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Comment by leggomylibro | Hacker News Reader

This is sort of surprising information, from my view.

The information about their business model and data practices which people seem to be so surprised by was/is common knowledge among people who work with these technology stacks. Going to work for Facebook seemed like it would have meant supporting and abetting those practices; they were very clear about what they were doing, and the roles were in no way ambiguous.

The cynic in me wonders if these employees are just responding to how others are starting to view their positions, more than ethical or moral quandaries.

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Exactly.

And I doubt it's a mass exodus either.

If you read "Surely you're joking Mr Feynman", the author clearly states that when making the bomb, they had a lot of fun. Lots of budgets. Only smart people. Working on the coolest projects. He even plays with the censorship and security practices.

They never really thought too hard about the ethic part of it: they need to end the war, and that's it. They really said "oh we fucked up" once the bomb exploded.

And we are talking about brilliant minds with very positive personalities.

While skilled, I doubt than more than a small fraction of FB work force is close to Feynman's IQ. And they have a very arrogant culture. Somehow I doubt FB is going to bleed talent anytime soon.

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 raging for more than two years. Fun or no fun, you can find motivation for working on weapons in a lot of things: the next Pearl Harbour attack could be against your home town, the next ones to be sent to labour camps back at home could be your only surviving relatives, the next casualties of war could be your high school friends.

Barring a couple of teams that work on interesting projects, Facebook has little other than money and reputation to throw at people. The former isn't that hard to find in our field, though, and the latter is kindda fickly. Facebook may well keep its talent pool constant, but largely by having people for whom the latter (or, more generally, what they work on and what impact it has) is important replaced by people for whom it is not.

Fortunately (for most of us, at least), the kind of talent that money, disregard for ethics and public doublespeak attracts is pretty self-destructive in the long run.

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 happen enough imo.

> And they got the best projects and the most money.

I think what they don't have is their CEO testifying in front of the Congress after building a platform whose hunger for money made it an exceptional weapon against society. Smart, young people start avoiding companies only after public perception turns against them. Facebook is closer to that than Amazon or even Google.

> 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 )

I don't remember when I felt that, oh man I wish I had a shot at working at google, to where I am now. There was a bit of "meh" in between.

That's not exactly my recollection from the book. I believe they thought closely about how the bomb was needed to end the war in Europe as quickly as possible.

What they failed to do was reevaluate the project after the Allies won the war in Europe. It was after Hiroshima they said, "oh, we fucked up." (to parapahrase)

Exactly. There is no war/enemy here. Only ideals, whose ethics are now openly questioned.

I think the public discussion probably hits FB most in hiring - I mean, if I were doing an interview there I'd at least ask the question and see how they responded (maybe negotiation point on what I'd be working on or increased comp).

“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.

Contrast Feynman's attitude to that of Wolfgang Pauli, who refused to work on the Manhattan Project, saying "it's not the business of science to engineer mass destruction."

There have been plenty of other highly intelligent people who acted ethically, often at great danger to themselves, rejecting many financial and social incentives to act unethically.

This. We rarely realize that we idolize the wrong historical actors which contributes to our inaccurate evaluation of their deeds. In this case, pointing out Feynman or any other "brilliant minds" behind horrific events and technologies fails to acknowledge that they had detractors in during their time who pointed out these things to them. And they ignored them.

I usually try to keep that in mind now. In the back of my mind I'm saying "they knew, someone told them" and lo and behold, if I go looking for said detractors I can usually find them in spades.

I'm not defending or excusing anyone. Just pointing out that its unlikely these employees were unaware.

But it just doesn't seem likely.

The bomb was initially built against the Nazis, and with the understanding that they would be building something similar.

Japan came later.

Also the group was sequestered to a remote lab (Los Alamos?) and working under strong secrecy. You either try to keep a good atmosphere or you go crazy.

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 or not is a hard debate that I still think about sometime.

But there was not that much debate reported from the people building it.

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.

> 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.

Smart people can be really dumb.

Yep -- Los Alamos. You should read "Surely You're Joking," by the way. It's worth it just for the story about finding a hole in the fence, then walking in the guard gate and out the hole again and again until someone noticed.

It's one of those rare books where you laught while reading it. The whole reason he ends up in Brazil is just so relatable to me, pricesily because it's absurd and so realistic at the same time.

I have the book, but I don't think I got to the Los Alamos part ;)

Thank you for wasting my time ;-). That story was in "Los Alamos from Below," which may not have been part of "Surely You're Joking." Feynman was a fascinating guy and an excellent writer, even if he was a bit too young to be a serious player in the Manhattan Project. By the way, if you're interested in physics, these are about as good as it gets: http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/

>While skilled, I doubt than more than a small fraction of FB work force is close to Feynman's IQ.

Feynman is semi-famous for testing at a much lower IQ than most people assume. (He scored 125 on his test at school).

See: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/finding-the-next-ein...

Unless I'm mistaken, I tested out at 140 a long time ago.

There is no friggin way I'm remotely as intelligent as Feynman was so there goes any faith in IQ tests being meaningful. Most of the people who have worked for me are demonstrably smarter than me and none of them are close to Feynman. Smart people but not at his level IMO.

RIP IQ tests :)

Doesn't it depend a lot on what age you take the test though? Like I was very smart for my age as a child and I tested very high. Later in life I'm probably not much higher than my peers.

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 careful definition) can't be reduced to a single number.

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

I'm not saying that the tests are useless, just that they should be renamed, and culture should look at them a little differently.

I would agree with you if you're saying that they're not at all a measure of human worth. I don't get the 'rename' comment, though.

If we don't call one's skill at mental tasks 'intelligence', just how should we label it?

"Intelligence" is poorly defined in most conversations. The nature of the word and concepts around it lead to problems, even for people who can score high on IQ tests.

It will take me a long time to write out my thoughts completely, but I plan to do it at some point.

Mostly it seems to be quick and adaptable thinking, if I understand the test results right. The colloquial usage is all over the place, as usual, but the tests strongly correlate with things like being able to attain advanced education and ability to be successful. Some of it appears to be inherent, whether it's clock speed/RAM equivalent for our brains or what, because it survives twins raised in completely different homes (including large economic differences). That said, there are certainly environmental effects, too, especially in the negative direction (e.g. lead exposure).

Originally though IQ was calculated by dividing by age, now it's calculated by comparing with those in the same age group. So any random child outscoring a famous scientist doesn't seem to be that significant.

I think I tested around 30 (apparently still insecure enough back then to care, these days I care what my dogs think more than I care what people think :)

Tests can be sometimes inaccurate but still useful. There are false positive and negative rates for everything.

Feynman had a higher IQ than 125

Tests are not perfect, he could have had a bad day

Maybe he didn’t care

Maybe he misremembers taking an actual IQ test etc

IQ tests only measure your ability to write IQ tests.

> 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.

> While skilled, I doubt than more than a small fraction of FB work force is close to Feynman's IQ.

In fact Feynman's IQ was merely "above average" according to Feynman himself, who got a look at his score after taking the test in school.

But if you're using "IQ" as a proxy for actual, you know, intelligence then yeah, I agree :-)

Just a figure of speach of course. Feyman doesn't use "fucked up" either :)

Don't forget that a lot of them were refugees in need of a good job to sustain their family.

Well people might be valuing stock price risks and not making decision based on ethical concerns.

> They never really thought too hard about the ethic part of it

Feynman was only speaking for himself there. It's been 25 years since I read that book but I thought he described some of the efforts by Einstein, et al. to prevent the bomb from being used.

So maybe the Cambridge Analytica hullabaloo is the equivalent of the bomb going off?

No electing trump was the bomb going off.

Cambridge Analytica was more of a "oh, WE made that bomb?"

It’s also just one tweet. It’s an article based off a single sentence in the nytimes article. Maybe people are transferring, maybe this is a reason or an excuse, but the support in this article is pretty flimsy.

having worked in Facebook games in 2012, I think some today forget how much worse for privacy Facebook used to be than it is today

Also good points - plus, it's not very compassionate to let a knee-jerk negative opinion color my view of other peoples' actions without having heard their opinions.

> The cynic in me wonders if these employees are just responding to how others are starting to view their positions, more than ethical or moral quandaries.

I think you hit the nail on the head. I doubt it has to do with moral qualms as employees. More to do with your friends and family giving you crap for working at a company that's getting bad press.

The best way to summarize FB employees, from @numair from 8 months ago:

> Having known so many people involved with Facebook for so long, I have come up with a phrase to describe the cultural phenomenon I’ve witnessed among them – ladder kicking. Basically, people who get a leg up from others, and then do everything in their power to ensure nobody else manages to get there. No, it’s not “human nature” or “how it works.” Silicon Valley and the tech industry at large weren’t built by these sorts of people, and we need to be more active in preventing this mind-virus from spreading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14780186

The issue is people who in the past would have went to wall street are now going to Silicon Valley solely for the money and it has poisoned the culture. Tech companies shouldn't have pushed the coolness factor so much and instead let people continue to think tech was for nerds

This is an exceptionally poor way to "summarize" the employees of any large company, including Facebook. Your personal ethics aside, whenever you're about to describe an entire company's staff using phrases like, "these sorts of people" and "mind-virus", you should stop and reconsider what you think you know about the world.

You are making an uninformed judgement based on a generalization of over 20,000 people.

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 occurring to me to make a choice".

With creepy consistency, the replies were rejections of this idea. "No, we're connecting the world!".

My conclusion was an echo of the Upton Sinclair quote:

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

I hope that the quitting phenomenon is real, and that it represents the creme de la creme, with many other options, leaving because they can no longer avoid understanding. If this is happening, then FB's decline will just accelerate.

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 "connecting the world") is their biggest challenge, especially in the ever-evolving social industry.

> 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.

You're right in what keeps the leadership up at night - figuring out how to keep users glued to Facebook. That however, is also core to their business model, in that without user attention, advertisers wouldn't pay to advertise on Facebook.

Given that FB is now a public company, it needs to prove to shareholders, beyond anything else, that it's growing its revenues and profits. Turn FB into a company that puts its users first instead of its profits, and its stock price would probably be 1/3 of what it is today.

This is just you trying to get an answer you knew you wouldn't get.

"Connecting the world!" is indeed the job of almost all employees at Facebook. You can have a large majority of the company focus on this one goal, and also know that the byproduct of that goal allows you to expand another part of a bigger goal: to make more money on ads.

A company in a capitalist economy must make money, of course. No one is arguing that and no one is saying that Facebook doesn't want - indeed must - make money.

It's like asking an Uber driver what is job is: "to transport people!". Of course, that much is obvious. If you ask someone in the "growth" department (or whatever) what their job is - the description will necessarily be much different.

> The cynic in me wonders if these employees are just responding to how others are starting to view their positions, more than ethical or moral quandaries.

Doesn't need to be cynical. "I never thought of it that way" is maybe one of the most important phrases you can say.

These people didn't see their jobs as unethical until someone really put a spotlight on what they do. It forced them to look at their roles in all of this and say "is this right?". To quote David Mitchell: "Are we the baddies?".

>These people didn't see their jobs as unethical until someone really put a spotlight on what they do.

That reflects a certain quality in the individual that I generally think of as bad, but I suppose may have some place in the greater scheme of coporate america. However I generally think that we have a moral imperative to constantly ask ourselves, "is this right? . . . 'Are we baddies'?

I've understood that Facebook is essentially evil for a decade. People who work there who are jumping ship now either look like they aren't paying attention but are moralizing the company's action or are abandoning a sinking ship, neither are really positive traits in a potential employee.

I mean that's good for you and I tend to agree. But it's incredibly naive to think that any significant percentage of the working population is using that criteria to determine where and on what they should work. We tend to think of tech people as being incredibly bright but at the end of the day they are human and FB is a very cool place to work. If you don't take a minute to evaluate the ethics of the work you're doing which might not on the surface be all that questionable it's easy to fool yourself into thinking, you're doing nothing wrong. It's a much easier realization that working for Defense Contractors making missile guidance systems is bad than it is to think hey all this data i'm collecting for my social network features could be put to some very bad uses

I've quit a job for ethical reasons before, in a similar vein to this issue with Facebook. I don't begrudge those who didn't. Not every issue is black and white.

We saw the same thing after Snowden, people were leaving the NSA in mass after the average person became aware of the situation.

Data collection is what enabled the Nazis to find Jews and homosexuals, the next mass percution can be more specific than race. Anti-vaxers, pizzagaters, people who don't watch anough TV.

As the world becomes more aware of the dangers of algorithms and AI, Facebook engineers are rethinking their career path.

It's clear to me that Zuckerberg was entirely too willing to abuse his power from the start, he doesn't seem to have good intentions at all.

>Data collection is what enabled the Nazis to find Jews and homosexuals

It's also worth noting that a certain American tech company was responsible for this.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

Facebook is a huge organization and although to the outside world it's perceived as one, internally it's basically hundreds of separated teams and companies. So to your point, yes probably some are aware of all what's going on around the company, but there's probably an equal amount that are not. I work for a Fortune 50 company and I get much of the information about the company from the news, despite having a relatively senior level role.

>I work for a Fortune 50 company and I get much of the information about the company from the news, despite having a relatively senior level role.

I think your parent's point is that all of this information has been out there even in the news.

As he said:

>they were very clear about what they were doing

> "The cynic in me wonders if these employees are just responding to how others are starting to view their positions, " Or just giving politically correct reasons that conveniently fit the current broader narrative.

Might this be the last straw for some that were already close to leaving? Sure. But it's not the only reason, just the one that's simple to explain and/or easy to spot.

That said, I have to wonder how often unintended consequences are discussed at FB, or at any of the other (tech) powerhouses. I mean, targeting ads based on personal info hardly sounds like a big moral / ethical problem, until someone finds a loop hole and attempts to exploit it (in what should have been foreseeable ways?).

The cynic in you is obviously right about this one.

The best case scenario here is many people simply didn't ever consider the actual ethics of the business that was paying them until everyone else started talking about it.

Not thinking about it until someone makes you doesn't make you a terrible person of course, but I won't be throwing any admiration your way.

The cynic in me wonders if this is just grandiose self-promotion as a bargaining chip for the next datamining job.

> The cynic in me wonders if these employees are just responding to how others are starting to view their positions

Employees rarely flip until the organization stops making them money, then they flip en masse. As long as Facebook's stock remains stagnant, the insider leaks will likely continue.

yeah but it wasn’t in the cultural zeitgeist to care about these. Now that it’s popular, many people will want to virtue signal and leave the company so others see how much principle they have.

Or perhaps, over time, they have changed their minds. The principle of charity, it seems to me, requires that we take them at their word in the absence of evidence otherwise.

Maybe it's because the a large portion of the population started to care and it changed their minds

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