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Always a losers game. You implement it with ethics in mind, I do not. I win and you fall into obscurity. The law is all that matters. If I can not lose what

Always a losers game. You implement it with ethics in mind, I do not. I win and you fall into obscurity. The law is all that matters. If I can not lose what I take, there is no reason for me not to take it (so long as I'm still chasing the 'fuck you money', morals are great after you have it). I understand it, lots of people have dreamed big dreams of how great the world would be if everyone else was just like them too.

frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
Except the article mentions that they're targeting >the next generation of technologists and policymakers Sure tech workers in a bad system are coerced into unethical actions, but policymakers hold the power to alter the system itself so that they're not.
- hobofan 9y ago
  > policymakers hold the power The cynic in me tells me that the winning unethical companies hold the power over the policymakers.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
miketery 9y ago
> The law is all that matters Agreed. Lets change it.
- jackhack 9y ago
  Unless you are sitting on a mountain of money, forget it. You must buy laws of any substance. Laws represent power structures. Power structures are buttressed with money flows. If you threaten either, it will not end well. Politicans know this. They profit from it, it is the product being sold. (Ever wonder how so many congressmen end their terms as millionaires?)
moomin 9y ago
If the law is the only thing that matters, then it follows that more regulation will come. Maybe try self-regulating before putting more power in the hands of the government?
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  One would wish. The fact is, self-regulating against market pressures pretty much never happens - coordinating people against their perceived, short-term self-interest is hard. That's the very reason governments exist.
KirinDave 9y ago
Flip side of this: People who say this are usually folks trying to justify the fact that they're resorting to underhanded, abusive tactics to compete with talented, successful people who are not. It is the battle cry of the mediocre, the hallmark of scammers, the ultimate admission of the untalented and unworthy. I know a lot of folks in fintech and blockchain, and we've all skated the outer edge of what's defined by law. The folks who give a damn about setting sustainable policy and not exploiting customers? Those are the folks who are still around. Even big US national banks, notorious for their immunity to law and enforcement, are starting to feel the pressure. Rumor is, Customers left Wells Fargo in droves after the last kerfuffle and new account opening went down substantially at Citi after their money laundering fine. The hidden cost of bad optics is immense. And as data science makes the formerly invisible behaviors of the world visible, society's going to get a whole lot more capable of identifying "bad behavior" and punishing it. To say "The law is all that matters", in the context of these industries, is beyond naive. It's not just wrong, but it's leaving money and opportunity on the table. It's bad business AND bad optics. > (so long as I'm still chasing the 'fuck you money', morals are great after you have it). If this ethos is so effective, why are you still "chasing?" Or is this the rhetorical we? Or the royal we? I can never tell here.
- cheeze 9y ago
  > blockchain sigh
  - KirinDave 9y ago
    Plenty of people are doing legitimate things in this space. One need only look. Legitimate NON-currency (token or integrity) applications abound. In a very real sense, github was an early blockchain startup. Do you type "sigh" on an internet forum when people talk about github?
    - theoh 9y ago
      The "hub" aspect of GitHub takes a decentralised protocol and adds a trusted third party (github). The whole point of blockchain is to avoid creating trusted third parties, something people like Nick Szabo identified a long time ago as a problem for protocol design.
evanlivingston 9y ago
I don't want people like you in the world.
- dang 9y ago
  Please don't respond to a bad comment with another bad comment. That just makes this place worse, and usually provokes others into worse yet, which is why the site guidelines ask you not to do it: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
commandlinefan 9y ago
Well, lawyers can be and have been disbarred for behaving unethically - but that does depend on a few fundamentals: lawyers can't legally practice law without a license, ethics are well-defined, and there are hearings to determine claims of unethical behavior. To apply "ethics" to software, we'd have to have (at least) all three of these in place.
wfo 9y ago
Sure this is true if we just let the market do as it wills. But we have many tools to deal with this problem in our historical toolbox that we have mostly left behind as we hard embrace neoliberal ideology: regulation with fines, regulatory bodies (that can make judgements on unethical behavior not explicitly written into law and mete out serious punishment), a criminal justice system that could be applied to executives, a troubling but powerful system of asset forfeiture designed to seize "ill-gotten gains" (and what is money gained from unethical business practices but ill-gotten?), nationalizing or breaking up companies to prevent concentration of power that can be abused, organized labor and collective bargaining. If e.g. CEOs who ran unethical enterprises were afraid of their assets being seized and being jailed the fairly accurate picture you paint of our current reality -- the unethical businessman who crushes anyone with an ounce of human dignity, worker and competitor alike -- looks a little different. I think it's pretty clear that voting with your dollar will never and has never worked, but some of the above tools might. Though they all of course come with their downsides. >I understand it, lots of people have dreamed big dreams of how great the world would be if everyone else was just like them too. Actually nearly everyone already is like me in this way: nearly every human being has a sense of ethics and sees a pretty clear difference between right and wrong that transcends a profit motive. It's just that it's not so easy to turn that ethical and moral sense we all share into actual power to change things, especially when power is concentrated in the hands of the unethical (for exactly the reasons you describe above). But that's the task before us, and that's why universities are making computer scientists take ethics.

frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago

Except the article mentions that they're targeting >the next generation of technologists and policymakers Sure tech workers in a bad system are coerced into unethical actions, but policymakers hold the power to alter the system itself so that they're not.

hobofan 9y ago
> policymakers hold the power The cynic in me tells me that the winning unethical companies hold the power over the policymakers.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

miketery 9y ago

> The law is all that matters Agreed. Lets change it.

jackhack 9y ago
Unless you are sitting on a mountain of money, forget it. You must buy laws of any substance. Laws represent power structures. Power structures are buttressed with money flows. If you threaten either, it will not end well. Politicans know this. They profit from it, it is the product being sold. (Ever wonder how so many congressmen end their terms as millionaires?)

moomin 9y ago

If the law is the only thing that matters, then it follows that more regulation will come. Maybe try self-regulating before putting more power in the hands of the government?

TeMPOraL 9y ago
One would wish. The fact is, self-regulating against market pressures pretty much never happens - coordinating people against their perceived, short-term self-interest is hard. That's the very reason governments exist.

KirinDave 9y ago

Flip side of this: People who say this are usually folks trying to justify the fact that they're resorting to underhanded, abusive tactics to compete with talented, successful people who are not. It is the battle cry of the mediocre, the hallmark of scammers, the ultimate admission of the untalented and unworthy. I know a lot of folks in fintech and blockchain, and we've all skated the outer edge of what's defined by law. The folks who give a damn about setting sustainable policy and not exploiting customers? Those are the folks who are still around. Even big US national banks, notorious for their immunity to law and enforcement, are starting to feel the pressure. Rumor is, Customers left Wells Fargo in droves after the last kerfuffle and new account opening went down substantially at Citi after their money laundering fine. The hidden cost of bad optics is immense. And as data science makes the formerly invisible behaviors of the world visible, society's going to get a whole lot more capable of identifying "bad behavior" and punishing it. To say "The law is all that matters", in the context of these industries, is beyond naive. It's not just wrong, but it's leaving money and opportunity on the table. It's bad business AND bad optics. > (so long as I'm still chasing the 'fuck you money', morals are great after you have it). If this ethos is so effective, why are you still "chasing?" Or is this the rhetorical we? Or the royal we? I can never tell here.

cheeze 9y ago
> blockchain sigh
- KirinDave 9y ago
  Plenty of people are doing legitimate things in this space. One need only look. Legitimate NON-currency (token or integrity) applications abound. In a very real sense, github was an early blockchain startup. Do you type "sigh" on an internet forum when people talk about github?
  - theoh 9y ago
    The "hub" aspect of GitHub takes a decentralised protocol and adds a trusted third party (github). The whole point of blockchain is to avoid creating trusted third parties, something people like Nick Szabo identified a long time ago as a problem for protocol design.

evanlivingston 9y ago

I don't want people like you in the world.

dang 9y ago
Please don't respond to a bad comment with another bad comment. That just makes this place worse, and usually provokes others into worse yet, which is why the site guidelines ask you not to do it: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

commandlinefan 9y ago

Well, lawyers can be and have been disbarred for behaving unethically - but that does depend on a few fundamentals: lawyers can't legally practice law without a license, ethics are well-defined, and there are hearings to determine claims of unethical behavior. To apply "ethics" to software, we'd have to have (at least) all three of these in place.

wfo 9y ago

Sure this is true if we just let the market do as it wills. But we have many tools to deal with this problem in our historical toolbox that we have mostly left behind as we hard embrace neoliberal ideology: regulation with fines, regulatory bodies (that can make judgements on unethical behavior not explicitly written into law and mete out serious punishment), a criminal justice system that could be applied to executives, a troubling but powerful system of asset forfeiture designed to seize "ill-gotten gains" (and what is money gained from unethical business practices but ill-gotten?), nationalizing or breaking up companies to prevent concentration of power that can be abused, organized labor and collective bargaining. If e.g. CEOs who ran unethical enterprises were afraid of their assets being seized and being jailed the fairly accurate picture you paint of our current reality -- the unethical businessman who crushes anyone with an ounce of human dignity, worker and competitor alike -- looks a little different. I think it's pretty clear that voting with your dollar will never and has never worked, but some of the above tools might. Though they all of course come with their downsides. >I understand it, lots of people have dreamed big dreams of how great the world would be if everyone else was just like them too. Actually nearly everyone already is like me in this way: nearly every human being has a sense of ethics and sees a pretty clear difference between right and wrong that transcends a profit motive. It's just that it's not so easy to turn that ethical and moral sense we all share into actual power to change things, especially when power is concentrated in the hands of the unethical (for exactly the reasons you describe above). But that's the task before us, and that's why universities are making computer scientists take ethics.