A Reader Asks How to Avoid Working for Evil
rachelbythebay.com
rachelbythebay.com
But then I realized looking back at my career, I have not worked for any evil companies to my knowledge, at least not cartoonishly evil. It seems most of the companies she mentions have one thing in common, they are by the bay, part of a local system that's one of the economic engines of the U.S and favours growth over any other considerations, including ethics.
So my conclusion from this post would be, if it matters to you, don't work in the bay? There are many industries beside software where good software engineers are needed and you can do good, challenging, and very innovative work "to make the world a better place".
Honestly, such as and how?
I worked for one company I thought had a good mission, and a good product (it wasn't ads!), ahead of its competitors. Lackluster marketing, then we got acquired and inept management sunk it, and ended up with those of us who worked on it laid off and it's all gone, now.
I'm in healthcare now, but it is really hard to move the needle. There's no way around integrating with providers, and they're driving a lot of absolutely bonkers technical decisions. I spent a lot of time building out brand new, but completely broken, things, because there's nobody designing the system.
Meanwhile recruiters routinely hit my inbox with information-free cold pitches. I'd kill for a lure that had bait attached to it. The last email that had a salary attached wanted a Senior Software Engineer but was offering less than what I started at in the industry as an entry-level engineer.
> don't work in the bay
I left the Bay, and it's not really changed anything from a work/career perspective. But I don't think it's morally acceptable to tell people to "just leave"; what if they have a home there? family? connections? Perhaps giving it all up might be the most pragmatic thing, but it might crush a soul in the meantime.
That said, the political climate of the Bay was "head, firmly in sand" when I left. I left partly because I do not see the Bay, collectively, being capable of solving the problems they face. (There are a few people trying — including a friend of mine I left behind. But they're hopelessly outnumbered.)
> if it matters to you
Maslow's hierarchy. Real rent is up, nominal compensation is down. People are getting laid off left and right. Being a millionaire is practically a pre-req to home ownership near any city. (And companies include "geographic adjustment" in compensation these days.)
You seem to have read my comment as saying snarkily "if you really cared you'd just leave", that's not what I intended to convey.
Of course I realize people have multi-faceted priorities, family, financial safety concerns, existing investments, and so on... I'm not telling people to leave as much as I'm saying if you care deeply about working for ethical companies, it seems like working in the bay area is not going to make it easy, and you'd probably have a easier time elsewhere.
There are plenty of cities where you don't need to be a millionaire to own a home, I have a friend who just bought a nice house in San Antonio for 200k. That's another advantage of working out of the bay.
Now I'm sure we have a line of people waiting to claim that they are evil, but we're running an experiment in Europe to find out what happens when horrible regimes stop providing oil - turns out there are serious risks of people starving or freezing to death. The loss to living standards is incalculable but large.
There is a great reason that companies are freed from the requirement to be morally good - because human instincts are not calibrated to run an 8-billion-strong postindustrial globe. It doesn't work. If we let people do things completely on instinct most people will die quite quickly, and the leadership will turn out to be corrupt anyway.
We do things this way because a lot of experiments were run, and free market economics gets much better results than all the systems people swear do better. It harnesses greed to the cause of ... if you won't admit it is good you have to at least admit it is effective. Honestly, I think it is good too. Good and evil are not the right mental tools here, morals don't cope with the scale that humans need to operate on now.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_corporate_prof...
Well I don't see how people in Western Europe (i.e. excluding Ukraine) are in danger of starving and I would actually argue the people that we are seeing being killed at the moment are a direct consequence of buying cheap energy no matter the ethics. If Europe would have invested more strongly into becoming energy independent instead of chasing the cheapest oil and gas, we might have a slighly lower standard of living, but much of European politics would not be infiltrated by money from resource oligarchs and likely Russia would never have invaded so people would not be dying in a pointless war.
In other words, not
Nothing happened with the two Chechenyan wars, with Georgia, nobody did anything about Syrian cities being bombed to rubble and the 2014 sanctions post-Crimea ware rather weak.
During that time everybody continued to buy gas, oil, electricity, fertilizer, aluminium and titanium. Clearly, the west did not care about things like that and it would be business like normal.
Except that this time it was found out there's a limit.
not to mention nuclear fuel (https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Framatome-and-Ro...)
Yet they are bound by many laws and regulations, beyond contract law and non-aggression, born of these instincts you malign, that (try to) prevent the worst of their greed. Laws covering worker safety, union-busting, antitrust and fair competition, child labor, truth in advertising, environmental protection, even requirements on the length and validity of warranties.
You have to ignore all of these constraints to arrive at the simplistic "greed is good" conclusion. A conclusion that implies not only that we should not add further prohibitions against newly-recognized "evil" behavior (e.g. web spying, devices locked against their owner, etc..), but also that we should remove the prohibitions currently in place.
We don't regulate companies to prevent "the worst of the greed" except by some naive definition. We regulate them so they mop up or don't leave messes in their wake, be these messes social or environmental.
Companies don't poison the water or use bad labor practices because they want to. Large organizations (Boeing, the Catholic church, the FBI, etc) don't "want". They respond to incentives. Companies do it because it's less un-profitable than the next best option and to not do that while their competitors do puts them at a disadvantage. Regulation only adjusts the incentive scale.
>You have to ignore all of these constraints to arrive at the simplistic "greed is good" conclusion
You have to ignore the difference between "good" and "can be harnessed for good" to come to that conclusion. You're implying meaning he didn't write because it makes a more easily defeated position.
Those messes are the worst of their greed that I was referring to. I have no idea what your objection is - that those laws didn't "mandate companies behave good", but merely "readjusted incentives to avoid undesirable outcomes"??
Of course laws are not as simplistic as "try to do good, avoid doing evil", but that doesn't mean that is not their aim.
I come to exactly the opposite conclusion from that.
We'd have been far better off not putting ourselves in that position, i.e. in a position of dependence on those regimes in the first place, not to mention funnelling billions into their treasuries. Countries like Russia and Saudi have been using our cash to prop up their repressive regimes for decades, causing untold pain to their population, building up their military and using those funds to destabilise democracies across the globe.
If we'd put that money into nuclear and renewables instead of being happy to embrace greed (and I'd have been fine with legislation to achieve that) we'd have energy security, we'd be looking at much less devastation from climate change and the world would be in a much better place in general.
The regulators have been squeezing the life out of the nuclear industry for what, 40 years now? There is that wonderful chart floating around [0] showing what regulators have done to the learning curve. You're not going to get a more hardened and cynical capitalist than me and I've been spewing for more than a decade about the Australian government blocking me from investing in nuclear power effectively. Their policy is a disaster on multiple levels.
It isn't greedy people holding back nuclear power, it is the dreamers looking for an industrial power supply that doesn't cause pollution while we run out of fossil fuels. It'd be great if we can find that in renewables, but we'd have gone heavy nuclear decades ago if it was left up to raw greed.
People also whinge about Texas being greedy with their massive investment in cheap renewables rather than winter hardening them. Damn those greedy people for going all in on cheap renewable, I suppose. Again, the issue isn't greed, it is the reactionaries getting antsy when capitalists do things the cheap way. I point out that the Texas grid was still better and cheaper than what the Germans managed with their Energiewende and social whatever it is they wanted to feel moral about.
[0] Figure 7.11 - https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop
Things break, and you need to be ready for blackouts. I'd still rather take cheap and 99% availability than expensive and 100%.
https://www.dw.com/en/berlin-blackout-raises-questions-over-...
Europe is actually pretty connected wrt the electricity network, so if we'll ever encounter an actual blackout you can expect it to be covered everywhere, especially in Chinese/Russian media as they'll be meme-ing how much better they're.
Despite having countless localized outages all the time, but hey... You know how dictatorships work. Can't let the truth get in the way of propaganda after all.
The linked article is about the fact that there isn't a plan how to handle a full blackout, precisely because there hasnt been one. It's the same for all developed nations, outage just haven't happened in ages so contingencies have been forgotten, basically.
2) In Texas you have to be ready for a 48 hour blackout in case your supplier is incompetent. In Germany you have to be ready for a 48 hour blackout in case of ... usual local incompetence? Although the Texan grid is obviously less reliable, that doesn't actually change the amount of preparation that households should be doing.
3) There is also a pretty reasonable argument that it is better to have a rare blackout than to have no plan or experience for a major blackout. It is terrible planning to assume that nothing can go wrong.
4) Texan greed got them to ~25% renewable penetration in their electricity mix. It is cheap and sustainable. The German energiewende has got them to around 40% renewable penetration and "highly dependent on Russian energy, as it gets more than half of the natural gas, a third of heating oil, and half of its coal imports from Russia. Due to this reliance, Germany blocked, delayed or watered down EU proposals to cut Russian energy imports amid the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine" [0]. This wasn't a close contest, the Texan regulators - the ones who leave it a bit more to greedy capitalists - are the ones that people should be putting in charge.
The failures of putting non-greedy people in charge of the German energy grid was so bad it had geopolitical consequences! That is why we try to leave it up to greedy people. If they'd listened to us greedy types they'd be knee-deep in reactors and not crippled by the threat of Russian sanctions. The people pushing the Energiewende thought they were a force for good, and it turns out they were the exact opposite. They were empowering a land war in Europe.
That experiment is basically switching one horrible regime with another (e.g. Aserbaidschan and Qatar), so I would argue that it was never really about morals at all, but rather geopolitics and power all along.
Continue doing more buisness with russia would simply be more expensive, as it would increase the cost of doing buisness with closer trading partners/allies.
"morals don't cope with the scale that humans need to operate on now."
So when was a time, when morals could and should have an influence on human operations? Slavery just ended recently (in most parts of the world) and your argument means for example continuing buisness with Nazi germany during the war (and holocaust). There is no line, when you say morals are not the right tool. So this means profiting of slave labour camps. The more and brutal exploitation, the more profit, the better?
I don't think so.
My stance is, that there is just no general solution and everything is case by case. By doing buisness with a random chinese company(e.g. buying something made in china), I do not endorse chinese politic. But if that specific company is involved with slave labour, then yes, I would support that slave system by buying from them and I would try to find a alternative.
<sarcasm> </sarcasm>
1. We have tried.
2. Doesn't work.
The plan "give greedy people incentives to make people materially better off" not only works, but works better than everything else we've tried. Ergo, we want more greed, not less evil.
But if your plan is to try to set up a bunch of moral slides that cause your desired outcome as the end of a chain of dominoes, well, best of luck but I am not signing on.
Unfortunately, due to scale issues, most software development jobs isn't on those companies. But each innovation that reduces the cost of development moves this relation into a better position.
I must admit I'm a little skeptical that they were not strictly amoral (which given the right incentives always tends to an almost ridiculous amount of evil), but I would really like to believe it.
Education. Non-profits. Hospitals.
Not that the software vendors I worked for in those industries were perfect. Nor were the customers. Evil, greed, ambition, and power came into play and brought negativity to them all. But it tended to center around a handful of poor leaders, and did not prevent the overall impact of the work being "neutral or better".
Do you think there could be a causal link between their lack of evil and the fact that they don’t exist anymore?
I believe you can find "problematic" companies everywhere. If it matters to you, go look at the pay. If they're paying enormous sums, they believe they can make much more. "Good things" usually don't offer that kind of profit margin.
That's not to say that shitty pay = good company, there's plenty of terrible people who are evil AND offer low salaries.
The big villains in USA are not that powerful in some other places, because people and their governments reign them in.
I had a job at a publicly traded company with an office (my office) in Ohio - and not headquartered from the bay but another part of the Midwest - and one day during pride month the CEO emailed everyone to say that they would NOT put up a pride flag. They went on to explain that they couldn’t because it would be upsetting, and if inclusivity flags were normal to display at the office, black people may want a flag too, and where would it end?.
They were a very generic company, and not particularly evil in other aspects of their business.
I have also worked at large FAANG companies in the bay. They treat employees way better (google’s shuttles! Free food! Equity Refreshers!). I would much rather be a Bay Area FAANG employee than an Ohio Generic Co employee. The way FAANG treats their employees isn’t evil.
There’s evil everywhere, IMO I might as well be treated well for being complicit towards it.
What next, is this poster going to take a flamethrower to the anthill in their backyard? Lets see how well that works.
The reasoning, other minorities, explicitly mentioning black minorities, may want attention isn’t a very “not-evil” thing to do. It’s a weird whataboutism that throws black employees under the bus as the ultimate problem they’re trying to avoid. This was in 2017, and not eg during the George Floyd protests, so it was really arbitrary to mention.
It’s a flag in an office park, for a month, it has no negative affect to the company except an hour of human effort to put up and take it down. It does have a positive affect for their employees, however. Even if it does “snowball” to other minority groups… really has minimal downsides.
What is particularly stunning was the action to email the company to say they wouldn’t put up a flag because black people may get ideas. That’s the action that is hard to understand because it draws attention to a decision that could be made quietly with less negative impact.
Because this is certainly not the case.
Most companies that hoist the pride flag probably do not care about gay rights any more than your previous employer. They just do it to mollify Western activist Twitter. Their Middle Eastern branches, if extant, will do the precise opposite in order to mollify Middle Eastern activist Twitter and not get kicked out of the conservative kingdoms/emirates.
Once you start consider most big companies as perfect psychopaths who know how to simulate deep feelings on the surface while having none inside, the world starts making a lot more sense.
Are they doing it because of those reasons? Maybe.
Should they really be in the same category as Epstein and Dahmer? methinks no, so maybe lighten up on the language there.
Case in point:
Imagine you find someone grasping a cliff edge by their fingertips. Pulling them back to safety is good! Pulling them back to safety only after they promise you all their worldly wealth forevermore is less good. Being in the business of offering people this deal is not better. Funding the effort to prevent people from restraining your exploitation of cliff danglers is still worse.
This isn't an insoluble moral puzzle. I don't think pharma is an ideal example for your larger point. Most businesses don't thrive on the desperation of their customers.
But I also don't think your point is correct. There are better and worse companies.
I understand one needs to make one's peace with one's choices. I've worked for companies that were doing evil (not exclusively, but at all). I've worked for companies that were mediocre at best. I'm currently working for a company that I would say is positively good. I got paid more by the evil companies. I have been happier working for the good companies though it's harder to support my family. But I understand people who choose to keep working for their evil company, particularly when others depend on their income. In one of the more egregious outbursts of evil at one of the companies I worked for I had friends who quit. They didn't want to be complicit. I stayed. I had kids and didn't want to throw my family into turmoil. But I saw the choice I was making.
I mean, pharma as an industry also creates the ability to pull people back from the edge.
Medicine isn't created out of thin air, the universe doesn't just owe us a steady supply of new innovations that have kept so many people alive and in better comfort. Money needs to be invested, that money has to be paid by someone.
(I'm not talking about specifics of the US healthcare system or anything, where there are problems, just pharma in general.)
Like seriously, what is your alternative?
If you work in medicine you have lots of ways to wash your conscience. Medical school is hard and expensive! You are saving lives! But in the end you can charge the rates you charge because your customer is desperate (to say nothing of the information asymmetry, the cost and difficulty of seeking a second opinion, etc.). There is a huge market failure here and that is the source of your enormous profit.
There are many alternative ways to achieve the same end without the market failure fleecing the unfortunate in the middle. Offer bounties for medical breakthroughs. Finance healthcare as a public good. This will reduce the rate of improvement in medical science because the payoff for breakthroughs will be less. Maybe this is the wrong way to go about it. But I'd rather take my chances with a less broken medical system. I've been fleeced many times in my life by the US healthcare system. If I have to sacrifice my well being for some cause, there are others I'd prefer. Will innovations slow if the US stops being a patsy? Yes. But I'd just like access to the medicine we already have.
It is not a bug, it is feature. And it is not the government, it is capitalism which endorses greed.
There are a very, very few organizations that don't fall into one of those categories.
Those that refuse to sell their soul will make ever so much less money than their colleagues. I've kept my soul, but I bet Rachel can keep the lights on.
Evil pays really well.
You’ve obviously never worked for a nonprofit :-)
As someone who co-ran a non-profit with a mission full time, I ended up deeply in personal debt as a result (of not being paid for years but still having living costs). Those running the non-profit ended up significantly worse off than other people working there. I'm still paying it off years later.
At mine, management were required to be volunteers (even full time), but other full time staff were paid salary and benefits.
Most people working there were also volunteers, but part time or occasional as they felt like it. They had time for day jobs.
The reason for this arrangement was because most members who co-owned it did not believe anyone should be paid, but we had a grant for premises and hired staff. Nobody wanted the hired staff to be in charge overall, as their incentives, skills and competencies were far more aligned with the premises owner and business angle, and not with the non-profit's mission. So it had to be run by motivated volunteers, and that included developing a type of non-profit business and manufacturing service, managing staff, as well as organising a large number of volunteers, events, teaching, safety, purchases, accounting, etc.
Boy did that combination take a lot of work for a long time. Like regular startups, we had a big idea and hoped it would grow to something we wanted to see in the world. It actually did really well for what it was.
The model broke for different reasons than the obvious one with sustainability, involving assholes and a commercial opportunist who offered the premises owner something better (which they then promptly failed to execute, destroying everything for everyone), just as ours was starting to flourish at a sustainable level and we were getting better at distributing the work and knowledge effectively.
I know.
I was nearly violently assaulted by the CEO of my NGO when I pointed out they justified our patltry salaries by the fact we’d make approximately the same on the GS scale while the higher ups made multiples of what POTUS did (which iirc is towards the far end of the bell curve for government salaries).
(Hacker protip: Don’t stand in a doorway, raise your voice, then police the response.)
It's a culture of complacency and pretentious bragging that allows evil companies to keep going. This is the case for every bad company from Google, to Blizzard, to FTX.
Back when Blizzard was making great games, did they have a culture of "I work for Blizzard therefore I am a true insider"? No. That's their current culture though.
I've seen plenty of people saying they got hired by their "dream company" and now they're in "silicon valley" and all that, and invariably they're joining some predatory company that rides on a legacy from pre-2015, or some hype train like most crypto projects.
You want to work for a non-evil company? Just don't work primarily for bragging rights, it's not that hard.
Of course, some companies are not necessarily evil but have the prestige. I think what differentiates those from others is that people want to join those companies to be part of a mission rather than simply make money and gain bragging rights.
But predictably, that wasn’t sustainable, and now I’m a generic FAANG engineer
The organization is not 100% 'not evil' by any means. There are a lot of issues, e.g. we take donations from unquestionably evil sources and prominently mention them (and/or run ads for them). But the mission is to educate, and I know for a fact that my work helps teachers and students every day, so all things considered I feel good about working here.
Many people who work here have taken salary/benefits cuts to do so. I'd say most of us are less motivated by money than we are by contributing to society. I was ludicrously underpaid for years, and only recently I got a raise that falls within the lower boundaries of what is average for my position and skills. I get recruiter emails almost daily offering tens of thousands of dollars more than I make now, but I'm not interested in contributing to spyware or optimizing landfill-junk production or any of the other evils that the vast majority of for-profit companies are rewarded for doing.
If I think about what it would take for me to work for a company like Facebook, it ends up being "enough to donate whatever it would take to negate the harm they do" - i.e. everything they have, and complete control over the direction of the company. I would turn down millions of dollars if taking it meant working for Facebook.
Other times, it's less-obvious:
1. You don't have enough visibility into the company's operations, plans, or executives.
2. You don't know enough context of society and/or business, to understand how something innocuous-sounding is evil.
3. All's good on intentions and impact, but later the situation changes (company is pressured by market or investors, or someone falls into a bad influence yacht party scene, etc.),
Complicating this is that it's the norm (especially for startups) for a company to claim to be doing something positive for society:
1. Sometimes it's just marketing/brand convention that people go through, and don't think they have to take seriously (it'd be rude to say you just want to extract money).
2. Sometimes the founders/execs believe it, but with poor understanding of the problems and solutions (often by class sheltering, or simply not knowing the domain well enough).
3. Sometimes it's con artists and/or narcissists, who work the narrative to manipulate others, or to increase sense of personal glory.
I don't know a complete solution to this problem of detecting evil so you can avoid working for it.
I also haven't figured out a satisfying way to reconcile not wanting to work for evil, with wanting to have a comfortable life right now. Especially in "tech" right now, where a lot of bad practices have become so ordinary, we don't realize it. (And if someone called out the practices, we might get irritated like a 9th grade Economics fan, because that person who thinks that's a problem must be stupid, because we were told this is the way things are.)
Or maybe both sides are evil because they ultimately are seeking money, not positive change in the world.
That is, if the VCs are intending to do something evil by turning a company into a growth lottery ticket, but they're so useless at picking potential lottery tickets that they might as well be setting their money on fire.
Then what is the moral standing of someone who collects a paycheck from that company, grabs some popcorn, and sits in the sidelines to watch bad decisions unfold?
And it's a breath of fresh air compared to government or organized religion.
Why is federal law enforcement doing something evil? Why is the church doing something evil? God only knows. They have a dozen subjective competing goals in their mandate. Companies are easy. Follow the money.
There are degrees of evil and lines that shouldn’t be crossed, but for the most part, if you’re doing anything in this world, you’re going to be interacting with evil in some capacity.
I’m writing this on my Foxconn iPhone as I’m making ethically sourced coffee— but is the coffee really ethically sourced? It produced a lot of carbon being shipped to me and being roasted. I’m about to go write some software that I know is being used to teach things that I consider reprehensible and evil.
I’ve personally chosen to focus on one or two changes where I can make a difference, and for the most part, I’m letting the rest go.
So, assuming that people are well-intentioned and aren't purely virtue signaling for social capital, what's the measure of a "virtue" like this? Most people try to hand wave it as "the smaller car does approximately X less damage to 'the environment'", but that's all but completely unmeasurable. How do you quantify damage to the environment? How do you weight that against needing to get the kids to school? I'm not convinced there's any meaningful way to do it since it's a global measure for a local action. It seems to me that absent any universal morality, then, a better measure of a virtue is against itself: what an individual is willing to give up to uphold their virtue. "I drive the smaller car into the ground over 20 years, forgoing the luxuries of heated seats in newer models" or "I don't shop on Amazon, preferring instead to take extra time to acquire items locally" sort of a thing. It's still far from a reliable, quantifiable measure, and any of these things can be weaponized in any number of directions against unfavorable people or ideas, but I think it at least scopes the idea of "more and less moral" a little better/more locally.
In the words of John Oliver's character in Community, "the average person has a much harder time saying 'booyah' to moral relativism."
"What has been thought of once cannot be taken back anymore." Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Die Physiker (1961)
organizing social and economic life solely around money (as the only serious means of keeping count) has been extraordinary effective - due to the ease and universality of its application.
its also been a complete disaster because you can't reduce our multi-dimensional moral landscapes into a single scalar.
alas, being the simplest system means it is basically acts like a social virus or a weed: it drowns any competing more complex structure. one "must work for" in order "to pay the bills". you could solve any of humanity's grand challenges and it would still not help you to even feed or warm yourself if not somehow translated into money.
that crushing simplicity and its inadequacy is destroying our souls.
Those fertilizers that hurt more than they helped? Those chemicals spread all over enemy lands during the war? That plant disaster that they tried to cover up?
Everything I do helps the company be more efficient at producing these products. The in-joke is "what kind of poison are we making today?", or "what country are we killing people in with this?"
On the other hand, the other 95% of the products produced here are making people's lives better.
* Can you imagine a better world where the goods and services this company provides aren't needed?
* Does it seem like the company is moving us closer to that world, or does it seem more like they would do everything in their power to prevent that world?
It may be a bit of both. For instance, you could be writing software that the company will desperately try to monopolize, but also in that capacity contribute to open source software that your company uses that others could use to compete with it.
Personally I will never work in e.g. finance or "defence", but even where I work now could be seen as encouraging throw-away consumerism. It was a very serious consideration of mine when I was looking for a new job. I ruled myself out of some interviews halfway through because I could tell that their product would have rubbed against my morals eventually.
Sometimes I feel like a mug for following my convictions like this. I will never be a manager, I will never invest in the stock market, and I will never own more property than I can use myself.
Many people seem to see such a project in a negative light, particularly those who have never been into trading. However my aim is to help prevent people from losing money and thoroughly test strategies before trading any real money.
In such a case it's really about preconceived notions.
I refuse to invest in stocks because that would mean (potentially) profiting from the exploitation of the workers in that company. I suppose if I were awarded stocks in the company I work for that might be different, I'd need to think about it more.
Regarding stocks, you can often be assured that public companies are held to a high standard, especially in western countries where the press reports on exploitation.
I'm not sure this act in itself is morally neutral, imo. There's reasons ethical concerns about objectification (in the older 'treating something/one as an object' formulation of it) pop up not-infrequently through time.
Reducing something to a market view of itself is a choice. Similarly, seeing something as being more complicated but turning away because 'it doesn't have to be'.
Now, I'm not trying to suggest you should take up my concerns here. I'm not saying "you're terrible for this!" in any way. It's just an interesting springboard of a question, what do we see as 'morally neutral' and what has moral salience?
But that's not my only view. E.g. Ethereum and what it can be used for is still interesting to me, but not immediately of any use to me either.
Finance: Get people enough capital so they can do what they want
Defense: Keep people safe enough so they can do what they want
I don't see the basic premise of these two industries as being evil. Of course, participants can go off the rails but so can any company.
Finance: increase abstract 'value' no matter the practical cost.
Defence: invent more efficient ways to cause harm.
Medicine: Keep them alive long enough to take all their money.
Search: Sell them things they don't need
Self-driving cars: Delay societal investment in sustainable transportation
Retail: Pointless fashion for the masses
Agriculture: Make as many as fat as possible
We should look at the best that any industry can provide and then strive for that instead of assuming evil is inherent.
My logic is that humans need to be safe to a certain degree (and I admit that the perception of safety is totally subjective)
I like safety from viral disease therefore I'm a fan of vaccines and masks.
I like personal safety in my day to day environment therefore I'm a fan of a well funded society with mental healthcare and appropriately funded social services and police.
I'm personally invested in the current system of sovereign countries/states and I believe that without controlling borders you can't really have a country. So I now believe that a well funded military is sadly still necessary. Talk about getting less left wing as you get older :-/
But I still 100% agree about not working for certain companies. Short term high interest consumer loans and any type of gambling are on my black list.
I have a simple definition I call the Grand Unified Theory of Evil:
Evil = delusion * conviction * power
Delusion = how factually incorrect your idea is compared with base reality
Conviction = how little you will try to find flaws with the idea, how little you will test it, how likely you are to implement the idea at 100% of the universe if you had total power
Power = Your ability to push your idea into the world
This model isn't a tool to calculate evil. It's a tool to reason about how to avoid evil. First you need to be not wrong. Secondly you need to be damn UNSURE about what you know and try it at small scale. And lastly you need to have just enough power to test the idea, and show that it works to others if it does, but not any more.
Idea: we can grab this land with our troops (assume this is 100% based in reality)
Delusion: 0%
Conviction: idea was checked, is aboslutely correct
Power: 100%
=> Evil = 0 * 100 * 100 = 0
I think the categorical imperative is a way better tool to recognise evil.
Not really. I mean "guard against evil" loosely interpreted includes all of life so it's hard to say.
But spending a bunch of time defining, quantifying what is evil, arguing about the specifics on the internet, that is deep in the weeds exactly where they want you.
Most people have a good enough intuition for it when they see it up close. The menace is in how well we've obscured a lot of the true evil behind layers of misdirection and diffusion. Focus more on developing your innate sense of wrong so you can ably intuit what is actually happening. That is much more practically valuable than getting bogged down in constructing theories of what evil is and what is evil and how much.
I wrote "This model isn't a tool to calculate evil."
Spotting evil is all well and good, but what about when you CAN'T spot it? What then? You STILL need to guard against it. Say you're Mao, now you believe in your ideas. But you should not be convinced, because being doubtful is a guard against evil. You should not use your full power, because this is again a guard against evil.
If Mao had followed this, he would not have killed tens of millions of his own people.
I worked for a company in their project management area and it was straightforward and not fraught with moral judgement.
Later I got promoted (Crying emoji) to a new role and suddenly everything I dealt with seemed filled with interests and corruption. This jump corresponded with the budgets of the projects and programs I dealt with.
Same org, different parts of the org. Bad promotion :(
Delusion in this case runs quite deep.
Maybe not impactful, but not evil.
Now I work for a big tech company. Maybe it's evil, but if that's true, at least evil pays better.
That is because for each voluntary trade, both the buyer and the seller at least SEE themselves as better off.
If you account for damage done to the commons (i.e. pollution of the environment or involuntary pay (through artificial monopolization, misleading advertising, or corrupt government against people's wishes)), the profit margin is an indicator that what you are doing is needed, and that not enough suppliers compete in that area.
For instance: how strongly does the population support the weapons expenses? If it's forced into this spending, the trade is not moral.
How much damage is dealt by each bullet? What does a bullet cost?
If you chose to apply the same standard to the people around you, you'd have no friends or family. Because you have friends who work for minimum wage (enabling evil), you have family members who use all of the worst social networks and have all of the voice assistants on, you have a racist uncle, you have whatever. The specific examples aren't relevant, literally everyone else does _something_ you don't like.
I think it's better to try to control what precisely _you_ are doing because otherwise you'll just silo yourself into a corner until you can't do anything.
It's fine to avoid working for a company whose explicit purpose is to do something you don't believe in, it's another thing to exclude basically everything because some nonzero component of what is happening isn't to your liking.
Not that I practice what I preach, I'm out of work because I think video calls are evil. Bugger.
Consider: if you start with 10 companies in a given field, 9 of which are run by decent people with strong ethics, and one which is run by an evil bastard with no scruples whatsoever, which one will have the highest profit margins? The evil one. And so the evil one will eat the other 9, and the employees of the other 9 will be put to work doing evil things, and if the company gets large enough, the political system of the country the evil company is in will be bribed to do evil things.
The counteracting force to that is organized popular movements, but those are on the defensive lately- witness congress intervening to undermine a strike when all the workers wanted was to be able to stay home when they were sick.
Meh, I've tried and all I got was hate for many years and very few staunch friends. Sheeple don't want truth, justice and the Amerikan way. After seeing 2020-2022 in action (the lies, the gaslighting, waving evidence in peoples faces until I'm hoarse), I've decided to join The Empire. Evil all the way. Abstergo, here I come.
Well at least the hours are good. And the uniforms are snappy. Red, black. lots of leather. And the shouting. Fuckit, sign me up.
The second is that in the Uber case, from the beginning their disregard for the law was apparent. That should be a good warning sign as well. It's one thing to ignore unjust laws as an individual; we can have moral agency for reasons other than profit. A corporation is solely a prodit seeking machine and if you build disregard for laws it disagrees with into its behavior, you're going to have a bad time.
I can also easily imagine a company that wants to be evil but is too incompetent to accomplish it.
does th company make an active effort lead by the owners or leadership team to cancel out the effects of other companies. (e.g. engange with local community, promote work life balance)?
if its a partnership or employee owned then its also probably good, but some partnerships (where there are 10 to 100s of partners) then it becomes like a publicly owned company again and no individuals feel their personal reputation is at stake.
personal reputation is about the only thing you can rely on when it comes to not being shitty, as it all comes down to trust really.
And so most aren't.
Also with a small company you'll know just about everything the company is "doing" whereas if you're working for (Rackspace, Google, Meta, etc) you have a very good chance of not knowing what the company is doing somewhere until it becomes a major news headline.
I guess "fascist regime" is a reference to Trump here? If so it's hard for me to take the author seriously. My grandparents survived actual fascist regime (Nazi Germany occupation during WW2), and my parents grew up in authoritarian puppet states of USSR. Trump doesn't get anywhere close to what my people went through in 20th century, and it's pretty insulting for me when people make this comparisons.
Of all the larger multinats, I think it's one of the least evil, especially since it privately owned by a foundation.
- Nazi collaboration - Role in emission cheating software - Role in Astongate greenwashing campaign
I work at Netflix and I am happy here. Curious if any of you would consider it to be an evil company in the sense we are discussing in this post.
Two quick things, as a user, I would change about Netflix:
1) More childrens' content with actual people in. It's all cartoons (cheaper) whilst I hypothesise children develop better viewing real human interactions.
2) At account level build in breaks. It used to be adverts would provide a break that would encourage at least some movement and offer a chance to go off and be distracted (for adults and children alike). I'd love to say "minimum 10 minute break between episodes"; the screen would go off and only restart if interacted with after 10 minutes ... some will say "just have some will power", but IMO tech should help us with such things.
Mind you, I'd also change copyright law to allow any service to stream content of one service does (no exclusives except for a limited time; forced syndication, effectively) in order to create competition and choice at the service level rather than the content level.
> Another frame of reference which might help him would be the Doctrine of Original Sin. I wonder if he has ever heard of it. We are all doomed to commit acts of cruelty or violence or evil; that is our destiny, due to ancient factors. Our karma.
People work to eat.
Humanity is a brutish, barbaric species. Get used to it.
It's anecdotal, I'm agreeing with your last point - humanity is brutish, it's easier to exit the Matrix and to see what humanity really is rather than to keep believing in the romantic image of it.
Those are hard to find, though - so I've mostly worked for companies I think have a net neutral effect, news (though not right wing hatemongers) & entertainment.
I don't think you can make a lot of money without enabling evil at least a little bit. I suppose that's where "effective altruism" comes in; do evil but do more good later. Eventually. Maybe. I'm not totally convinced.
> I worked for a web hosting company that had a dubious history of keeping spammers around far too long.
How quaint.
Which companies or industries are contributing to the downfall of humanity? This answer is hard to answer but I don't think it's ads, spam, or user tracking despite being vehemently against these things. Perspective is needed.
Raytheon or Lockheed Martin? They're certainly milking the taxpayer but they also fulfill an extremely important need. Fossil fuel industry? They are polluters but low energy costs contribute immensely to standards of living.
I can't think of any companies or industries that are legit evil, if there even are any. Tobacco industry? Building nukes for North Korea or Iran?