what always fascinates me isn't the people who are in on in but the people who are kind of on the edge. From the Theranos case I remember employees not being allowed to enter rooms, secret chat rooms, people being followed by security etc... like, how can you work for a company like this and have a sort of Twilight Zone or Kafka novel experience for years and just be okay with it?
Realistically, the best and brightest left early and it's the people afraid of losing their jobs that feel compelled to shut up and toe the line.
Everybody I know in tech that's any good has no problem finding a new job on short notice, including people with less than one year of experience.
As you get older, jobs aren’t as interchangeable.
Consider at least: - compensation - scope - niche fields - culture - work life balance, family policies - location - golden handcuffs - network
I can (and have) found new high paying (at least they were for me at the time) jobs within 1-2 weeks of deciding to look to jump and signing an offer. But as I’ve grown older, that doesn’t fly anymore. If I’m taking a new role, I require certain compensation levels, and that comes with certain output/WLB expectations, which means I need to find it interesting, and my family needs to be ok with the value proposition.
All of those things narrow the search space down quite a bit. Then as you’re more and more senior, and if you can command a large compensation package, it’s usually no longer a 1-2 week ordeal (after initial phone interviews, I had 10 interview sessions over 3 weeks for my current role).
You’re also no longer being interviewed by random engineers and PMs, but higher ups with busier schedules that means it’s no longer a concise 4-5 hour thing.
You might eventually hit a stage in your career where as a candidate, you get to pick a panel for you to interview for a second on-site. These things take time to coordinate and schedule.
If you think this is wild, just move to SV and it'll become your new normal.
If it was that obvious then we wouldn't even have interviews.
In a well-run humanities degree you would never pass the first year without being able to critically engage with difficult ideas, although I would have no trouble believing there are institutions that offer poorly-run ones.
I'll also raise the point a lot more people simply don't care or don't believe these things to be unethical than I think a lot of people are willing to admit.
Discussing the different sides of difficult ideas in a classroom setting is not critical thinking. The ideas don’t even need to be “difficult” to practice critical thinking on.
Humanities does focus a lot on teaching students the current critical views of lots of things in society. But they focus far too much on the substance of the critiques rather than the process of generating and meaningfully evaluating them.
Philosophy's basic main tenet is to critically engage with ideas. ONE aspect of that is to engage ideas in the politic sense
And humanities students no longer do this. If they did, the notion of suppressing the communication of ideas rather than refuting them would be repugnant. However, this instead the first tool reached for by students who find something uncomfortable. Title 9 inquisitions, etc.
It’s not necessarily brainwashing, but it’s awfully coincidental they have nearly uniform political opinions coming out of university and can’t defend them when critically challenged.
Having taken the time to pursue some amount of humanities education next to an engineering degree, this isn't even close to true. If anything, humanities education is a celebration of all the things that it can mean to be human. That certain ideas are currently broadly in vogue in society (in this case I guess for the vocal minority you could say it is "nice at all costs" and "being nice should be criminal" with very little in between) is immaterial to what's happening in such a classroom.
it is necessary but not sufficient.
Did Einstein make relativity or Nietzsche "Thus Spake Zarathustra " in a vacuum?
It can't be a requirement, because at some point there was a first great thinker. That one appeared in a nominal vacuum because otherwise they wouldn't be the first.
A man that somehow survived being raised by wolves would be tremendously irrevocably mentally stunted. We have evolved to learn language from the people around us as children.
Einstein did not read about Kierkegaard to form theories on relativity.
You’re confusing studying philosophy with critical thinking. You can think critically with a few basic logic rules and zero knowledge on existentialism.
Guess what? That company does not exist today.
I'm assuming by your concurrence with the comment above you and your association of that comment with "blindspots of morality" that you believe advertising is immoral. Forgive me if this is mistaken, but hopefully it's clear at least how I came by this impression. I am here to tell you that a person can be a reader of Orwell, or Mieville, or whoever, and still not agree with you on a position like the one you've implicitly espoused. You can have similar base principles as someone and come to very different moral conclusions based on a number of things, like access to different data or relatively subtle nuances in you take on some of those principles.
They're not asking for someone to read some particular books they like, but to go reading around and sampling the variety. Your criticism only really applies to the former.
There’s a lot of bullshit papers in every field (including computer science) now, due to the corporatization of universities and its chase for numerical metrics. It’s our job as independent thinkers to wade through the bullshit, find the hidden gems, and arrive at our own conclusions. My current take is that if you’re actually trying to find some serious philosophy, don’t look at journal papers but actual full books by philosophers (which is becoming rarer and rarer due to the incentives to pump out high-metric papers).
Nope. With the possible exception of moral philosophy. And even then, you get most "points" for making sound arguments for (what most people would consider to be) morally dubious standpoints, which is precisely the dynamic in play at all of these ethically bankrupt tech companies.
People can think different things than you or do things that you don't find acceptable and still conform to their own system of ethics (or model of morality). You may not approve, but that doesn't make "ethically bankrupt" a meaningful value judgement. It almost doesn't say anything at all, except perhaps about your views on ethical and moral absolutism.
I have never heard anyone claim the first (Mind you, I don't go out of my way to ask people to say incredibly stupid things), but I have frequently heard the second statement getting misrepresented as the first. [1][2]
And there's also an entire canyon of statements on the spectrum[3] between the two, many of which I have heard.
[1] Mostly by engineers on, ah, this website.
[2] It's rather easy to make such a misrepresentation, just do a direct quote that drops everything after the word 'ads'.
[3] 'People prefer looking at ads[2] over paying', 'People prefer looking at X ads[2] over Y ads', etc, etc, etc.
This is a good distinction, if it also contains the nub of the problem - "with commercial intent". FAANG have very little (no, they have no) way of telling if my intent is commercial or just day to day existence.
I spend most of my life not wanting to buy stuff, and yet most of my online interaction assumes that I am wallet out ready to buy ... something.
(I assume (as a straight man) this is what most women feel like on a night out.)
this is also why I think duckduckgo has the right approach - for all FAANGs targeting based in behaviour etc, they are trying 99% of the time not to present the best match given commercial intent but they are trying to convert non-commercial behaviour into commercial behaviour. No wonder the ad conversion rates are poor. And we could get pretty much same response rates with context-only ads ala duckduckgo - or even a tag in google like "shopping: men's trainers"
In short FAANG are like those guys trying to "neg" women into sex. All the effort is in the wrong place.
If you live a truly ascetic life, it's possible that you don't make those kinds of searches.
It's not, but that's not what this subthread is about.
OK: who was phil hartman, alan may quotes, history of netscape, treatment for wrenched neck muscle, dad jokes and campsites in the new forest.
So yes, you could sell me something related to each of those (a dad joke book, a phil hartman dvd) but there is no commercial intent there except for the last, and that's more research than intent.
I am not spending my life in a state of purchasing arousal (I think the analogy to women navigating a world of men is interesting)
But more importantly the lead quality is terrible. I think this is what people are learning - FAANG almost always provides low quality lead density. (More research needed)
It may be a good explanation of Amazon's 20 billion dollar new ad business - if you search for anything in amazon you are almost certainly doing so with commercial intent.
Jeff might win again :-)
You can’t boil a frog like that.
Trees? Isn't the traditional myth they jump off cliffs to drown in the ocean, as exemplified by the old Disney documentary where they filmed it, but in reality it was a river they were crossing, and the species depicted isn't even known to migrate?[1]
Not trying to be pedantic, it's just interesting how these things shift and mutate over time and culture.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Wilderness_(film)#Contro...
What practices do you have in mind?
One can only wonder!
I.e, I imagine a lot of Apple corporate culture has similar restrictions, yet as far as we know, they're not committing fraud like that.
Theranos, by contrast, did not have anything functioning. Ubiome seeks not to have either though I admit it is less clear a case without expertise.
Even if you work there and have a bad feeling you are probably doubting yourself quickly when you read that you are actually working for the hottest company in SV.
Unless your work interfaces with what happens in those silos, you generally don't have any idea about what's going on in the Android Hardware Testing building, or the garage out of which Project Loon ran before it was shut down.
It's a lot stranger in a small start-up.
I just can’t figure if 90%, or 99%?
Every profession, and every job, people look the other way on truth, and moral issues.
I usually have more respect for the criminal who admits he steals, and cheats, for a living.
This is providing employees only as much information as needed to do their job. Apple, for instance, seems to do this. So it might not ring any alarm bells with the employee.
You're not a "slave". You're extremely well paid with in-demand skills, and you could do something else with them. If you keep doing this, you're no better than the tobacco merchants.
This potentially is another argument for laws / regulation.
Regulation is required in such cases. It's unrealistic to expect otherwise.
> no better than the tobacco merchants
Prior to a certain time, tobacco producers honestly had no idea how harmful their product was. Once they found out, they actively tried to hide that fact from everyone. I don't much like adtech, but unlike tobacco it doesn't cause direct physical harm to the individual. They're also pretty up front about the fact that they try to track you.
I often feel guilty for not being as altuistic as I'd like, but at least I know I'm not using my skills to do something that a net negative for humanity.
“Hun, I think its time to be realistic and provide for us”
But people on the internet said every unideal thing at work means I should get a new job
While employees may have doubt, they can justify their actions by thinking they are doing "their" part correctly. Which, I can relate to.
If I am not doing pseudoscience and am working on tech / systems that are good in my domain, why would I bother about the whole picture? Morally, yes. But if you have loans to pay and a family to take care of, and are getting your salary on time, everything else is the management's fault.
I can get a job in a similar field somewhere else.
And, IMHO, it is the management's fault out and out. The reason they get to take the big cheques is because they bear the responsibility.
It's not the responsibility of the average lower level worker to worry about it.
To some extent, companies like Theranos succumb to the greed and vanity of its founders.
Sure, the idea is revolutionary, but when the time comes where you realize you have a lemon, it ought to be shut down, or pivoted.
Which is what Madoff did, I believe.
The following is probably just an already completely debunked conspiracy theory with zero basis in fact but what you describe is precisely how special compartmentalized intelligence works. Maybe many of the corporate and government organizations in security and intelligence operate in this siloed way, possibly at the risk of a lack of oversight and accountability which helps any abuses go unaddressed. Official secrecy oaths and classification perhaps compounds this vulnerability to misuse.
And except for the public heads very occasionally rolling, it's likely nobody takes responsibility (in a justice sense) when abuses occur. How do you get people to carry our these things? Simple finance, and isolation could be one way as mentioned. Coercive control via blackmail, planting evidence, fake accusations or intimidation could be other effective methods, especially when you need to secure the cooperation of key people outside the organization, and especially when your daily work involves intelligence collection and deception.
If it occurs at a deep level under the security and compartmentalization shields, then it's unlikely checks and balances could correct it if this sort of corruption was occurring.
A combination of compartmentalization and churn can keep the charade up for quite a while, and if executed well you can have a pretty big operation with only one or two people being in on it.
I figured something was off but there's a whole gradial spectrum of Schroedinger's Accomplices where most people can seem to be conners or conned.
For this reason, I found the documentaries on NXIVM (Seduced, The Vow) quite interesting - the way the protagonists are framed and how everyone seems to have plausible deniability even with all the video material.
I disagree with your moral conclusion - we all have responsibility as individuals with regards to what our work contributes to. This goes for anything from military personnel to software engineers. That you don't have legal risk doesn't mean you don't have ethical responsibility.
Does that really work in the real world? When you don't have workplace rights and concepts like "at will employment", can you really expect the individual to have any sympathy towards the company or society?
If you and your job is as expendable as a tissue and you struggle your whole life to get one, be in one and earn the almighty dollar, where the lack of the dollar means your kids go hungry and cold, would you place higher priority on morals for "the greater good"?
Those who are made to do un-ethical things in companies are usually picked because they have no other way than to be in the job, or are greedy enough to put their morals behind them.
Good luck trying to force morality on either of them.
I think you conflate these two things somewhat:
Of course there are always extreme situations when people are left with tough decisions and have to choose between "doing the right thing" and sustaining themselves and their family.
Separately, there are egotistic people who will disregard the consequences of their actions on others. For those who only care about themselves, it is hard to change things without changing incentive structures.
Finally, some are just ignorant because they don't know or didn't think it through deeply.
Neither of these are justifications to look the other way for those who can find employment either way and are choosing between an $80k job and a $200k job.
When you read about iphone development Apple isn't that different. Only Jobs and a few other people knew the whole picture. The rest worked on their little area while not seeing the whole product.
I was there at the beginning, then you start to see it. The closed founder meetings, no more team meetings. The hushed conversations at lunch. The rumor mill started to circle - VC money running out. The CEO blew all the money on coke and hookers. Nobody wants to answer basic questions like why the rollout of the new product is taking weeks and weeks to get going.
People KNOW what's going on, but nobody wants to jump off the ship, only to find out the company figures it out and all your co-workers are now millionaires and you're back at some other startup busting your ass for some unknown future.
People hang on, believing its going to happen, then you show up one day and the office is dark, the cop outside says you're not working today or tomorrow or ever really and you should go home. You hold out hope the company can pull out the nosedive, and when it doesn't, you have to go through the five stages of bereavement until you accept that it was really doomed from the start and you should have seen it but didn't want to believe this company was really just a complete façade to fleece money from some big VC firm.
That's why you have to empower new hires to question your methods: someone from outside will see what is not normal, if you dismiss them you may be missing opportunities to right things before you crash.
I guess from the inside it's not always so clear to the little guy what's normal company weirdness and what's fraudulent. Although higher up execs should know.
Most corporate work is like this. Secrets everywhere, managers acting like they have stuff to hide, actual crimes happening off-camera (and sometimes on-camera). If you spend a year or so working in such an environment it just doesn't really raise your eyebrows unless something really extreme happens. Anything below acute grievous bodily harm is background noise.
Are you saying that you had the exact same list of bacteria and % of each?
Test are not identical. I have a collection of hundreds of different results group by a few medical conditions I was researching.
The data is extremely detailed and changes to diet reflect changes to samples.
Can you verify that they changed in ways that corresponded with your diet? It's possible if they were exceptionally lazy that they just generated a new report for each date haha.
My favourite blogger was a women who's sport involved falling into the dirt and eating it often as a result. Her bacteria profile was mostly a bacteria type found in dirt.
The field is open for a better managed company to take on these challeges.
It's common in the industry in general to sell software you haven't built yet. Even IBM did it with Watson Health.
If so I suspect most people can see there is a gulf of difference between offering a service on a website and saying its currently unavailable when people hit 'buy' vs "securities fraud, conspiracy to commit health care fraud and money laundering."
That said, it told me my composition was like that of an East African, which I am not. That wouldn’t surprise me as I have gut issues. My big hope for the next 30 years is we meaningfully crack the nut on microbiomes and can bring the next major evolution in medicine to a reality. We need these kinds of companies as a step 1.