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> But why is my own intellectual curiosity more important than whether someone else gets to eat?

It's not, but unless you are working on something that is directly impoverishing someone to this point, then the economic or social system that allows people to go hungry and without basics is more to blame than your particular role.

People don't go hungry anymore due to lack of societal resources. It's due to either a lack of sufficient collective concern, or even a belief that it is largely acceptable that this occurs.

That the effect of your inequality inducing job is hunger for someone can only be countered with policy and incentives that work at societal, not with individual choices to disengage from jobs that optimize productivity.

It's similar to the fallacy of asking Warren Buffet to cut an additional check to the IRS vs raising tax rates, or the fallacy of thinking that an individual's choice not to eat meat has any meaningful effect on climate change.

> I don't want to just donate to charities, I want to end systemic problems that lead to charities needing to exist in the first place.

This is actually a great way to think about it, and if you have the personal means to pursue the systemic issues without having to worry about your own survival, then go for it. But know that this will almost certainly involve spurring on the collective human will to act towards that goal, not inventing a technology as an individual that will fix the problem.

And get downvoted when asking how it's ethical to allow a small fraction of people to own unlimited wealth when 25% of Americans don't have clean tap water. :3

It's actually 63 million people, roughly 20%.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/08/14/63-million-am...

As many as 63 million people — nearly a fifth of the United States — from rural central California to the boroughs of New York City, were exposed to potentially unsafe water more than once during the past decade, according to a News21 investigation of 680,000 water quality and monitoring violations from the Environmental Protection Agency.

I'd say that "exposed to potentially unsafe water more than once during the past decade" is pretty far from "20% of Americans don't have clean tap water". If anything, I'd rather say it's impressive that 80% of Americans haven't been exposed to potentially unsafe water more than once in a decade!

Where did you get that statistic?

Discussion about ethics are kind of pointless as different people have different ethical systems.

I dont think unnecessary inequality of food and water are very controversial in humane ethical systems, unless you want to include fascism in your debate

No individual snowflake thinks it is responsible for the avalanche. Being aware of your own contribution to the state of the world and being willing to change that are important, even if you account for only a minuscule part of the problem.

Individual awareness is different than individual actions. Awareness can actually scale through individual change due to the non linear way that information spreads, and that can in turn influence policy, which then operates over the whole domain. That's sort of the whole political process in a nutshell.

But individual acts of sacrifice for the common good are not scalable in the same way, due to our inherent aversion to loss.

Usually large scale acts of sacrifice are the result of worse alternative consequences, like imprisonment or penalties for cheating on taxes.

> But individual acts of sacrifice for the common good are not scalable in the same way, due to our inherent aversion to loss.

I submit that this is a convenient excuse. You have to be the change you want to see in the world. It is easy to say "yeah, I'm making things worse, but its ok because so is everyone else", and thus nothing changes.

> I submit that this is a convenient excuse.

More of an observation that people will tend toward their local maximum utility even while global utility is compromised. Sometimes you might discover a way to increase both, but for most ongoing concerns the way to balance the two is via laws and regulation.

I agree with you, what I was trying to say is that I've had an internal dilemma about pursuing my career or making it a priority to tackle those systemic issues.

I know that my individual contribution to capitalism by working for a major corporation is a drop in the bucket, and simply refusing to work for a corporation has no real impact on poverty worldwide. But I could definitely put more energy into radical action than I do right now.

I agree. The interesting, high-paying jobs in tech all seem to be centred around funnelling money from one place to another for profit, or manipulating people for profit. Most of the available work just seems to do harm. Working for public/charity companies doesn’t lead to satisfaction either, since all you see is an overworked, underpaid, too-junior workforce and an inferior, outdated product which you can do little about.

On top of this, the accepted career progression for many programmers seems to be that you become a manager and don’t even get to solve the fun problems yourself - now you’re doing harm and not even enjoying doing it!

But hey, at least we get paid a lot...

> The interesting, high-paying jobs in tech all seem to be centred around funnelling money from one place to another for profit

Maybe that's because so much of tech nowadays is a branch of the finance industry (mostly through VC), and that's all finance has ever been.

Listening to this it would seem there’s only horrible extortional companies to work for. If you stay away from FAANG you’re already a lot better off.

There’s a lot of traditional industries that do not exploit people or paychology any more than they’ve been doing for hundreds of years. Those companies need programmers as well.

You won’t get your FAANG salary, but that is the sacrifice you make. No need to give up on IT altogether.

That's how society works though. Funneling money from one place to another for profit and manipulating people for profit is business as usual. I really don't understand the recent public opinion of some people thinking tech will become the downfall of our society.

I strongly relate to this comment as a programmer. Sometimes when a colleague asks me: "Why life is hard?", I answer: "Because its hard for people to get along"

My answer is just aggregation of all biggest problems I face in my life and programming. The biggest challenges often have to do with cooperation between 2 or more people.

Then I encourage you wholeheartedly to work on that problem! It is really among the most important things of all.

To be fair, a lot of people are pretty terrible.

If you don't know it already, you are probably interested in these:

https://80000hours.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism

They are basically thinking about exactly this question, what is most important for the society / humanity / the world, and how can you make the biggest impact to achieve such a goal. This very much depends on your background and abilities, of course.

There are plenty of technical organizations that do meaningful and beneficial work, although they aren't all going to be in California paying $150k+. I don't see how I'd ever be able to maintain motivation while working 50+ hour weeks on advertising or content delivery. The main reason I declined a private tech sector position to work for the federal government is because I hope to be a part of something which moves the needle ever-so-slightly in the right direction.

> most of the world's problems are social/political and won't be fixed by technology.

One might argue that technology not only won't fix our issues but, used as it is today, is the cause of a lot of them.

I agree with you, but I didn't particularly feel like getting into a debate over this topic at work :)

Just curious, what are you working on now?

I actually went to school for history, but I'm self-taught in tech. Thankfully, I never had to work at any dishonest or unethical companies (I stayed out of the startup world), but it still feels like most of the Bay Area companies are not really improving society much, and only a very small section of the population benefits, and they benefit heavily.

What really worries me is that thinking about it probably the greatest positive influence you can have, at least in theory, would be to build something massively exploitative and unethical, siphon gross amounts of money out of the economy with it, and then insure that money is not spent unethically again.

A large part of why things are the way they are is because both wealth hoarders and consumers incentivize the status quo with their economic influence. Building systems, writing software, trying to raise awareness, etc does little to displace an economic system centered on exploiting weakness and maximizing profit. The most any one person can really, truly do is amass such a substantial portion wealth that they can dictate and control to be a force for good and not evil.

This is a noble intent, but it presumes that the perception and cognition of the individual remains unchanged by the circumstances in life. Capital is only a form of power, which is known to corrupt.

As an aside, I've done work with United Nations Online Volunteers previously. That is one way you can use your skills to the benefit of organizations in need.

It doesn't help with your systemic problems directly, but it can provide valuable service to groups that need all the help they can get.

Often this includes groups like children's mentoring organizations that provide access to education and other extracurricular activities. In that way it can indirectly help dig at the root of a variety of problems.

https://www.onlinevolunteering.org/en

https://www.onlinevolunteering.org/en/opportunities?f[0]=fie... (development tasks)

What was your reasoning that lead you to believe that the social/political problems of the world won't be fixed with technology? I personally have come to the opposite conclusion. I think we need systems to help us reason about and model various social and political issues. Many issues of today go unresolved because they are hidden by complexity. We need systems to help us navigate this complexity. I'm tired of seeing people talk nonsense in circles, I want to create systems that allow them to craft their arguments rigorously without the need for rigorous training. If we can help people reason about problems, would that help us at all?

We have seen demonstrable evidence for over twenty years now that if you build a way to more easily inform yourself on reality, facts, historical accuracy, etc that people would rather use that system to justify their own preconceptions and biases than seek out truth that might influence their beliefs.

Technology can only supplement a mindset where people are agreeable to solving problems in the first place. Most social and political woes are intentional, someone is "winning" for someone else's "losing", and often neither party wants the arrangement to change even if from the outsider perspective it would be "so easy" to fix, especially technically.

I'm not talking merely about platforms for discovering information, I'm talking about platforms for thinking. Have you ever seen https://www.bayesialab.com? I went to one of their workshops in NYC and they produced quite a convincing example of this.

The economy/society is not a zero sum game as you are suggesting. It's a cooperative game. In some local scenarios it is a zero sum game, but to look at the whole economy/society like that is misleading. But yes, if people are looking to destroy each other, then yes, technology will just facilitate that. It is in most people's best interest to cooperate though.

So you're saying even if we do have platforms for thinking that help people navigate complex issues, it wouldn't have any economic or political benefit?

>We have seen demonstrable evidence for over twenty years now that if you build a way to more easily inform yourself on reality, facts, historical accuracy, etc that people would rather use that system to justify their own preconceptions and biases than seek out truth that might influence their beliefs.

I'm fairly certain the problem is the systems are written to reward those behaviors. It's technically not hard to solve that, but modern social media companies have this baked into their business model.

(Yes, I have a scheme in mind that solves it, sorry not sharing :-)

You don't need social media to learn that climate change is a thing. Just read Wikipedia. Look at the citations. And yet, a sizable portion of the US public believes it's a hoax.

Actually the problem with climate change deniers is that they doubt the source and cannot reason about the issue themselves. This is actually one example of needing a system to help people reason. Just telling someone something will not convince someone unless they trust the authority of the person telling them OR if they can reach the conclusion themselves. Thanks for this comment, it actually made me further realize how important such systems are.

Sure, sure. Yes, it would. And you'll find your proposal gets shot down and derided by those above you in the hierarchy whom it would negatively impact, your desk moved to the basement and your favorite stapler confiscated. Politics will block the change that would fix said politics. That's why it's politics. That's why it works.

(You have no contact info in your profile, so I'll just post this publicly.)

I've been thinking a lot of similar thoughts and have been wishing I had more people to discuss this with.

If it sounds good to you, reach out to me at the email in my profile. I'd be interested in hearing more about your diagnosis of how systems are malfunctioning, what systemic fixes might look like, and how it could be practical to work on that and still pay bills.

Some of the social and political problems can be fixed by technology.

Technology offers speed, ease of use, and freedom:

It's allowing the population to educate itself. The sheer number and diversity of media allows people to find material about a topic that captivates them instead of walking away from the topic because the "classical" texts are not matching the student's needs.

It's allowing the population access to news beyond the standard topics and formats of newspaper, radio, and TV.

It's allowing a staggering amount of recording and publication that leads to increased transparency and reduced corruption.

It's allowing the population to bypass government controls. Encryption, cryptocurrency, etc.

> eventually came to the conclusion that most of the world's problems are social/political and won't be fixed by technology

I agree.

I work at an education company on a digital product. I got on board excited because I deeply believe education is the best way to change the world.

After 4 years I've realized tech is just another tool. The quality of education depends entirely on the quality of the educators and the pedagogic system they are using. Tools are pretty much irrelevant.

So basically the only reason the company has a digital product is because it looks great on sales presentations and everyone expects us to have tech since our competition has tech too.

> Tools are pretty much irrelevant.

I won't go so far as to call them irrelevant cause I've personally found them very useful during my education. Whilst they're useless by themselves if the quality of the content itself is useless they can definitely help studying more easier and efficient.

People learned as much as today with paper and pencil. Digital books and tools are certainly convenient, but don't really contribute to the quality of the education.

There's this study by the OECD which finds that not only there is no correlation between maths/reading/science skills and the use of computers, but in some cases using computers only makes things worse:

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-34174796

https://www.compareyourcountry.org/pisa-digital

In France they recently completely banned tablets and phones in primary schools.

Estonia, Finland, and Singapore have some of the best K12 education in the world and they barely use computers if at all.

The evidence is slowly piling up that learning, at least until before college (where most of the cognitive skills are learned) does not benefit from using digital tools.

> I don't want to just donate to charities, I want to end systemic problems that lead to charities needing to exist in the first place.

Everyone wants this. The problem is that it's intrinsic to human nature. We might get away from it some day, but until we can universally trust the people who have power we won't get there.

When I was Catholic, I liked the serenity prayer (I still meditate on this from time to time). It helped me scope what I accepted as my own personal responsibility to fix. Picking a job where you can code on something that actually helps people AND make a living is a great experience. It shouldn't be everything, but sometimes it's enough.

>I don't want to just donate to charities, I want to end systemic problems that lead to charities needing to exist in the first place.

You could give some of your salary to political groups that you think will help fix those systemic problems. If you're working for a FAANG, you're probably making like twice as much as you need anyway.

> But why is my own intellectual curiosity more important than whether someone else gets to eat?

Because I am me, and they are them? I mean, if I can get both at the same time then that’s obviously best. But I won’t compromise my own happiness for someone elses.

I don’t think that is mutually exclusive with wanting to end systemic problems with inequality though.

What you're dealing with right now is called burnout. I know because I've been there.

How did you come to the conclusion that "the world's problems are social/political and won't be fixed by technology".

I'm still shocked how come you don't see the effect of the 21st century where in the past all those world wars, genocides, ignorance etc.

Really sorry but I couldn't find any profession other then engineering and science if you ask me what makes us prevail in the long run!