GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#581

Post by nemothekid » Fri, Nov 01, 2019, 3:53 AM UTC

manfredo wrote: post #486

dcposch wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I question how much an employee should concern him/herself with how a product is used > Where do we start? Where do we stop? Often when moral question pops up on HN, the top comment is some variation of > But where do we we draw the line? > I wonder whether we should even try. Counterpoint: cynicism is too easy. Actually giving a shit is harder, it's uncomfortable, it involves compromise. Yes, there's ambiguity. Ye…

I think you're misrepresenting the argument of people who don't think developers should interfere with the usages of their product. The most compelling arguments I found is that just because we happen to work in a field that lets us exert our influence over society doesn't make our moral sensibilities any better than the rest of society. What us privileged few who work in technology see as using our position of influ…

>make the deliberate decision that refraining from exercising that power is the morally optimal choice

Don't you think the FSF exists as a huge counterpoint to this? The FSF deliberate makes the decision that copyleft is the morally optimal choice and forces others to comply - and I'd imagine more developers view the FSF as a good thing.

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#582

Post by baggy_trough » Fri, Nov 01, 2019, 3:55 AM UTC

d-smoke wrote: post #560

smudgymcscmudge wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About a quarter of the company has signed the protest letter. I signed the letter just so people would stop nagging me to sign. I don’t care about ICE. I suspect there are others who got pressured into signing.

I keep getting flagged/downvoted into oblivion, but I am also a GitHub employee and this person (smudgymcscmudge) is very identifiable based on their public HN posts. The history of all signers of the protest letter is visible (it’s in an internal repo) and he never signed it. Why is HN okay with letting a completely false comment stand?

You expect HN to investigate the truth of individual comments?

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#583

Post by Teknoman117 » Fri, Nov 01, 2019, 3:56 AM UTC

In response to a lot of the comments here, isn't the whole "people with power have the moral imperative to defend (their view of) morality" how the US got into the "America, World Police" problem in the first place?

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#584

Post by dragonwriter » Fri, Nov 01, 2019, 3:58 AM UTC

CapricornNoble wrote: post #538

dragonwriter wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These aren't people fleeing genocide. These are people leaving Mexico. No, they are people fleeing violence in Central America through Mexico, in large part. That violence, incidentally, is in substantial part resulting from the US training nonviolent drug war criminals into extremely violent criminals in its original and then deporting then to Central America what they have no substantial roots.

>>>No, they are people fleeing violence in Central America through Mexico, in large part. If you are passing through one country because you desire to get to a specific destination, you are basically asylum shopping. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asylum_shopping

Or, you know, the country you are passing through presents (for overlapping, though not identical reasons) reasons the same dangers that you are escaping from, so it's not any kind of escape.

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#585

Post by slykat » Fri, Nov 01, 2019, 3:58 AM UTC

Thorentis wrote: post #554

sascha_sl wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To draw a parallel between an organization that runs concentration camps (in a similar state to early nazi camps before they were extermination camps, nuance please) and one that refuses to provide services based on an anarchic justification for bigotry is either truly vile or exceedingly cynic.

[flagged]

What bothers me the most is how myopic people are about this. Does anyone not see how dangerous it will be if we have the world's largest companies choosing to do business based on their internal moral grounds? Do we really want tech companies to have moral councils that vet customers?

If you want to fix ICE, then by all means, attack the problem at its source! Take that well paid Github salary of yours and fund the ACLU and other lobbyists fighting the good fight. Write your congressman. Call your congressman. VOTE! Campaign for the correct congressman. Code for your congressman. Push for policy that makes ICE employees (and all government employees) more accountable for human rights abuses. All of these actions will be more effective than campaigning for ICE, who will just migrate to a different cloud code review tool if the contract is cancelled (gitlab, bitbucket, or whomever else).

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#586

Post by School-Cotton » Fri, Nov 01, 2019, 3:59 AM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #293

madhadron wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elections? There hasn't been a democratic election in China since 1912.

Hong Kong is part of China. Under the "One Country Two Systems" model, it has more 'experimental' and 'innovative' policies than the rest of the country (such as choosing their local government officials via democratic elections). But then again so does Shenzhen in other ways.

Hong Kong has never had democratic elections. It has elections but they are non-democratic, as the “functional consistencies” system rigs them in one side’s favor.

“One country, two systems” refers to Hong Kong’s separate economic and legal system, not to democracy.

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#587

Post by icelancer » Fri, Nov 01, 2019, 4:00 AM UTC

aeturnum wrote: post #580

slykat wrote: post #381

I find it ironic that the same people protesting the contract would also protest a bakery that refuses to sell a product for say a same sex couple (or if you were in the 60s, restaurants that refused to serve blacks). You either have a viewpoint that: 1) a business shouldn't make a moral judgement on its customers and be accessible to all 2) A business can make moral judgements on its customers and choose not to do b…

I do not think the dichotomy you outlined accurately describes how things work I mean, this is why we have developed the idea of a "protected class." Because you're correct that, at the end of the day, judgement is judgement and sentiment is sentiment and everyone is the hero of their own story. But to place the limits of proper action at sentiment is solipsism. So there is a set of protected classes which we, as a s…

>> race

Unless you're Asian/Asian-American, of course. Then it is fine to negatively discriminate against you.

https://www.stanforddaily.com/2019/10/03/judge-rules-in-favo...

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#588

Post by patcon » Fri, Nov 01, 2019, 4:00 AM UTC

manfredo wrote: post #486

dcposch wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I question how much an employee should concern him/herself with how a product is used > Where do we start? Where do we stop? Often when moral question pops up on HN, the top comment is some variation of > But where do we we draw the line? > I wonder whether we should even try. Counterpoint: cynicism is too easy. Actually giving a shit is harder, it's uncomfortable, it involves compromise. Yes, there's ambiguity. Ye…

I think you're misrepresenting the argument of people who don't think developers should interfere with the usages of their product. The most compelling arguments I found is that just because we happen to work in a field that lets us exert our influence over society doesn't make our moral sensibilities any better than the rest of society. What us privileged few who work in technology see as using our position of influ…

> What us privileged few who work in technology see as using our position of influence for good, many other people may see as a small minority abusing their power to manipulate society for the worse.

Nevermind "good" or "bad" by the select judgement of a few privileged people -- it's whether you even bother to _consider_, or instead just claim "this is hard".

We can create influencing machines, or consensing machines. Your rightful concern is applicable to influencing machines imho. A consensing machine has no centre it's drawing people into. It's a technology for users to find and coalesce around the centres that work for them.

The things the OP is implying unnavigable are the same class of challenges we navigated hundreds of years ago with intellectual property. We thought ownership was worth controlling access over, and we made arbitrary laws to propagate that regime in the world. We could deign it worth creating processes to collectively negotiate moral right/wrong together (without presupposing the will of the steward of the tech is right/wrong) and hold ourselves to that.

The fact that we don't even bother to consider the question of "should we do this" and instead fall on "this is challenging" -- that speaks volumes to how some of us are limited in our imagining of what the sickness in society might be.

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#589

Post by Thorrez » Fri, Nov 01, 2019, 4:01 AM UTC

aeturnum wrote: post #574

manfredo wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're misrepresenting the argument of people who don't think developers should interfere with the usages of their product. The most compelling arguments I found is that just because we happen to work in a field that lets us exert our influence over society doesn't make our moral sensibilities any better than the rest of society. What us privileged few who work in technology see as using our position of influ…

> just because we happen to work in a field that lets us exert our influence over society doesn't make our moral sensibilities any better than the rest of society. I agree this is problematic. However, programmers are uniquely well situated to create a system for asking "the rest of society" questions about what kinds of systems they would like a programmer to support. > make the deliberate decision that refraining f…

>What you're describing is cooperating with the status quo, which is definitely an exercise of power.

Working for ICE as an engineer would be you exercising your power for ICE. But working for GitHub as an engineer, where GitHub is customer-agnostic, doesn't seem like an exercise of power to me. Anyone can use the product you build, it's not specifically for ICE. Similarly if you design a car and some cars of that design get used by ICE, that doesn't seem like an exercise of power in favor of ICE, unless you build features specifically for ICE.

Threatening to quit if GitHub continues to sell to ICE seems like an exercise of power against ICE. Silently quitting and not telling anyone why you quit I would consider a very slight exercise of power against ICE, because over time if it happens enough, businesses that deal with ICE will be less competent that businesses that don't deal with ICE, and that will harm ICE slightly.

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#590

Post by patcon » Fri, Nov 01, 2019, 4:03 AM UTC

geofft wrote: post #517

manfredo wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're misrepresenting the argument of people who don't think developers should interfere with the usages of their product. The most compelling arguments I found is that just because we happen to work in a field that lets us exert our influence over society doesn't make our moral sensibilities any better than the rest of society. What us privileged few who work in technology see as using our position of influ…

> The most compelling arguments I found is that just because we happen to work in a field that lets us exert our influence over society doesn't make our moral sensibilities any better than the rest of society. What, then, does? Democracy is a good idea, sure. But what happens when democracy reaches a conclusion that seems obviously unjust? Do we decide that our own sense of right and wrong must be flawed? (This is a…

> But what happens when democracy reaches a conclusion that seems obviously unjust?

In that case, we imagine a better democracy. If someone feels empathy is what makes their local democracy work better, and the further-above larger spheres of democracy no longer embody that:

We should imagine a new democracy that optimizes for empathy, no?