Mission Protocol
missionprotocol.org
missionprotocol.org
This brings to mind what Snowden revealed to the world. Few inside the CIA new about domestic warrantless surveillance.
Had Snowden followed the "Mission Protocol," we might still not be aware of the laws being broken routinely in the name of security.
Following the Mission Protocol seems like a thinly-disguised attempt to get workers to subject themselves to someone else's agenda.
I mean, isn't this just a fancy way of saying that the ends justify the means? Every mission is political in one way or another.
> Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corporation (informally Booz Allen) is the parent of Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., an American management and information technology consulting firm, headquartered in McLean, Virginia, in Greater Washington, D.C.
I wasn't aware. /s
Contractors are also protected under existing whistleblower laws. There are clearly codified protocols for reporting and handling instances of governmental abuse. Any contractor that is dealing with sensitive information is working with either a Confidential, Secret, or Top Secret clearance. These projects and clearances are something you are specifically hired for, or voluntarily agree to participate in.
https://www.cncsoig.gov/contractor-whistleblower-protection-...
Again, stop obfuscating.
You're grasping at straws.
Gentle nudge to take a look at the HN etiquette guide. Your comment sticks out in a very negative way, and hurts the culture we want to foster.
It's very difficult to create meaningful and impactful change to improve society, and this advocates being laser-focused to give your mission the best chance be successful. If all (good) missions are given their full attention, they all have a higher chance of success instead of everyone trying to trying to do everything, and then not doing any mission well enough to be successful.
It is advocating for people to choose a company with a mission they believe in because they think it can make a positive contribution to society. For example, if you care about having a world-wide open financial system but take a job at Tesla, according to the Mission Protocol you would be doing a disservice to bringing clean energy to the world if you also asked Tesla to put effort into contributing to an open financial system.
>...isn't this just a fancy way of saying that the ends justify the means?
No, It doesn't discourage anyone from questioning the groups action at all. It should stop companies from having to decorate their office according to the current pride month to make a political statement that is completely irrelevant to its mission.
Whether e.g. my colleagues that happen to be minorities feel comfortable in the working environment is super important for me as an employee, and should be important to the company too. Even as a purely profit-driven incentive, but hopefully also because empathy is a thing that exists.
My colleagues without citizenship, gender-minorities, and ethnic minorities in general are, for example impacted disproportionately by the policies of the current administration. If one of these colleagues talks about "politics" that aren't directly relevant to the mission, but impact them deeply as humans and emotional beings, they shouldn't be shut down. For them, it might instill a degree of confidence in the organization if the company, instead of ignoring their plight, chose to actively support them.
If you are mistreated by others AT WORK for whatever reason including political reasons then you have (should have) a way to report that. The Mission Protocol isn't about looking away from wrongdoings its about focusing on the mission and avoiding mission non-critical stuff. Your views on whatever outside of that scope can be emotionally affected by current events but that can not and should not be in the way of the companies mission.
To take it out of racial lines, imagine how scared a member of the LGBT community must feel as the supreme court justice hearings, which could result in the reversal of crucial protections for that group, are playing out. My point here is that caring about the well-being of your colleagues and/or your employees should necessarily include the singular issues which negatively affect them to the degree that current events seem to have. Or, at least has for the people that I have spoken to.
I want to make it clear that the above argument isn't that "a group should speak out because they have a voice", even if I think such an argument could be made quite strongly. Rather, it's an argument focusing solely on context of keeping employees and/or colleagues somewhat happier, and less affected by events like we've seen. It's also a way to foster loyalty. If someone thinks their employer has their back, they're more likely to have the back of their employer too.
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On the topic of "at work" problems relating to political issues. Recently there has been a some high-profile but, in my view, quite meaningless changes proposed. Like GitHub changing the default branch name. It's a trivial change, doesn't do anything meaningful about the real problems faced by minorities, and primarily is a way to score a few feel-good brownie points. However, it still had an effect on the people I've talked to about this. Because when 30% of your colleagues care so strongly about _not_ changing the default branch name - something that, again, is utterly trivial and well-supported - it makes them feel less welcome. A change so small and trivial, suggested by some in a well intentioned effort to be nice, turns into exclusionary act by the employee that so strongly feel making that change is preposterous.
You might say that the change shouldn't have been suggested in the first place, and thus the whole thing would be avoided. But the conversation about that change was happening everywhere online in every technology-related sphere. You'd be hard-pressed to follow any news in our industry and miss the conversation. Which brings us back to the crux. It's such a small change that doesn't really matter to most people, but to some it _is_ important. Why not?
Work doesn't happen in a bubble with no connection to the outside world. The work affects the real world, and the real world effects the work. It's a two-way street that you can't ignore.
It'll be interesting to see if this is a competitive advantage. Personally, I think it is. I would happily accept a PR from a guy who wants to kill me. He can't kill me or hurt me in a PR.
Personally, I'd also prefer to (metaphorically) drive right off the cliff at full pace with a bunch of people who also think it's the right way than go nowhere because none of us agree on where to go.
We might be inclined to ask ourselves what it would have looked like for lunch counters in 1958 to have done the same, and why that doesn't fly now.
Setting boundaries on an organization's objectives is certainly a worthwhile thing to do, because coordination is hard and any alignment helps, but it is just going to reflect to consensus of the leadership regardless.
If a founder of a lunch restaurant starts out by saying "hello everyone, I'm here to make the best lunches possible but only for southern white people" I suspect, given my experience with lunches on three continents and in 37 states in the US, that he is going to have a hard time finding people who would actually be able to make good lunches.
Which is the point.
This does two things: it focuses people on what the actual mission of their company is or should be, and it can expose the kinds of missions that are nuts, or counter-productive, or just plain bad.
Which sounds fine, but Woolworth's chose not to serve Black Americans. This was legal[0]. With the benefit of hindsight, we can claim that refusing to serve Black people was indeed "taking a side", but there were places where supporting the pro-integration people was breaking the law. And refusing to serve Black people, until they staged sit ins, didn't appear to be taking a side, because it wasn't uncommon. It was the way most places worked.
Even the mission to "serve everyone a sandwich" doesn't require addressing segregation, you can have separate lunch counters and serve everyone. Perhaps that's fine, people at the time certainly thought it was.
[0]: https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/the-greensboro-...
Idk, "we make [my edit: great] sandwiches", which sounds like a great mission, seems very much entwined with who gets to eat said sandwiches - especially if they're delicious. Since if you are denying certain classes the right to enjoy your awesome sandwiches, your sandwiches probably aren't that great to begin with.
If I steel man your argument about having segregated counter space - that they'd excuse the segregation because if everyone has separate counter space to eat the sandwich the underlying differences don't matter -, what I'm left thinking about is that, well, the experience of having a great sandwich also has to do with the environment in which you eat it. Who wants to eat a delicious sandwich when you have to sit at a crappy table, with crappy chairs and bad service? No one, that's who.
And then we're back to my original point about artificially constraining the market for awesome sandwiches.
You say that someone could justify that. I'm saying they could also do the opposite. My point is that a "mission-oriented" code of conduct if you will allows the people who set the mission (read: leadership) to set the ethics too.
Fighting segregation can be part of the mission, or not. But if it isn't, you can't work on it.
It's hard to blame someone who's just trying to get by for taking a job, and I'm not especially interested in levying blame. What I'm more interested in is ensuring that people feel able to lodge their complaints about injustices.
People should be political about which missions they support. What I think is wrong is accepting a position at a company knowing what their mission is, and then using one's position at the company to push for a different mission while castigating others in the company for not doing the same. If media reports are correct, this is what happened at Coinbase, as a handful of employees refused to work unless their CEO made a political statement about the issue of alleged systemic racial injustice against black Americans.
As for lodging their complaints about injustice - that's vague. Injustice in the workplace? Nothing in the protocol discourages that. Or injustice in the wider world? The complaints should be lodged with the relevant parties, outside of the workplace.
It isn't! It's strictly better to boycott than to abide.
The observations are as follows:
* Boycotting is, for a multitude of reasons, not always a reasonable option for individuals
* Companies are aware that some of their best potential talent won't work for them unless they emphasize at least some social good
* It's not especially surprising that people who are attracted by the promise of some social good want more, and are upset or angry when they realize that their company's ethical stances are superficial or self-serving
* Conversely, it's not especially surprising that companies that aggressively pursue "apolitical" positions are the ones that are perhaps the most objectionable: defense contractors, financial companies that benefit from organized crime, &c, and find themselves in the company of employees who actively favor the company's unethical positions
To be clear: it's a double bind for companies, and it's always been one. I wouldn't want it any other way!
At the risk of being maybe a little plaintive: what happens when that mission is bad? It's not clear to this (government-funded) researcher that good (meaning quality) work, even when it's always open-sourced, translates to a good (meaning ethical) mission.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding that you're saying, but wouldn't this imply that unionisation from within ought to necessarily always fail? It's a pretty textbook example of activism, and is generally pointed to as one of the great strengths of the American midcentury.
This doesn't make an engineer who works at a car startup a bad person. It's just an admonishment to maybe be a little more cognizant of the bigger picture that we're all a part of.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/04/new-york-sou...
Not what's intended, but works well enough.
As if employees or the culture at the company or conversation about a changing world or taking in new information and adapting (etc. * 100) could have no positive impact.
It should just be about code (or whatever the project is made of). We need to get back to a system that maximises the project, not bike shedding.
https://missionprotocol.org/codeofconduct/ "Our objective is to focus on the mission we set out to accomplish, which we believe will produce an important social good in the world"
This can be hard if people came to the project for difference reasons and it is an interesting point, because missions can be narrowly or broadly defined. They can be framed in terms of a variety of ends.
But if you can agree on what the common ground looks like ... which might beed a BDFL or steering committee, then you can proceed from that point.
I don't think there is any way to get around the potential for misuse or misappropriation though. Either those concerns are in scope or out of scope of the project. The framing of a mission presumes they are ignored unless explicitly accounted for the in the mission itself.
Is the mission of the Linux Kernel to build a core of a "free" in the GNU/stallman sense OS? Or is to just build a world-class os for diverse environment that just happens to be copy-left licensed as a means to encourage broad participation? If maintainers of proprietary drivers needs more hoo
It would be great if companies could work towards something greater but the incentives are not aligned with how the system is currently built.
identity & individualism? that's the new creed being pushed from above. ...only it's not new, it precedes the french revolution. divide and conquer. rule by banking elite, who continue to work to institute neomarxism across nations.
Honestly though, I go somewhere where I can contribute and my efforts and time in exchange for money. Work is work, it's not who I am. That being said I get the point of the Bill Ayres crowd with this zinger "How will you live your life so that it doesn't make a mockery of your values?"
Like, yeah- If I was a die hard Catholic I may have issues working writing software to make abortions easier. On the flipside if I were an Environmentalist I am sure I would have issues working at BP drilling in Alaska or something.
Dont work for BP and then complain that they are expanding drilling operations. Dont work at Planned Parenthood and then complain about free birth control. Opinions are like bootyholes, we all got em'. Better question is can you sit across from someone you disagree with and accomplish a common goal. That is professionalism. Rise above the differences you may learn that everyone's viewpoint has some shimmer of value- and you are not always right.
The interesting thing about a company is its path to making money, not that its objective is making money. Everyone knows it's for making money.
Facebook seems like the obvious counter example to this.
The whole statement seems to be: "Trust the business, we know it's going to be good. Ignore the larger societal issues we might be causing."
It's so vague as to never be controversial. However, their behavior in the details...the implementation, if you will.
Having been an employee where partisan politics are brought up in the workplace, I applaud that it seeks to provide actual teeth.
I understand that these are hard issues; I don't think SV companies are sitting on the solution under locked doors. But the strategy of "we're totally neutral, whatever happens, happens ¯\_(ツ)_/¯" is clearly not tenable. Solving that literally requires employees (and stakeholders) to take a stance about the world they want going forward, instead of letting this machine coast.
['] supercharged, made malignant, transmuted, whatever.
And how does this protocol help reach them.
Perhaps that part is commentary added by the submitter?
This is a substantial claim, and requires substantial evidence. Claiming that the Good (meaning the metaethical object) is objective is also a substantial claim, but observe that it's not necessary to be a moral realist to think that things can be, for all practical purposes, bad: in an intersubjective sense, a thing is bad if everybody around you agrees that it's bad.
They can all be wrong (and they frequently are!), but I'm going to go ahead and wager that they're not wrong about civil rights, not drone-striking civilians in other countries, indefinite detention of undocumented migrants, &c &c.
Show me the "good particle" and then we'll talk. Until then I can only rationally assume something doesn't exist until proven otherwise.
Not especially: there is an abundance of immanent ethical theories that define the Good (or Right) in terms of basic things in our grasp: the number of people who go hungry, the number of people who die of preventable diseases, &c. These don't require some spooky or transcendental universal fundamental: they're about seeing people suffer in ways that we can measure, seeing that many patterns of suffering are generalizable, and taking actions to countermand that.
(There are also plenty of ethical systems that are both immanent and non-consequentialist. I follow one of them. But it's maybe beyond the point of the original comment to explain them.)
The problem with all those theories, is they can be attacked as simply efforts to define "good" – with the ensuing problem that other people will define "good" in contrary ways, and if "good" is just a definition, then how can a mere definition be, in an objective sense, superior to a competing proposed definition?
That's basically G. E. Moore's argument against naturalistic objective ethics. If one agrees with it, then the only options available are to reject objective ethics, or to reject naturalism.
Neither intersubjective nor Kantian ethics have this problem: intersubjective ethics doesn't admit of an objective Good, and Kantian ethics don't admit of an is-ought distinction (all "ought"s are in fact "is"es that are bound in actions).
I agree, but intersubjective ethics might not actually work in practice in a world in which people are approaching ethics from wildly different starting points. Consider an issue like abortion – people who support the legal availability of abortion, and people who oppose it, have such widely different ethical views that I think there is no intersubjectivity to be had (on that issue at least)
> Kantian ethics don't admit of an is-ought distinction (all "ought"s are in fact "is"es that are bound in actions).
I wonder, if you could expand on that point?
In my mind, Kant's categorical imperative could be viewed as either a proposed definition of the good (in which case Moore's argument is applicable), or a claim about what actually is good (in which case it escape's Moore's argument)
Kant had a lot to say about normative ethics, but the question of what his metaethical views actually were seems more disputed: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/#Meta
It’s an academic opinion, but I believe it’s the latter: the very first line in the GMS asserts that the metaethical object itself is the good will: “nothing in the world (or indeed beyond it) can possibly be conceived as good without qualification except for the Good Will.”
The CI is the logical consequence (according to Kant) of what the good is. But that distinction is definitely subtle in the context of his normative ethics.
You don't have to agree with them, but it's a real phenomenon. It's up to you to decide how you handle it.
I agree, that if naturalism / physicalism / materialism is true, then the concept of "objective good" becomes hard to justify. Certainly, some people have tried, but a lot of people question whether those attempts can be successful – indeed, doubting those efforts is one thing that both naturalists who doubt the objectivity of the good, and non-naturalists who believe in the objectivity of the good but reject the idea that it can be given a naturalist foundation, can agree on.
Some of the more interesting (to me) arguments of the realists/naturalists (the justification question rather than the ontological question above), consider there to be emergent properties from the nature of interaction between agents. Basically game-theory. Presume we all were psychopaths, but intelligent self-maximizing agents and not the irrational kind. What behaviors would maximize achieving our ends? What behaviors would we need to hold others accountable to support our ends? You can take this thought experiment pretty far to get an "emergent" moral system with first-order properties similar to those we see in real societies. I find this insufficient though, you still need some base value system. Even the psychopath example presumes a set of ends for individuals like "continued survival" and so boils down to something like a form "utilitarianism."
But, in practice, what is good is highly contested, and open to philosophical and political debate. In some ways, something which is objective but very difficult to know with certainty is difficult to practically distinguish from the subjective.
If I am running an open source project, I would like to welcome contributions from people who have widely differing ideas of what the "good" is. Participation in the project should not require a general agreement on what is good, or even a general agreement on what the good is (in philosophical terms), simply an agreement on the bare minimum of shared ethics necessary for the project to successfully function.