Personally, I don't want to work with people who don't care about the end goal for practical reasons as much as anything else. For the sorts of companies I've worked for at least, they make sub-standard contributions. I work on a very product-centric engineering team in a complex domain where not knowing the domain well will seriously hamper your ability to plan, refine and execute on features and bug fixes. Sure, we have a product manager but we still need that deep knowledge and you're probably only going to obtain that by being into the product and fairly engaged with it and the company's mission.
Conversely I had another friend who switched out of his phd when he discovered every red cent of funding was somehow coming from the race to build killer robots. Props to you Henrik, if you ever read this!
I'm curious... since all advertising has the goal of modifying human behavior by definition (from the state of not buying your product/service, to buying it), would you consider all advertising to be toxic by your criterion?
And if not, where do you draw the line exactly?
The point isn't that I expect others to agree with me on this, but simply that I expect them to think about this and form opinions about it.
Some advertising is done as product discovery. You make something good, you want people to know about it. Some advertising is done to convince you to purchase regardless of its value proposition using psychological tricks. Or, since they were talking more generally about manipulating human behaviors, we can include 'dark patterns'.
not hiring someone just because of their internal philosophies feels like gate keeping to me.
if someone is a cynic and realizes most start ups arent out there "making the world a better place"... doesn't really have any bearing on their potential output.
I have a lot more respect for people who consider these things, and just have different opinions than I about what they consider worthy applications, than those who just consider it unnecessary to think about these things. We have an obligation, if we are going to call ourselves "engineers", to consider what we are working on from an ethical perspective.
- you started with ad systems as example of evil: they patently aren’t. They are more of a result of the deeper cause - folks don’t want to pay for things if possible. So now the bill gets moved to a different table, that’s all. All the humanitarian efforts (if any) are standing on the shoulders of the money generated from ads
- if someone says ‘I just want to solve hard problems’ - it is quite a leap from there to assuming they don’t care about social problems. May be they don’t feel empowered/qualified to tackle the big social questions and are just trying to make a living and possibly be productive doing so. Or they don’t want to tackle a social conversation in a workplace setting.
I am very wary of the forcing that’s happening of making everyone involved in social/philosophical questions whether they like it or not. A lot of people just want to make it through the day/build expertise in something and make it through their life. They’d prefer to pay taxes and let other entities / experts deal with those. This doesn’t mean apathy, it just means a lack of time and ability. I think that’s worth respecting.
What you are describing is apathy. You don't get to stand apart from the work that you do because it is hard.
- morality and ethics are a gradient and are fluidly getting defined as we evolve. Are you still immoral or apathetic if you use electricity generated from coal? Or are you saying we are all apathetic but this is the one instance you want to stake your argument on?
- almost all systems get misused over time: are all those makers apathetic? What about the intent of the hustlers using such systems?
Engineering work has an ethical element to it. I do not see how what you are your 'just asking questions' intersects with this.
You're being silly. The guy is explaining his perspective. He's explaining what he believes and why he believes it. He's not writing a thesis or constructing some logical argument. This isn't a debate. Applying the term "goal post moving" to this makes absolutely no sense.
I just feel like you're taking a confrontational approach rather than just trying to understand his position. Nothing he says is inherently contradictory.
Fwiw - I don’t work on ad systems. I was just stating my opinion about how borderline ethical considerations from misuse are pervading engineering and science today. What about intent?
My point isn’t that I won’t hire people who worked on such things, my point is I won’t hire people who are completely disinterested in the ethics of what they are doing. I’m not imagining this, I have worked with many people like this in my several-decades long career. Beyond the ethics, this is just good business, since people plowing ahead on things while being blind to ethics is how people get harmed and lawsuits get filed.
This isn’t a revolutionary concept in other engineering fields: you can lose your license if you violate certain codes of ethics, either maliciously or due to ignorance or apathy towards following them.
I never said that if someone doesn't care about the purpose of their work, they don't care about social problems.
If you're going to turn this into a debate, at least try not tearing down strawmen.
The point of my post wasn't to make strong claims about ad systems being universally evil. It's just like, my opinion man, that some are. The point was to state that I do not want to work with people who, knowingly, do their work in an ethical vacuum, focused entirely on the technical problems at hand.
>Very, very toxic things for society, like human behavior modification (ad) systems
You didn’t say those points about people’s intents, you just said you won’t hire them / won’t work with them.
Sorry for paraphrasing. My argument stands.
Yes you’re allowed to have whatever opinions you want to hold. But here you’re proclaiming it in a public space where it can definitely be construed as judgmental.
Finally you call my arguments as fighting a straw man and yet you construct one yourself: ‘folks who work in an ethical vacuum’. My whole point is that’s probably a very minuscule amount of folks and something you are refining as a true Scotsman from your previous generic statements. My whole response is around how most folks do consider it but file it under fair use expectations and move on - so it is not a fair opinion. That’s all.
You sound like you were offended by my characterization of ad systems and extrapolated a ton of imaginary arguments from there you’re attacking. I’m not sure who you are arguing with, but it sure isn’t me.
Let me give you a concrete example:
Imagine you are an software engineer tasked with working on a facial recognition system to help police identify known criminals to help find suspects near the time and location of a crime. It observes nearby people and assigns a probability to them being a known criminal. Police department demands 80% accuracy for the product.
You design such a system using some blackbox facial recognition AI, and you get the following results:
Overall 78% accuracy with:
6.5% False Positive rate 31% False negative rate
Not too bad, you tweak some things, hit your 80% accuracy without messing with the false positives too badly, and you meet the specification provided by the client. Mission accomplished and you're ready to ship right? Makes the company money? No problems?
Cool. Except, because you didn't really care that much about how the technology you deployed would be used or the ethics surrounding its use, you failed to consider the right performance targets despite what your client asked for and your system is nearly 100% racist.
What happened?
You trained on equal numbers of prison mugshots, and mugshot like photos of people with no criminal records. You failed to consider that black people are over represented in the US prison system. (38% of prisoners but 13% of US population) Your classifier just learned to label someone a likely criminal if they were black and essentially no other criteria.
Yet, the actual likelihood the people identified by the system as "criminals" in fact have a criminal history is at most somewhere ~33% despite the fact your system labels it as 80% likely. Worse, even if we have a hypothetical situation where blacks and non-blacks are represented in their average proportions, there's a near equal number of black and non-black people with criminal histories in the vicinity of the crime! Worse still, since people tend to be more segregated than that, when blacks are in even more of a minority there will be more non-blacks with criminal histories around. When blacks make up a greater proportion, the likelihood of being falsely accused goes up even more.
And FYI... such systems with similar flaws have actually been built and deployed in the past. How do you think that plays on trust in the company and the technology in general in the long run? Considering end-use ethics brings value.
Being a high performer is not a positive when someone's looking to take advantage of you.
I'll work with almost anyone who can form an argument that shows they thought hard on the ethics of what they worked on, even if I fundamentally disagree with their conclusions. The people I don't want to work with are the people who when I ask them this, say: "you know, I never really thought about it that much. I kind of just leave that to the people in charge, and focus on trying to do the best work I can." There are a lot of people like this, but they're not a cultural fit for teams I create.
Is the mere act of thinking enough for you like this, or does it have to go the right way? :)