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And I don’t blame them. Developers are largely undercompensated for the utility they provide for firms, both across companies and within (compared to other rol

And I don’t blame them. Developers are largely undercompensated for the utility they provide for firms, both across companies and within (compared to other roles). In the Bay, it’s the difference between living comfortably+saving for their future and just making ends meet. It’s a bit like blaming the scientists of the Manhattan Project for dropping the atomic bomb.

eesmith 8y ago
> It’s a bit like blaming the scientists of the Manhattan Project for dropping the atomic bomb. Consider Joseph Rotblat. He worked on the Manhattan Project because believed that it was needed as a deterrent against a German nuclear weapon. After he learned that Germany had given up on the bomb, he left the Manhattan Project - the only one to do so - and felt betrayed by its use in Japan. "Rotblat believed that scientists should always be concerned with the ethical consequences of their work.[39] He became one of the most prominent critics of the nuclear arms race ... Rotblat shared, with the Pugwash Conferences, the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize for efforts toward nuclear disarmament." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Rotblat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Rotblat . There's a movie about him, "The Strangest Dream", at https://www.nfb.ca/film/strangest_dream/ https://www.nfb.ca/film/strangest_dream/ .
- xxpor 8y ago
  The difference is the nuclear arms race was inevitable. The soviets would have made it eventually anyway, and then what would we (the US) have done? Facebook on the other hand is not inevitable.
  - eesmith 8y ago
    Should scientists always be concerned with the ethical consequences of their work? Should Facebook employees always be concerned with the ethical consequences of their work? I think your argument is that the ethics means we really needed enough nuclear weapons to destroy the planet several times over? And we really needed to let the government sell the lie that there was a 'missile gap' to the US population? Or was that lie in order to hide that there were U-2 overflights? Who were we hiding the knowledge of U-2s from? The Soviets, who could see them on radar and were developing ways to shoot them down? Or the US public? It's all very odd ethics. I'm sure the Rand Corporation has some game theorists who would clear everything up.
    - antod 8y ago
      > And we really needed to let the government sell the lie that there was a 'missile gap' to the US population? Or was that lie in order to hide that there were U-2 overflights? Who were we hiding the knowledge of U-2s from? The Soviets, who could see them on radar and were developing ways to shoot them down? Or the US public? From memory the "missile gap" wasn't a government lie to hide anything but an election campaign lie by Kennedy to attack the govt and appear tougher on the "commies".
      - eesmith 8y ago
        Eisenhower could have made the information public. A lie of omission is still a lie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap > According to Robert McNamara, Kennedy was leaked the inflated US Air Force estimates by Senator Stuart Symington, the former Secretary of the Air Force. Unaware that the report was misleading, Kennedy used the numbers in the document and based some of his 1960 election campaign platform on the Republicans being "weak on defense."[5] The missile gap was a common theme. > Eisenhower refused to refute the claims publicly for fear that public disclosure would jeopardize the secret U-2 flights. Consequently, Eisenhower was frustrated by what he conclusively knew to be Kennedy's erroneous claims that the United States was behind the USSR in its number of missiles.[6] > In an attempt to defuse the situation, Eisenhower arranged for Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to be apprised of the information, first with a meeting by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then Strategic Air Command, and finally with the Director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, in July 1960. Still, Kennedy continued to use the same rhetoric, which modern historians have debated as likely being so useful to the campaign that he was willing to ignore the truth. If you want an explicit lie, the Eisenhower administration lied to the US public saying that the U-2 was for high-altitude weather research. When Powers was shot down, the official US lie was that a high-altitude research flight was missing, and may have 'drifted with an incapacitated pilot across the Soviet border' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_U-2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_U-2 .
        antod 8y ago
        I see what you meant about hiding the U2 now, ie by not refuting the missile gap 'lie' rather than by creating/spreading it. Makes sense. Cheers
  - adgasf 8y ago
    If Facebook hadn't succeeded another, similar network would have
    - xxpor 8y ago
      Sure, but would they have committed the same ethical disasters?
- jeffreyrogers 8y ago
  There's some evidence that the use in Japan was partly an attempt to deter the Soviet Union from future aggression.
  - eesmith 8y ago
    I don't think I explained my point well enough. If the Manhattan Project is a useful comparison, then we have to take the totality of the people working on project, including the one person who quit, for moral reasons. He 'believed that scientists should always be concerned with the ethical consequences of their work'. In other words, yes, we should apportion some blame to 'the scientists of the Manhattan Project for dropping the atomic bomb'. (For that matter, Philip Morrison was one of those scientists. He helped load the atomic bombs onto the planes that made the two bomb runs. Certainly there's direct blame there, if blame is to be placed.) Certainly the rest of the scientific staff did not have the same views, or at least, didn't place the same weight on the different aspects of the ethics. Even then, remember that Oppenheimer remarked that he felt he had "blood on my hands" because he and others of the scientific staff thought the bombing of Nagasaki was unnecessary. Truman later told Acheson "I don't want to see that son-of-a-bitch in this office ever again." Regarding your point, and quoting from the WP page on Rotblat: "Rotblat continued to have strong reservations about the use of science to develop such a devastating weapon. In 1985, he related that at a private dinner at the Chadwicks' house at Los Alamos in March 1944, he was shocked to hear the director of the Manhattan Project, Major General Leslie R. Groves, Jr., say words to the effect that the real purpose in making the bomb was to subdue the Soviets." I interpret that to mean that Rotblat would have considered using the bomb against the Soviets in the way you summarized it as being sufficiently unethical that he would not work on it.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- FilterSweep 8y ago
  This is profound because I would be surprised if the early employees at Facebook didn’t feel a bit betrayed at the direction they later went.
  - TremendousJudge 8y ago
    did the early employees at facebook believe in anything more than making money?
mehrdadn 8y ago
> It’s a bit like blaming the scientists of the Manhattan Project for dropping the atomic bomb. I'm the last one to defend Facebook here but I don't see how designing an atomic bomb is comparable to working for Facebook, regardless of what you think about the morality of each.
- about_help 8y ago
  It is an extreme example to illustrate the point, not a direct comparison of FB to atomic bombs. However, one might argue that FB is actually worse. It is hard to quantify widespread societal effects and determine if they would have occurred through other channels. The massive privacy violations across the world through FB is another item that is hard to quantify yet 100% morally wrong.
  - bootlooped 8y ago
    I don't think it would be a very persuasive argument. Atomic bombs have some easily quantifiable negatives, for example $5+ trillion spent on nuclear arms in the US alone, and ~200,000 mostly civilians killed. https://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/costs-us-nuclear-weapons/ https://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/costs-us-nuclear-weapo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a...
    - saagarjha 8y ago
      Just because something can’t be tied to “people died” does not make it a positive for society. Things like censorship and tracking don’t have clear and immediate negative externalities, but they are clearly wrong and they can enable other, worse things.
      - bootlooped 8y ago
        "Just because something can’t be tied to “people died” does not make it a positive for society." I never asserted that Facebook was a positive for society, neither here nor ever in my life. I'm just saying it's a very steep uphill climb to make a convincing argument that it's worse than something that directly caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and cost trillions of dollars.
PhasmaFelis 8y ago
I mean, I don't see the Manhattan Project guys as monsters, but weapon designers absolutely bear some responsibility for the weapons they design.
- FilterSweep 8y ago
  In that same vein, social media, especially facebook, has largely been used by malactors and state-sponsored trolls as a weapon itself. Hello, “Internet Research Agency”!
sigi45 8y ago
Aaaaaaand gone is the moral. Great.
- bytematic 8y ago
  New grads don't have the liberty of filtering out 85+% of companies that have shitty morals. The ones that are too small to be newsworthy likely wish they could do what facebook does and more.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    It really depends. You can be selective to where you apply and still a job, even as a new graduate. It’s not like it’s impossible to get offers if you’re talented.
jfk13 8y ago
> Developers are largely undercompensated for the utility they provide for firms Perhaps, though I tend to think that developers are largely overcompensated for the benefit they provide to society as a whole. (Yes, I'm one of them.)
- FilterSweep 8y ago
  Hey,(side note) Jaron Lanier has some interesting things to say about “value-added” to society! I can’t disagree with what you’re saying, but that would also mean other roles are also overcompensated, if not even more (heh, executives)
imgabe 8y ago
I'd have a lot more understanding for the people working on the atomic bomb. From their perspective they were in the midst of a world war with an enemy that was trying to do the same thing. That's just a matter of preserving your own existence.
alex_duf 8y ago
> Developers are largely undercompensated for the utility they provide for firms I disagree, we just have a favourable job market. We're a privileged slice of the population, my salary is way higher than anyone in my family, than my partner or most of my school mates. Am I smarter than them? Am I working harder than them? I don't think so. It's sheer luck. It's not to dismiss any of the effort/creativity/perseverance it takes to get into that class of work, but devs are anything but "undercompensated". There's just not enough of us around. Now the bay area might be a special case where the reliance on our industry completely distorted everything else. Regarding your point about blaming students working for Facebook, I agree, I don't think they should be blamed. Everyone has their own situation to deal with.

eesmith 8y ago

> It’s a bit like blaming the scientists of the Manhattan Project for dropping the atomic bomb. Consider Joseph Rotblat. He worked on the Manhattan Project because believed that it was needed as a deterrent against a German nuclear weapon. After he learned that Germany had given up on the bomb, he left the Manhattan Project - the only one to do so - and felt betrayed by its use in Japan. "Rotblat believed that scientists should always be concerned with the ethical consequences of their work.[39] He became one of the most prominent critics of the nuclear arms race ... Rotblat shared, with the Pugwash Conferences, the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize for efforts toward nuclear disarmament." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Rotblat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Rotblat . There's a movie about him, "The Strangest Dream", at https://www.nfb.ca/film/strangest_dream/ https://www.nfb.ca/film/strangest_dream/ .

xxpor 8y ago
The difference is the nuclear arms race was inevitable. The soviets would have made it eventually anyway, and then what would we (the US) have done? Facebook on the other hand is not inevitable.
- eesmith 8y ago
  Should scientists always be concerned with the ethical consequences of their work? Should Facebook employees always be concerned with the ethical consequences of their work? I think your argument is that the ethics means we really needed enough nuclear weapons to destroy the planet several times over? And we really needed to let the government sell the lie that there was a 'missile gap' to the US population? Or was that lie in order to hide that there were U-2 overflights? Who were we hiding the knowledge of U-2s from? The Soviets, who could see them on radar and were developing ways to shoot them down? Or the US public? It's all very odd ethics. I'm sure the Rand Corporation has some game theorists who would clear everything up.
  - antod 8y ago
    > And we really needed to let the government sell the lie that there was a 'missile gap' to the US population? Or was that lie in order to hide that there were U-2 overflights? Who were we hiding the knowledge of U-2s from? The Soviets, who could see them on radar and were developing ways to shoot them down? Or the US public? From memory the "missile gap" wasn't a government lie to hide anything but an election campaign lie by Kennedy to attack the govt and appear tougher on the "commies".
    - eesmith 8y ago
      Eisenhower could have made the information public. A lie of omission is still a lie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap > According to Robert McNamara, Kennedy was leaked the inflated US Air Force estimates by Senator Stuart Symington, the former Secretary of the Air Force. Unaware that the report was misleading, Kennedy used the numbers in the document and based some of his 1960 election campaign platform on the Republicans being "weak on defense."[5] The missile gap was a common theme. > Eisenhower refused to refute the claims publicly for fear that public disclosure would jeopardize the secret U-2 flights. Consequently, Eisenhower was frustrated by what he conclusively knew to be Kennedy's erroneous claims that the United States was behind the USSR in its number of missiles.[6] > In an attempt to defuse the situation, Eisenhower arranged for Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to be apprised of the information, first with a meeting by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then Strategic Air Command, and finally with the Director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, in July 1960. Still, Kennedy continued to use the same rhetoric, which modern historians have debated as likely being so useful to the campaign that he was willing to ignore the truth. If you want an explicit lie, the Eisenhower administration lied to the US public saying that the U-2 was for high-altitude weather research. When Powers was shot down, the official US lie was that a high-altitude research flight was missing, and may have 'drifted with an incapacitated pilot across the Soviet border' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_U-2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_U-2 .
      - antod 8y ago
        I see what you meant about hiding the U2 now, ie by not refuting the missile gap 'lie' rather than by creating/spreading it. Makes sense. Cheers
- adgasf 8y ago
  If Facebook hadn't succeeded another, similar network would have
  - xxpor 8y ago
    Sure, but would they have committed the same ethical disasters?
jeffreyrogers 8y ago
There's some evidence that the use in Japan was partly an attempt to deter the Soviet Union from future aggression.
- eesmith 8y ago
  I don't think I explained my point well enough. If the Manhattan Project is a useful comparison, then we have to take the totality of the people working on project, including the one person who quit, for moral reasons. He 'believed that scientists should always be concerned with the ethical consequences of their work'. In other words, yes, we should apportion some blame to 'the scientists of the Manhattan Project for dropping the atomic bomb'. (For that matter, Philip Morrison was one of those scientists. He helped load the atomic bombs onto the planes that made the two bomb runs. Certainly there's direct blame there, if blame is to be placed.) Certainly the rest of the scientific staff did not have the same views, or at least, didn't place the same weight on the different aspects of the ethics. Even then, remember that Oppenheimer remarked that he felt he had "blood on my hands" because he and others of the scientific staff thought the bombing of Nagasaki was unnecessary. Truman later told Acheson "I don't want to see that son-of-a-bitch in this office ever again." Regarding your point, and quoting from the WP page on Rotblat: "Rotblat continued to have strong reservations about the use of science to develop such a devastating weapon. In 1985, he related that at a private dinner at the Chadwicks' house at Los Alamos in March 1944, he was shocked to hear the director of the Manhattan Project, Major General Leslie R. Groves, Jr., say words to the effect that the real purpose in making the bomb was to subdue the Soviets." I interpret that to mean that Rotblat would have considered using the bomb against the Soviets in the way you summarized it as being sufficiently unethical that he would not work on it.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
FilterSweep 8y ago
This is profound because I would be surprised if the early employees at Facebook didn’t feel a bit betrayed at the direction they later went.
- TremendousJudge 8y ago
  did the early employees at facebook believe in anything more than making money?

mehrdadn 8y ago

> It’s a bit like blaming the scientists of the Manhattan Project for dropping the atomic bomb. I'm the last one to defend Facebook here but I don't see how designing an atomic bomb is comparable to working for Facebook, regardless of what you think about the morality of each.

about_help 8y ago
It is an extreme example to illustrate the point, not a direct comparison of FB to atomic bombs. However, one might argue that FB is actually worse. It is hard to quantify widespread societal effects and determine if they would have occurred through other channels. The massive privacy violations across the world through FB is another item that is hard to quantify yet 100% morally wrong.
- bootlooped 8y ago
  I don't think it would be a very persuasive argument. Atomic bombs have some easily quantifiable negatives, for example $5+ trillion spent on nuclear arms in the US alone, and ~200,000 mostly civilians killed. https://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/costs-us-nuclear-weapons/ https://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/costs-us-nuclear-weapo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a...
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    Just because something can’t be tied to “people died” does not make it a positive for society. Things like censorship and tracking don’t have clear and immediate negative externalities, but they are clearly wrong and they can enable other, worse things.
    - bootlooped 8y ago
      "Just because something can’t be tied to “people died” does not make it a positive for society." I never asserted that Facebook was a positive for society, neither here nor ever in my life. I'm just saying it's a very steep uphill climb to make a convincing argument that it's worse than something that directly caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and cost trillions of dollars.

PhasmaFelis 8y ago

I mean, I don't see the Manhattan Project guys as monsters, but weapon designers absolutely bear some responsibility for the weapons they design.

FilterSweep 8y ago
In that same vein, social media, especially facebook, has largely been used by malactors and state-sponsored trolls as a weapon itself. Hello, “Internet Research Agency”!

sigi45 8y ago

Aaaaaaand gone is the moral. Great.

bytematic 8y ago
New grads don't have the liberty of filtering out 85+% of companies that have shitty morals. The ones that are too small to be newsworthy likely wish they could do what facebook does and more.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  It really depends. You can be selective to where you apply and still a job, even as a new graduate. It’s not like it’s impossible to get offers if you’re talented.

jfk13 8y ago

> Developers are largely undercompensated for the utility they provide for firms Perhaps, though I tend to think that developers are largely overcompensated for the benefit they provide to society as a whole. (Yes, I'm one of them.)

FilterSweep 8y ago
Hey,(side note) Jaron Lanier has some interesting things to say about “value-added” to society! I can’t disagree with what you’re saying, but that would also mean other roles are also overcompensated, if not even more (heh, executives)

imgabe 8y ago

I'd have a lot more understanding for the people working on the atomic bomb. From their perspective they were in the midst of a world war with an enemy that was trying to do the same thing. That's just a matter of preserving your own existence.

alex_duf 8y ago

> Developers are largely undercompensated for the utility they provide for firms I disagree, we just have a favourable job market. We're a privileged slice of the population, my salary is way higher than anyone in my family, than my partner or most of my school mates. Am I smarter than them? Am I working harder than them? I don't think so. It's sheer luck. It's not to dismiss any of the effort/creativity/perseverance it takes to get into that class of work, but devs are anything but "undercompensated". There's just not enough of us around. Now the bay area might be a special case where the reliance on our industry completely distorted everything else. Regarding your point about blaming students working for Facebook, I agree, I don't think they should be blamed. Everyone has their own situation to deal with.