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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 o

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.

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.