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jordigh

I really hate this kind of response. Just because Mozilla isn't a saint doesn't mean that their words don't ring true.

Mr Gotcha is a boring person. Don't be Mr Gotcha.

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha-vs-the-green-new-deal/

https://images.dailykos.com/images/723537/story_image/1406.p...

Just because we're all living in the status quo doesn't mean we can't change because we're all hypocrites for living with the status quo. Aspire to something better. Even if you're currently benefitting from or struggling against the status quo.

We should be taking ethical jobs and who cares if it's Mozilla who said it. They're right about this, even if they're wrong about other things.

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That's all fine and true but it is a fact that you're better off taking your advice about ethics from a party that is ethical and Mozilla's record is less than spotless, to put it mildly.

People far better placed than Mozilla the company have been saying this for years so they are late to that particular party anyway and plenty of the damage done they did themselves.

Personally, my take is the opposite: if you are an ethical person find the very worst company that you are still willing to work for and try to change them from the inside. After all if only non-ethical people want to work at certain companies that will make things worse, not better.

Don't let the desire for perfection prevent improvement. And while I take your last point, trying to make e.g. an advertising company with tens of thousands of employees more ethical is going to be less productive than going somewhere that's trying to do some societal good in the first place.

It makes sense to go work for an unethical company if you're unskilled and/or lazy, and will essentially sit on your hands while burning their resources on a useless employee.

Otherwise, you're depriving an ethical organization of your contributions while aiding the competition.

Unless you're entering a leadership role it's very unlikely you'll be changing a damn thing from within, while being corrupted by the surely lavish compensation an unethical company generally can afford to shower on its individual contributors.

Every company is to more or lesser degree unethical. I've yet to come across a company that was 100% good. So you will always be making this trade-off, I'm asking for it to be a conscious one and to then push in the right direction from where it has the most effect.

While I agree that I haven't found any 100% good companies, I have yet to see a company where any low-level engineer has any real input at all and can actually make any kind of difference as far as ethics. If you work up into management, sure, but then you're no longer an engineer.

> It makes sense to go work for an unethical company if you're unskilled and/or lazy, and will essentially sit on your hands while burning their resources on a useless employee.

Now this is the kind of motivated reasoning I can get behind. I'm not lazy, I'm genuinely heroic!

"Personally, my take is the opposite: if you are an ethical person find the very worst company that you are still willing to work for and try to change them from the inside"

That won't work.

You do shape your enviroment, but your enviroment also shapes you. Meaning if you go to a miserable place on purpose, that place will just drain you, if you cannot change it completely. And changing a company on your own as a lonely employee ... is doomed from the start and will lead to burn out and depression very soon.

I propose the opposite: ethical people gather together and create organisations and companies to show that things can be done better. Talk and criticism is cheap. Actually doing something better, is much harder. But you need likeminded people around you. If they are all dispersed everyone fighting on their own against a behemot .. will not make things better. All those cold "evil" corporate people? Well, at some point they were humans with ideals as well (in most cases) but got changed by their surroundings.

The logical conclusion of this is to go join ISIS and do their IT. See how stupid this idea is? You're not going to change anything from the inside, you're just helping them do bad things.

The only thing that shows is that reduction to absurds leads to absurdities.

Showing that a claim implies an absurdity is what the “reduction to the absurd” proof technique is, yes.

Generally, “implies a falsehood” is considered to be equivalent to “is false”.

What’s your point?

My point is - and it is sad that this needs elaborating - that what works well for physics and maths problems does not necessarily work well for societal problems.

Changing a company from the inside is something that can only be done by those that are on the inside, hence my qualification that you should only join those companies that you can still stomach and then push as hard as you can in the right direction, rather than to join the very worst organization that you can find in the world, and one that you - hopefully - can not stomach.

It is an error to think that reductio only applies to “physics and math problems”. Logic is logic, it applies to all truths. (Though one has to be careful with things stated informally, to ensure that one is working with the claims that were intended. There is a danger of parsing an informal statement as if it were a formal statement, and as a result interpreting it to mean something other than what was meant.

Also, there may be a risk of people being more likely to derive in invalid ways when attempting the reductio, like making some hyperbolic statements, exaggerating the implications of a statement, and treating those exaggerations as if they actually logically follow. But this doesn’t make reductio an invalid technique, just one that people can fail to use properly.)

Like I said in the other comment, the objection should be that the derivation of the absurd from the premise is invalid. For example, pointing to the “that you can stomach” part of your claim, and saying that the derivation was invalid in neglecting that part of the statement.

That appeal to absurdity is simply that, absurd.

Talking about changing ISIS from the inside as the IT administrator doesn't convince anybody that it's impossible to change an organization from within. It's a poor argument that might win Internet points for being a spicy hot take, especially on Twitter, but it does little to debunk the idea that, eg, an engineer could ethically join Facebook with the aims of elevating the company up, through working on the team to detect Russian trolling rings/Anti-vaxxers/MLM marketers.

If someone argues “X implies <you should do something stupid and bad>. It is absurd to conclude <you should do something stupid and bad>, so therefore, by reductio ad absurdum, X is false.” your refutation should not be “actually, reductio ad absurdum is invalid.”, but rather “It is not the case that <x> implies <you should do something stupid and bad>”.

Perhaps their derivation of the absurd conclusion from the claim <X> was based on a misunderstanding of the claim <X>, or perhaps their derivation of the absurd conclusion from it was based on some fallacy, or some false assumption.

But reductio is a valid logical step, so long as we have the validity of the argument that the absurd conclusion follows from the premise.

Hmm, thank you for the response.

In this specific case, X is:

"Personally, my take is the opposite: if you are an ethical person find the very worst company that you are still willing to work for and try to change them from the inside"

with the response, Y: "join ISIS' IT department"

What is the refutation of this particular "X implies Y" you would have used instead? Is there one that doesn't require refining X and instead attacks the Y? X is already

Hmm, thank you for the response.

In this specific case, X is:

"Personally, my take is the opposite: if you are an ethical person find the very worst company that you are still willing to work for and try to change them from the inside"

with the response, Y: "join ISIS' IT department"

What is the refutation of this particular "X implies Y" you would have used instead? Is there one that doesn't require refining X and instead attacks the Y? X is already verbose, and adding additional verbiage does not help the case (IMO)

Is it that stupid? Infiltration organizations at the IT layer can be pretty effective. See sting operations such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childs_Play_(website)

you're better off taking your advice about ethics from a party that is ethical

And when there is no such party?

Listen to your own conscience. In fact, that's enough.

No one who programs computers is going to change an organization from the inside. Company culture comes from the top.

Interesting idea, but based on personal anecdata I wouldn't advise it.

See also Zvi's recent series on what he terms "Immoral Mazes": https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/01/16/how-escape-from-immo...

His claim is that power in large organizations is a zero-sum game, and merely competing in this game in order to advance necessarily alters your personality and lifestyle. This is due to the demands that the game places on you. The whole series is worth reading.

But where is the true Scotsman??

> Just because we're all living in the status quo doesn't mean we can't change because we're all hypocrites for living with the status quo. Aspire to something better. Even if you're currently benefitting from or struggling against the status quo.

I'm not convinced by this argument. The status quo may exist because there are fundamental issues with changing it. Those issues don't go away with wishful thinking. Attempting to change things while praiseworthy may end up do more harm than good. At the best, if it doesn't end up changing the status quo, you just wasted energy, and bothered other people. But much more likely seems to me that we are trading some pros/cons for others, it's not a strict improvement or even an overall improvement.

If one tries to analyze attempts at change that failed there are lots of common patterns. One of them is being ignorant of the fundamental reasons why the issue you are trying to change is the way it is. Being ignorant of the reason behind that makes it much more likely you will fail at your task.

> I'm not convinced by this argument. The status quo may exist because there are fundamental issues with changing it. Those issues don't go away with wishful thinking. Attempting to change things while praiseworthy may end up do more harm than good. At the best, if it doesn't end up changing the status quo, you just wasted energy, and bothered other people. But much more likely seems to me that we are trading some pros/cons for others, it's not a strict improvement or even an overall improvement.

Can you imagine yourself arguing this in feudalism or the USSR?

Well, what if you were under feudalism or under the USSR, and decided that the problem with the status quo that you should try to solve was not “we don’t have plentiful enough food” but rather “people need food to live at all”.

One wouldn’t succeed in changing this.

Of course, some conceivable changes to the way things are, are both possible to achieve, and are overall beneficial to make.

Some changes are impossible (or effectively impossible) to make, and some are possible but have costs which outweigh the benefits.

I suppose the question is determining, or estimating, which is which.

(Though, I suppose the question isn’t just “what proportion are you right about as to what category they fall under” but rather, what is the average benefit and cost (and I suppose also the variance and other moments?) of your pursuit of the changes you choose to persue.)

The USSR very much came about due to a bunch of people deciding that the status quo had to go

As did its end.

"Can you imagine yourself arguing this in feudalism or the USSR"

You should read about Perestroyka.

I have to disagree. The role of (this kind of) "gotcha" is to say,

"Hey, you're asking something unrealistic; people are under the same constraints that lead you to do what you advised against. How can you expect us to operate under constraints even you can't live up to? Isn't that a prerequisite to giving such advice?"

With that said, I don't think executive pay with layoffs is a good example of unethical behavior. A better one would be their behavior in the Looking Glass/Mr. Robot extension [1] or the forced updates via a mislabeled feature to cover their own screwup [2].

If a non-profit is so careless with security to promote their marketing and analytics, why would you expect others to heed less a stronger siren's call?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15931730

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19823701

This response is completely warranted when you don't lead by example. It's easy to rally the troops to charge the front lines while hiding in your castle.

>> This response is completely warranted when you don't lead by example.

No, it is a logical fallacy.

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

This informal fallacy is generally unrecognized. Having a Wikipedia article doesn't make it an accepted norm. What you're doing is called the appeal to authority fallacy which is generally recognized.

Both of you are wrong. Appealing to fallacies doesn't make a good argument, but neither does pointing that out knock down an argument. That'd be the “fallacy fallacy”.

Appealing to "accepted norms" is another case of appealing to authority – except a less verifiable authority, in that case. Ironically, I am currently listing fallacies, which itself does not a good argument make – so I will add to it that that's not what “informal” means; the adjective is merely specifying that it is not a logical flaw, but instead falls into a broader category (such as implying stronger evidence than exists, or something).

Your original argument is flawed, however; it neglects that organisations cannot increase the talent available to ethical companies and decrease the talent available to unethical ones by participating in the job market, and invokes an argument similar to the tu quoque fallacy by implying that Mozilla's actions have any bearing on how good its advice is.

Merely calling out that you used a fallacy (and misidentified at that!) is not a sufficient counterargument alone.

Did you mean pb7, the poster you responded to, when you wrote "Your original argument"?

Yes.

Don't know where to begin with this one.

Yes, "informal" isn't "logical", hence the italics specifying as much.

No, my response wasn't a counterargument because what I was responding to wasn't an argument to begin with. There was nothing to defend because nothing of substance was produced.

No, my original argument is not flawed because your counterargument has nothing to do with the concept we've been discussing in this sub-thread.

Allow me to summarize: Mozilla sucks and yes, students should consider ethics in their job search which means they should probably not work for Mozilla.

You are correct in that there are no logical flaws with that argument. I misinterpreted what you were saying; sorry.

I don't see any actual logical fallacy here. Tu quoque is often misunderstood and mis-applied. Can you explain, in very specific terms, what you see as logically incorrect here?

There's not much to misunderstand, as the fallacy is fairly simple. Indeed, you can take the example shown in the wikipedia article and apply it directly to this topic:

Mozilla makes the argument that young people should consider the ethical issues before taking jobs.

HN user matheweis asserts that Mozilla's actions or past claims are inconsistent with their argument.

Therefore, the reasoning goes, the argument that young people should consider the ethical issues before taking jobs is false.

It should be incredibly clear how this line of reasoning is fallacious and therefore invalid.

"""

HN user matheweis asserts that Mozilla's actions or past claims are inconsistent with their argument.

Therefore, the reasoning goes, the argument that young people should consider the ethical issues before taking jobs is false.

"""

This sequence strikes me as non sequitur and strawman. That is how "the reasoning goes" when one actually commits tu quoque, but merely pointing out hypocrisy is not tu quoque.

Edit: It's possible that I have not read all of his comments. I'm only aware of this:

"Mozilla wants young techies to consider ethics in their jobs?

Rich words indeed from the corporation that more than doubled executive pay and then found themselves needing to lay off 70 people to save costs on a restructuring"

Being a hypocrite doesn't make you wrong. I believe everyone should give up flying because it's terrible for the environment, but I still fly on planes.

My personal hypocrisy doesn't make air travel any better for the planet.

Yes, I understand tu quoque, I just don't see it here. It appears to me that one must strawman the grandparents post in order to shoehorn tu quoque onto it.

Two things:

1) Mozilla isn't right or wrong in this case, they just lack credibility on the matter which, again, warrants the type of response that the original and many other commentators here had.

2) Your analogy isn't quite 1:1 with this situation. If you were a railroad tycoon that flew daily to perform business and made a public statement about how awful flying on planes is and how everyone should stop in lieu of train travel, it would be hard to take you seriously and you would be rightfully called out. Mozilla likes to identify itself with the ethical side yet it is no better than the companies it is criticizing, going as far as being partially funded by one of them.

1) I disagree. I believe Mozilla is right, and engineers should consider the ethical implications of the things they're asked to build. This argument would be valid even if made by Mark Zuckerberg himself.

I'm fairly certain that the parent meant to say that the original criticism of Mozilla did not make any statement about whether the content of Mozilla's proselytizing is right or wrong.

Ok, then I guess we can all agree Mozilla are big stinky baddies and also that this is good advice.

Yes, we can.

Nobody has claimed that Mozilla's argument is invalid just because Mozilla are hypocrites for making it. People are expressing displeasure over Mozilla's hypocrisy, which is a valid issue, orthogonal to the merits of their proselytizing.

Edit: Sorry if I come across as belaboring, I hadn't read your other post. :)

I can't speak for the original commenter, but my concern is that Mozilla might be pushing for a vision of ethics in tech which excludes some ethics they'd prefer not to follow.

No, this has nothing to do with what they said and everything to do with should anyone care that they said it. If a murderer says "don't murder", that is obviously true. But our response should be 'lol, who are you to inform my ethics or debate with me?'

Well other people hate people or institutions that preach moral behavior and don#t adhere to their own rules.

Lol Google gets the same criticism. Have the same yardstick for everyone.

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