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wuunderbar

Where do you draw the line? Would you classify anyone who worked at Facebook somebody you don't need to work with?

What about Uber, Google, AirBnb, Amazon, Amazon subsidiaries?

How are you going to convince others that they should pass on those too based on your particular ethical code?

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Sometimes you don't have to exactly identify the line to know that some things are on the wrong side of the line.

I personally don't have a line. As I said, someone working at a dubious place means I'll start out more suspicious about their ethics. Good people sometimes end up in bad places. But I'll definitely be interested to see their answers around non-technical topics and I'll pay special attention to how they behave in the practical parts of things.

And I don't think this is about my particular ethical code. Any company I work at is going to be focused on delivering value to users, not harming them. Creating value for others is fundamental to commerce, so it makes good business sense to hire people who care about that.

> How are you going to convince others that they should pass on those too based on your particular ethical code?

Every recruitment process I've ever been involved in required unanimity for a hire. I don't need to explain my blackball.

Juul sells mega-dose vaping products.

Facebook is a tool used by hundreds of millions of people to connect with their friends and family. Google is a search engine and video platform. Amazon sells everything. AWS underpins a large portion of the internet most people use today. Uber provides taxi and food-delivery services.

Unlike Juul, what these companies do isn't inherently evil or exploitative.

That's... naive. Facebook and Google are platforms for behavior modification. Their products are designed to be addictive so you spend more time on them than you really want, subjected to a barrage of tactics to get you to buy things or change your opinion on something.

Nothing about Facebook or Google is inherently addictive. People use Facebook and Google as tools. Hundreds of millions of people around the world use Facebook to keep in touch with old friends and family that don't live nearby, and even (right now) nearby friends and family that they can't safely visit in person. And if there's too many unviewed posts in your queue, you have the ability to easily control which friends you get posts from, and the type of posts you see, and even the type of ads you get if you want to mess around with that. I haven't seen anything on Facebook that tries to get me to buy things or change my opinion other than ads, which is the whole point of ads and is something endemic to modern society and isn't unique to Facebook. If you have a problem with ads, go back 100+ years in time and shoot the NYT editor of the day for introducing the concept to the world.

I don't know what it is about Google that is supposed to be addictive so I'm not even going to try to respond to that part.

There are lots of things that are fine in some situations for some people, but addictive in others. I'd be interested to see your data for your claim that Facebook isn't addictive. But there's no reason it couldn't be; things like gambling are very much addictive without having to inject anything.

Also, because we made a mistake decades ago doesn't mean we aren't allowed to complain about or correct it now. Cigarette smoking is a fine example of that. It was a mistake to start, but now that we better understand how bad it is for people, we're slowly ending it.

I don't need to prove that Facebook isn't addictive. You need to prove that it is.

One, I really don't. And two, you're the one making a positive claim that it's not addictive. If you don't want to back your claims, I can certainly live with ignoring them.

One, you really do need to show Facebook is addictive since you're the one arguing that it needs to be "corrected" from what it is now.

Two, I'm not making a positive claim that it's not addictive. I'm saying that it's not inherently addictive like an addictive substance that physiologically changes your brain and neurochemical pathways (i.e., nicotine). I fully accept that Facebook is addictive in the same way as video games, exercise, food, or sex, in that it generates a dopamine response.

"Inherently addictive" is not a term I see used. I believe the phrase you're looking for is "chemical dependence".

I also didn't argue that it needs to be "'corrected'". So again, I don't need to prove anything.

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