Let’s Get Better at Demanding Better from Tech

About a week later, a tech recruiter called and asked me if there was any sort of company I wouldn't work at. I said, yeah, I wouldn't want to work in any social media company. He challenged me by pointing out that the money and prestige has to be tempting, right?

I told them Facebook contacted me the week before and I declined.

The hem and haw, followed by 'uhhh.... well" and silence was revealing.

To be fair, I have zero chance of getting into Facebook, especially for what they contacted me for.

You could have gone a bit further, and been a "person who refused a job offer from Google". That, imo, would carry more weight.

It's similar to the way some companies specifically look for newly admitted Stanford/Harvard/MIT students, then pay those students ridiculous sums to give up college and work for them instead.

I think this is essentially the role Mozilla fills in the SF/SV ecosystem at least. Everyone knows Mozilla engineers are equally or greater respected than anyone from Facebook or Google. The problem is there's only room for one Mozilla. There simply isn't enough donations to support more.

I wish you would. I agree with your complaint that the article leaves a lot of details to be desired, and I have the same complaint of your comment.

"As SSC put it, you have to think about whether people with different moral aims than you are just not clever enough to see you're right, or know they're wrong but hope to profit (mistake vs. conflict)."

Regarding "dumb v. evil", I've lately encountered this distinction:

"dumb people don't use moral concepts to get their way. They just sort of use brute force, bullying, you know they'll call names. But the smart people are the people, who use moral concepts in the service of evil. "

I've heard it in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-0V-gUuvW8

(at 18:15 min)

I transcribed the segment at my blog over here: http://tribeone.net/morality/how-to-malice-stupidity/

(If you like reading better.)

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" - Upton Sinclair

Just saying "well who knows what's right and what's wrong anyway?" and use that as an excuse to invalidate others' objections is cheap.

> You can have two good-faith actors with good (but not totally overlapping) information take up totally opposed positions because they don't see the same thing as being "right" (mistake vs. conflict)

The second quote describes a conflict, but it doesn't describe a conflict where one side knows it's wrong but is hoping to get away with it anyway. It describes an intractable conflict, one where no one is wrong.

The two choices you highlight in the first quote are a very small fraction of the possibilities, and are not a good reflexive thought to have, because if your first thought is "OK, it's one of these two options", you may not notice that you're going through life assuming, based on nothing, that everyone who disagrees with you is wrong.

And while tech companies have been accused at various rates of sexual harassment, do we really think the big tech companies aren't trying to mitigate these issues to a greater degree than say, Hollywood or Wall Street Investment Banks (or the VC industry)? Are tech companies destroying the environment as fast as Koch Industries, or are they actually trying to be carbon neutral? Are they at least trying to cleanup their supply chain's bloody parts, or are they lobbying politicians to legalize pollution and bloody exploitation. (e.g. Apple and blood minerals vs Union Carbide/Dow)

Your usage of the fallacy is incorrect BTW, this isn't a No True Scotsman fallacy, no where did I assert that tech companies don't do things which could harm society. My point is, the focus of HN is to obsess about tech companies behavior and avoid the far greater harm that non-tech (i.e. non-software) have done, principally because their interests are primarily talking about tech and how it relates to everything, and it is a myopic view of tech as the center of the universe: it either is the center of great harm, or the utopian solution to everything.

The real problems of the world require messy, political problems that don't include the skills of geeks or silicon valley, they include things you can't calculate, engineer, or apply rigid principles to.

So at worst, you can say my fallacy is "whataboutism", but in this case, the "whataboutism" is real. Lots of people crying about AI Skynets and full spectrum surveillance, and none about basic inequality. Why? Because a tech geek can imagine a way to filter cookies, or implement Asimov laws, but they can't imagine how to convince millions of people to stop voting for candidates who promise not to raise their taxes and stop giving money to "freeloaders" The real squishy, soft problems can't be solved with code on GitHub.

Yes, we can tackle both issues, both what tech companies are doing wrong and what non-tech companies are doing, but it is a false equivalence to say they're causing equal levels of damage, right now we haven't even cleaned up the historical legacy damage caused by the old economy, and we're talking about paying large amount of attention hypothetical threats and damages?

That's control. And privacy is much better now than it was in the "glorious early days of the internet" when your two choices were SMTP and IRC and both were subject to monitoring by local sysadmins and pretty much any node your packets passed through.

Just because the present is not perfect does not mean the past was better. I much prefer the privacy and control of today's internet over yesterday's internet.

However, women, children, and minorities have far more freedom and privacy than they ever have historically. There are some ways you can look at this so that it seems that corporations have more ability to see into your life. In large, it is really just a rise in their accuracy. Their attempts and actions are actually lessened.

There are concerns over expectancy going flat or down. My understanding is that a few points down does not indicate the swing down has started. Should be looked at, but evidence is equally indicative of standard variance in growth.

That is, the anomaly was the constant growth in expectancy. Certainly an outlier in our histories.

And you should try harder in looking for things that are easier in life. It may not have got your life, yet. We should do what we can to spread the rewards to everyone, including you.

Worldwide incomes have risen more in the last 30 years, especially for the poor, than at any other time in history.

Tech might not have improved the lives of people who lost their jobs to “gig” workers who are paid a fraction of minimum wage.

This is mostly a myth. Gig workers tend to make a bit more than minimum wage. Which, sure, isn't great but these are unskilled jobs where you make your own hours. It's not surprising that the wages tend to be on the low side.

Tech has downright hurt the environment, even if you only look at sheer waste.

GDP per unit of energy consumed has risen dramatically due to better technology.

You probably don’t appreciate the future of drones I’d your experience with them is being bombed by them.

Deaths due to warfare are at all time historic lows. I can't say that this is due to new technology but it is worth noting.

Similarly, suicides are not only not a new phenomenon, but they are actually not as high as they have ever been historically. This is precisely what i meant by us having a higher bar. And we should continue to raise the bar. But don't talk about how tech could possibly make our lives better. Instead, lets continue the progress we have made.