the services (FB and the likes) we're discussing here are morally neutral by their nature, and it takes concerted efforts to make them non-neutral[1]. It is the particular use they are being put to that is moral or immoral. Let's not shift vast moral powers from the wide society to a narrow cadre, shall we? The economy is a neat distributed system. It's the popular democracy before democracy became popular. Let's not give it up.

--

[1] example of non-neutrality: the current trend of algorithmic manipulation

Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord

#429

Post by thu2111 » Fri, Sep 18, 2020, 8:46 AM UTC

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #394

fareesh wrote: post #363

If the climate is such that the employees are so passionate about politics, is it at all possible that zero employees have their thumb on the scale in terms of using their position to nudge towards their desired election result? That seems like a bigger issue. If I am an activist and I poison the enormous dataset that's being fed to a ML model, is anyone even going to notice?

They would notice the size of the ETL job necessary to do this (and tbh, I don't think anyone understands the individual level outputs of any large ML model well enough to accomplish this).

Evidence suggests the opposite: they would write a self-congratulatory blog post about it.

For example the work Google does on "de-biasing AI" is all about taking ML models and warping its understanding of the world to reflect ideological priorities.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.06520

Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord

#430

Post by jcims » Fri, Sep 18, 2020, 8:51 AM UTC

thu2111 wrote: post #425

ketzo wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correction: they never brought up politics to you . You don't know that they weren't political in their discussions with other colleagues. Perhaps it is worth considering why that might be the case. People whose existences are deeply politicized (and they do indeed exist) are not often excited to have political conversations with people who say things like "'existence is political' thing is just a bullshit phrase." I…

You've set up an unfalsifiable belief there. No matter what evidence is brought up to the contrary, you can just blow it off by claiming said people never reveal the truth to whoever is arguing with you. It's a fallacious way to shut other people down and that is, kind of, a little bit dickish.

>You've set up an unfalsifiable belief there.

This is a tactic that needs to be called out more often.