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Comment by throw2016 | Hacker News Reader

throw2016

Discussions about ethical, privacy, surveillance issues often get hand waved and diluted here. See yesterday's thread on Google's retaliation as an example.

We need a diversity of communities that can represent the the software industry in more dimensions than the VC funded side of things, growth hacking and the singular focus on success that are often in heavy conflict with any kind of value dimension and ultimately greed and opportunism crowds out every other concern.

There is also often a extremely selfish mercenary view of the world this is disturbing and can jade most of us and needs some maturity to handle without letting it poison ones worldview.

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> Discussions about ethical, privacy, surveillance issues get hand waved and diluted here.

Do they? I tend to find that Hacker News often has a lot of discussion of ethics, especially with respect to technology.

Entirely one-sided discussion (to put it kindly), with dissenters finding their comments invisible. For as good as the discussion around here usually is, there are some topics that even HN cannot have an open discussion on, and that happens to be one of them.

Try an experiment: Argue in a thread that Facebook/Google/etc. are anything less than mustache-twirling-villian levels of evil, or that the people that work for those companies sometimes make actual human mistakes.

Arguing against the mainstream position can even get your comment flagged. Doing it a few times (even about unrelated topics) will get your account banned for being "incendiary". HN is an echo chamber. But that's not surprising, all Internet communities are an echo chamber to some point.

On HN I see lot of hand-waving away of ethics and a lot of defence of straightforward greed.

Right - it's probably very relevant to discussions of, say, Google's AI council that Google's purpose in putting Kay Coles James on their board was not that the Heritage Foundation's views per se should be represented (note that they didn't do corresponding representation of other political factions) but that she and the foundation have significant legitimacy and influence with the politically powerful parts of the American right wing, with which Google is generally in political trouble, and therefore it was a good way to allow Google to execute on its AI-related goals and therefore make money without political backlash.

A genuine ethics board would not include people whose real job is to curry favor with government - it's sufficiently close to unethical that it's a bad way to get started - and would be generally fine with saying "This task is ethically permissible, but not an ethical imperative, and so if it's politically difficult to do it, we should just do other things."

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