Comment by _delirium | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _delirium | Hacker News Reader

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An interesting question. I think in an ethical sense, there would be no blame to someone like Richard Dawkins for publishing an anti-religious book. I do agree there could be a causal link: Dawkins's university or publisher might receive threats as a result of his atheist advocacy. But who is really to blame for these threats? I would argue it is the people who would make threats in response to atheist advocacy who are to blame, and all effort should be put towards shutting such people down.

And does it mean I would support, as an ethical matter, Dawkins's publisher or university choosing to drop him, on the grounds that he has caused them difficulties, and they are therefore right in firing him to solve them? Obviously not: I would blame those making threats, and would consider his publisher and university spineless cowards if they dropped him as an author or fired him as an employee in response to the threats. I would expect them, rather, to expend their efforts tracking down the people who made the threats.

I agree that those offering the threats would be to blame but what we were discussing was the cause, who in this case is Adria.

Ethics are tricky, and I don't think there are blanket wrong or right answers here. I agree that simply placating a baying mob by tossing someone (metaphorically) to the wolves is not necessarily ethically right from all perspectives, but therein lies the problem: it's about perspective. Were it about a university defending an author from religious nutjobs then it's ethically right for them to support him. However, when it comes to companies, there are certain other perspectives on ethics that need to be taken into account. For example, ethically a company has to do everything it can for it's shareholders. It's legally required to do this, and has an ethical responsibility to. This might be in contrast to yours or my ethics, but for the company the ethical thing to do would be to fire someone who's losing them money.

Anyway, like I said, it's tricky. Personally I think SendGrid is justified in firing Adria: as a PR employee her job is to promote the company, which is difficult when the community she's trying to promote the product to has taken umbrage with her. If their sole reason was because of the DDoS attack I think that wouldn't be justified, but given the fiasco it's damaging to their reputation to continue to have her on their staff.

As an aside (and to hopefully help explain my viewpoint) in the Dawkins matter: I don't think it would be ethically irresponsible for a publisher to drop him. Publisher's are there to make money, and having that and the lives of employees threatened is a reasonable reason to drop him. I don't think they should drop him, but in my opinion it's ethically reasonable for them to do it. Were it a university, I think they under no circumstance should drop him. The purpose of a university (at least in the UK) is to teach and generate research. By censoring someone at a university you're essentially censoring science and scientific enquiry which holds much greater ethical ramifications than at a publisher.

> For example, ethically a company has to do everything it can for it's shareholders. It's legally required to do this, and has an ethical responsibility to.

This is not really the case, either as a matter of ethics or a matter of law. It's a widespread myth that there is an overriding legal responsibility to "maximize shareholder value", but that is not the case, and the myth is based on an over-reading of a century-old Supreme Court case that is no longer valid law. Companies have quite broad discretion to operate how their executives see fit, with expansive authority to take into account ethical or PR/brand considerations in their decisions. In modern caselaw, the shareholders are presumed to agree with their actions by the fact that they continue to keep the executives in place, rather than replacing them, as they have the power to do. Courts refuse to second-guess decisions absent very specific showings of conflict, such as insider dealings; if an executive thinks that a company should pursue a particular ethical strategy, and the shareholders keep him in place, courts are satisfied that they implicitly believe the strategy is in their interests.

As far as publishers go, I do think it would be ethically irresponsible for a publisher to drop Dawkins. A publisher that only wants to make money is a worthless social cancer. They may be legally entitled to do what they do, but nobody should support them.

It's also worth noting that these kinds of decisions can negatively impact reputation as well. I now consider SendGrid to be unethical cowards who I will not do business with, whereas previously they were a company I was strongly interested in using. I will not use them now. I may well be outnumbered by people who think the opposite, but the PR effect is not only in one direction. It's particularly relevant to an email firm, because I now believe they would sell me out as a customer as well, if anything I sent angered anyone. I suspect they would blame me for a DDoS rather than sticking up for their customer.

Fair enough about shareholder obligations: I only have it on hearsay, from a business lecture as part of my CS course.

To try and understand your perspective further though: do you think it was ethically responsible for PlayHaven to fire their guy? Also, were it not for the DDoS, would the posts on twitter and comments have been sufficient to ethically fire her?

I find it difficult to rationalise how firing someone who's views and conduct are in opposition to the company - and who (as a PR employee) is bringing the company into disrepute is unethical.

On the PlayHaven question, I lean towards thinking that wasn't justified either. If I had to identify villains in this case, it'd be both PlayHaven and SendGrid, which, despite their pretenses to being 21st-century startups, are looking a lot like rather backwards 1950s pointy-headed HR places. If people dare to speak in public without corporate approval, they get fired for stirring the pot, as if we still lived in a world where blogs, twitter, tumblr, and HN didn't exist, and companies owned you 24/7. If you know what's good for you, spend your weekends golfing and don't say anything in public!

(Replying here from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5420421 as comment limit reached)

As the limit's been reached, and I'm not sure of the etiquette on hacker news for longer comments, I'll finish up my end of the discussion here.

I think this is a classic internet situation where everybody's in the wrong, especially the two companies. To sum up my position:

-The developers arguably shouldn't have made the jokes. I don't know if they were actually sexist jokes as (full disclosure) I'm not entirely trusting of everything Adria says, but as other people have mentioned, it was a professional event so they should have been conducting themselves professionally.

-PlayHaven shouldn't have fired the developer. They could perhaps have publicly followed through with some disciplinary action, and issued a statement and apology essentially saying that they didn't support his actions, and it might have ended there.

-SendGrid should have again followed through with disciplinary action in a similar manner. I think that prolonged exposure to Adria would have been harmful to their business, but that's a matter for them to consider and decide on.

In the end though, I think Adria's done the most harm. There were channels available for dealing with sexist comments at the conference, and according to her own blog she used them. It should have ended there, but she unfortunately escalated which started the avalanche after the first firing.

breath

Anyway, I think that's my position summed up really. I would continue this further, but unfortunately I have no more contact info for you than username. As an aside however, I noticed you're a researcher in AI - something I'd like to get into at some point. How did you get into that particular area of research, and what would you say are the main prerequisites to doing research in that area? I'm currently doing a BSc in CS, and I have some space for focus next year, but I'm still a little unsure where to focus at the moment, and what I should be reading and doing at the side.

Thanks for a nice civilised discussion! Have a good day!

Thanks for the civilized discussion as well!

I agree that the immediate firings on both sides come off the worst. Announcing some miscellaneous investigation/discipline/etc. is one thing, but going straight to firing comes off, to me anyway, as more impulsive (and worrisome) than reassuring and decisive.

I also agree that Twitter mobs are a bit worrisome. I'm perhaps mostly counter-worried about the principle of posting some words on twitter being seen as problematic. I do it a lot! Of course, I have only ~250 followers, so while technically public, it's only public in the sense that random tumblrs and blogs are public. What crosses the line into the other kind of public? I agree it can happen, I just don't know what to do about it that isn't worse.

As an aside, the comment limit is actually "soft" in that if you click on a comment's own page (the "link" link) you can reply from there even if the reply link isn't showing up on the main page. It's intended to discourage extra-long comment threads, but you can still reply if you really want to, rather than posting a sibling comment.

[contact info removed]

Thanks for the link tip! I'm rather new here unfortunately, so I don't quite know how everything works unfortunately...

I think this whole debarcle should be noted down in a book entitled "how not to do things". Everything, from the developers conduct, to Adria's reaction, to the internet's counter-reaction to the companies reactions just multiplied the problems further. Essentially the lesson I'm taking away from this is that it's incredibly necessary to think twice or three times before doing anything - especially in this internet connected age.

Anyway - I'm still interested in how you got into AI, but I'll drop you an email to ask to keep the post thread down. I completely understand - it's probably trivial to find out who I am from my HN profile - but it's still better than it being explicit.

Thanks!

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