Why do people work for companies like this? Have they no compassion for their fellow humans?
Now you can come claiming well that's bullshit. But that can again be said for most of the companies.
One of the things that drove me nuts about the Qanon family of conspiracy theories, despite them being insane, was the rhetoric their followers used, calling the US government "the good guys". First of all, what conspiracy theory actually suggests that the government is on their side and not out to get them, and second, do Q followers think we're in a superhero movie with good guys and bad guys?
Very rarely it backfires & we get things like this.
Overwhelmingly, most people think this is fine.
I hate it here.
I'd expect most Facebook employees working on the main project feel like they are doing good in the world helping people connect with their friends and families, organizing events, etc...
For Google I'd expect most employees feel like their products (search, android, chrome, chrome os, maps, gmail, etc...) help billions of people in positive ways.
(Not to change the subject, but this always strikes me as funny when people debate misinformation; some of the most damaging misinformation of the past 50 years was disseminated first and most intensely through the internal channels of powerful institutions.)
If you work at a company because it has a great engineering culture, but the work it happens to make it super efficient to turn babies into cowfeed, you’re still evil…for not thinking about the meaning of what you do.
If you work at a company because it has an awesome engineering culture, and the work is to make it really easy and efficient for other companies to do whatever they do, how do you assess (and take responsibility) for your work? Can you? If you can’t, what are you doing?
If you work in the cloud, this is you.
I was pretty clear in locating the root of evil in thoughtlessness.
1) Doesn't wish to discuss the ethics at all.
2) The working conditions are very good.
What you're assuming was meant wasn't actually said either. Make your case. Make well. Make it clearly and forcefully but please don't go in for those kind of hollywood-drama-style courtroom argument tricks, it's not helpful to any given discussion.
Case in point, BT GMOs have only trained the insect population for resistance to it: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2011/08/researchers-identif...
https://geneticliteracyproject.org/gmo-faq/do-gmo-bt-insect-...
https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/06/13/9999-pesticides-we-eat-...
RoundUp. We are talking about RoundUp being sprayed onto foods. Not glyphosate. That is a tactic to avoid talking about the tests involving RoundUp.
Yes, you and Monsanto are shifting the goalposts. RoundUp is sprayed onto foods. Studies show that RoundUp is toxic. Monsanto funded a bunch of studies on glysophate in isolation to try and show that RoundUp is not toxic. RoundUp has chemicals that make it possible for Glysophate to permeate the cells.
By the way, we did see health problems. Farmers and farmhands successfully sued Monsanto for health problems caused by RoundUp.
Philanthropy should be done by entities dedicated to it and ethically responsible, not as a camouflage for private data brokering.
Technically and legally both are different, but I still see both as funnelling data to advertisers.
Not every position is responsible for the worst aspects of every decision made at a company/institution. No company is perfectly ethical, as people aren't perfectly ethical. Most of the work at Monsanto is for the greater good, and the world is a better place for it being around.
Compassion doesn't pay and my second home won't pay for itself.
Yes. Compassion for your fellow humans is quite unnatural for a lot of people.
It's why Christianity was a thing - a non trivial percentage of the population will only pretend to be a human being out of fear.
Could you please quantify? I recall reading the exact opposite conclusion in behavioral and psychological science journals. It’s the reason why the military has to break people down to teach them to kill. Our natural reaction is to have compassion for each other and not to kill each other.
We are a cooperative species that works well together and survives as a group. If we weren’t naturally compassionate, the human endeavor would have died out a long time ago. It also goes a long way to explain why things like hatred, racism, and subjugation of the other require massive amounts of propaganda and disinformation to perpetuate themselves.
I also recall reading in specific cases where compassion seems to be lacking, that there are larger cultural, religious, tribal, criminal, and social pressures at work influencing the outcome of human behavior to limit compassion. Once these forces are controlled for (often with the help of changes to the legal system) compassion tends to return to normal, average levels. Examples might include Good Samaritan laws.
It is my experience that more people want to help than hurt, more people want to promote the general welfare of the group rather than a select few, and more people desire to see others happy and prosperous, rather than unhappy and suffering.
This enduring, popular myth that everyone is out for themselves and doesn’t care about anyone else is the product of larger, psychopathic forces at work wishing to control society for its own purposes. The masses of humanity wish to live peacefully and in harmony with others. It is a very tiny few that have chosen to take power and use it against others. They are the ones that lack compassion, not the whole of humanity.
Over many decades, I’ve personally made note of and observed a strange and unusual undercurrent to popular culture that seeks to make people more aggressive, violent, and unnecessarily competitive and war-like, while attempting to denigrate, decrease, and diminish our proclivity for sharing and cooperation. This behavioral system of control is obvious and omnipresent once you start looking for it. It is not natural and it only serves to increase inequality and give power to fewer and fewer people.
The dunbar number limits that cooperative inclination.
> It also goes a long way to explain why things like hatred, racism, and subjugation of the other require massive amounts of propaganda and disinformation to perpetuate themselves.
This exists without the propaganda and misinformation. Tribes are an evolved social form.
If you are compassionate, surely your time is better spent trying to solve that problem, rather than posting on HackerNews?