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HN is criticizing the article wording but completely ignoring its point. This article coupled with the other one on the dystopian reality of San Francisco[1] ha

HN is criticizing the article wording but completely ignoring its point. This article coupled with the other one on the dystopian reality of San Francisco[1] have me feeling completely disgusted at the current state of the tech industry. Simply put: these tech giants are making too much money. They are losing touch with the average people and simply put with reality itself. It wouldn't surprise me if that's exactly how all "evil" companies of the past became evil themselves. [1]: https://www.mhudack.com/blog/2017/10/1/san-francisco-now-with-more-dystopia https://www.mhudack.com/blog/2017/10/1/san-francisco-now-wit...

zaptheimpaler 9y ago
Making money is not evil. Wall street makes money, pharma makes money, lawyers make money, insurance makes money, automobiles, consumer goods, real estate - all huge industries. Now that tech is being used on a massive scale of course the tech companies are making money. So what? It doesn't make sense to equate rich with evil - either for companies or for people. SF (and many cities in the US and across the world) have always had poor people. The world has always been very unequal with kings and paupers and everything in between. Now some of them are in the same town and it freaks people out.. welcome to the real world. Anyone who has ever lived in NYC has seen the same inequality.
- jonbarker 9y ago
  Making money is not evil, but social class increases likelihood of utilitarianism. Being a tech elite in the valley arguably makes one more likely to be more of a utilitarian. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/psyched/201304/the-rich-are-differently-moral https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/psyched/201304/the-rich.... Large scale usage does not increase likelihood of profit, either. There aren't any hard disk drive billionaires, for example. Also they aren't in the same town; those who are trying to make it or work in the 'supporting cast' take BART from oakland or richmond, or do extreme commuting from the san joaquin valley.
  - Bartweiss 9y ago
    This argument seems a little surreal. Is the take here seriously "utilitarianism is so intrinsically bad that wealth is evil because it causes utilitarianism?" Utilitarianism is an exceedingly broad category; hedonistic, rule, preference, and negative utilitarianism all recommend different behaviors. But none of them equate to selfishness or abuse of others. I mean, the article does give us "Piff’s earlier work suggests Richie might act in a way that neither a utilitarian nor a non-utilitarian would support, benefiting himself at the expense of others." But that's a completely different, contradictory argument being thrown in as though it bolsters the main point about utilitarianism. Also, it relies on a truly wild series of leaps from "people taking anti-anxiety drugs" to "psychopaths" to "rich people". (That older paper linked is setting off all my alarm bells for shitty social psych research. The second one doesn't look promising, but is paywalled. - "We derived the ethics of the rich from an online quiz" is a bad sign. - "We didn't control for education" is a problem in its own right. - PNAS is a bad sign. - 'Neutral primes' versus 'greed is good primes' is a disastrously bad sign, it's not even clear if those things work. - Human-coding of driver behavior is questionable at best. - Deriving human ethics from groups of ~100 Berkeley students is almost cartoonishly bad. My baseline here is "forking paths plus massive bias risks got us a catchy headline".)
    - jonbarker 9y ago
      You are biased against social psych research, as I think we all should be, but I'm not sure singling it out is the best strategy. The issues of reproducibility and 'p-hacking' among others are a big problem in a variety of disciplines right now, and there is a good synopsis of just one aspect of the problem in hard sciences here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis. For a non-paywall link to the original research this is better: http://www.pnas.org/content/109/11/4086.short http://www.pnas.org/content/109/11/4086.short
  - danans 9y ago
    > those who are trying to make it or work in the 'supporting cast' take BART from oakland or richmond At this point BART or other mass transit access to your workplace is itself a sort of privilege, perhaps not for the tech elite who wouldn't take mass transit anyway, but for rank and file skilled employees. For many of them, mass transit is preferable to hours spent in car traffic. I'm one of those who feels privileged to be able to take BART to work. It's service workers who have often been pushed out beyond the Bay Area into mega commutes.
Chardok 9y ago
"This time around, though, that community will be bridled with union–busting and data-harvesting apparatuses sure to make even the most paranoid techno-tyrant salivate." This is what worries me the most about something like Facebook running the town. I can imagine their Zuck-net would have plenty of mining to flag "potential unionizers" and snuff them out before they have a chance to begin. Unions are really the only answer to balance the corporation's power and I fear they won't stand a chance.
metaphorm 9y ago
HN has a lot of blindspots. This famous quote comes to mind. > It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. - Upton Sinclair

zaptheimpaler 9y ago

Making money is not evil. Wall street makes money, pharma makes money, lawyers make money, insurance makes money, automobiles, consumer goods, real estate - all huge industries. Now that tech is being used on a massive scale of course the tech companies are making money. So what? It doesn't make sense to equate rich with evil - either for companies or for people. SF (and many cities in the US and across the world) have always had poor people. The world has always been very unequal with kings and paupers and everything in between. Now some of them are in the same town and it freaks people out.. welcome to the real world. Anyone who has ever lived in NYC has seen the same inequality.

jonbarker 9y ago
Making money is not evil, but social class increases likelihood of utilitarianism. Being a tech elite in the valley arguably makes one more likely to be more of a utilitarian. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/psyched/201304/the-rich-are-differently-moral https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/psyched/201304/the-rich.... Large scale usage does not increase likelihood of profit, either. There aren't any hard disk drive billionaires, for example. Also they aren't in the same town; those who are trying to make it or work in the 'supporting cast' take BART from oakland or richmond, or do extreme commuting from the san joaquin valley.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  This argument seems a little surreal. Is the take here seriously "utilitarianism is so intrinsically bad that wealth is evil because it causes utilitarianism?" Utilitarianism is an exceedingly broad category; hedonistic, rule, preference, and negative utilitarianism all recommend different behaviors. But none of them equate to selfishness or abuse of others. I mean, the article does give us "Piff’s earlier work suggests Richie might act in a way that neither a utilitarian nor a non-utilitarian would support, benefiting himself at the expense of others." But that's a completely different, contradictory argument being thrown in as though it bolsters the main point about utilitarianism. Also, it relies on a truly wild series of leaps from "people taking anti-anxiety drugs" to "psychopaths" to "rich people". (That older paper linked is setting off all my alarm bells for shitty social psych research. The second one doesn't look promising, but is paywalled. - "We derived the ethics of the rich from an online quiz" is a bad sign. - "We didn't control for education" is a problem in its own right. - PNAS is a bad sign. - 'Neutral primes' versus 'greed is good primes' is a disastrously bad sign, it's not even clear if those things work. - Human-coding of driver behavior is questionable at best. - Deriving human ethics from groups of ~100 Berkeley students is almost cartoonishly bad. My baseline here is "forking paths plus massive bias risks got us a catchy headline".)
  - jonbarker 9y ago
    You are biased against social psych research, as I think we all should be, but I'm not sure singling it out is the best strategy. The issues of reproducibility and 'p-hacking' among others are a big problem in a variety of disciplines right now, and there is a good synopsis of just one aspect of the problem in hard sciences here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis. For a non-paywall link to the original research this is better: http://www.pnas.org/content/109/11/4086.short http://www.pnas.org/content/109/11/4086.short
- danans 9y ago
  > those who are trying to make it or work in the 'supporting cast' take BART from oakland or richmond At this point BART or other mass transit access to your workplace is itself a sort of privilege, perhaps not for the tech elite who wouldn't take mass transit anyway, but for rank and file skilled employees. For many of them, mass transit is preferable to hours spent in car traffic. I'm one of those who feels privileged to be able to take BART to work. It's service workers who have often been pushed out beyond the Bay Area into mega commutes.

Chardok 9y ago

"This time around, though, that community will be bridled with union–busting and data-harvesting apparatuses sure to make even the most paranoid techno-tyrant salivate." This is what worries me the most about something like Facebook running the town. I can imagine their Zuck-net would have plenty of mining to flag "potential unionizers" and snuff them out before they have a chance to begin. Unions are really the only answer to balance the corporation's power and I fear they won't stand a chance.

metaphorm 9y ago

HN has a lot of blindspots. This famous quote comes to mind. > It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. - Upton Sinclair