7 ms·

I really hate this kind of response. Just because Mozilla isn't a saint doesn't mean that their words don't ring true. Mr Gotcha is a boring person. Don't be M

I really hate this kind of response. Just because Mozilla isn't a saint doesn't mean that their words don't ring true. Mr Gotcha is a boring person. Don't be Mr Gotcha. https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/ https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/ https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha-vs-the-green-new-deal/ https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha-vs-the-green-new-deal/ https://images.dailykos.com/images/723537/story_image/1406.png?1569958066 https://images.dailykos.com/images/723537/story_image/1406.p... Just because we're all living in the status quo doesn't mean we can't change because we're all hypocrites for living with the status quo. Aspire to something better. Even if you're currently benefitting from or struggling against the status quo. We should be taking ethical jobs and who cares if it's Mozilla who said it. They're right about this, even if they're wrong about other things.

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
I can't speak for the original commenter, but my concern is that Mozilla might be pushing for a vision of ethics in tech which excludes some ethics they'd prefer not to follow.
jacquesm 7y ago
That's all fine and true but it is a fact that you're better off taking your advice about ethics from a party that is ethical and Mozilla's record is less than spotless, to put it mildly. People far better placed than Mozilla the company have been saying this for years so they are late to that particular party anyway and plenty of the damage done they did themselves. Personally, my take is the opposite: if you are an ethical person find the very worst company that you are still willing to work for and try to change them from the inside. After all if only non-ethical people want to work at certain companies that will make things worse, not better.
- bashinator 7y ago
  Don't let the desire for perfection prevent improvement. And while I take your last point, trying to make e.g. an advertising company with tens of thousands of employees more ethical is going to be less productive than going somewhere that's trying to do some societal good in the first place.
- newnewpdro 7y ago
  It makes sense to go work for an unethical company if you're unskilled and/or lazy, and will essentially sit on your hands while burning their resources on a useless employee. Otherwise, you're depriving an ethical organization of your contributions while aiding the competition. Unless you're entering a leadership role it's very unlikely you'll be changing a damn thing from within, while being corrupted by the surely lavish compensation an unethical company generally can afford to shower on its individual contributors.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    Every company is to more or lesser degree unethical. I've yet to come across a company that was 100% good. So you will always be making this trade-off, I'm asking for it to be a conscious one and to then push in the right direction from where it has the most effect.
    - magduf 7y ago
      While I agree that I haven't found any 100% good companies, I have yet to see a company where any low-level engineer has any real input at all and can actually make any kind of difference as far as ethics. If you work up into management, sure, but then you're no longer an engineer.
  - ForHackernews 7y ago
    > It makes sense to go work for an unethical company if you're unskilled and/or lazy, and will essentially sit on your hands while burning their resources on a useless employee. Now this is the kind of motivated reasoning I can get behind. I'm not lazy, I'm genuinely heroic!
- hutzlibu 7y ago
  "Personally, my take is the opposite: if you are an ethical person find the very worst company that you are still willing to work for and try to change them from the inside" That won't work. You do shape your enviroment, but your enviroment also shapes you. Meaning if you go to a miserable place on purpose, that place will just drain you, if you cannot change it completely. And changing a company on your own as a lonely employee ... is doomed from the start and will lead to burn out and depression very soon. I propose the opposite: ethical people gather together and create organisations and companies to show that things can be done better. Talk and criticism is cheap. Actually doing something better, is much harder. But you need likeminded people around you. If they are all dispersed everyone fighting on their own against a behemot .. will not make things better. All those cold "evil" corporate people? Well, at some point they were humans with ideals as well (in most cases) but got changed by their surroundings.
- ancientworldnow 7y ago
  The logical conclusion of this is to go join ISIS and do their IT. See how stupid this idea is? You're not going to change anything from the inside, you're just helping them do bad things.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    The only thing that shows is that reduction to absurds leads to absurdities.
    - drdeca 7y ago
      Showing that a claim implies an absurdity is what the “reduction to the absurd” proof technique is, yes. Generally, “implies a falsehood” is considered to be equivalent to “is false”. What’s your point?
      - jacquesm 7y ago
        My point is - and it is sad that this needs elaborating - that what works well for physics and maths problems does not necessarily work well for societal problems. Changing a company from the inside is something that can only be done by those that are on the inside, hence my qualification that you should only join those companies that you can still stomach and then push as hard as you can in the right direction, rather than to join the very worst organization that you can find in the world, and one that you - hopefully - can not stomach.
        drdeca 7y ago
        It is an error to think that reductio only applies to “physics and math problems”. Logic is logic, it applies to all truths. (Though one has to be careful with things stated informally, to ensure that one is working with the claims that were intended. There is a danger of parsing an informal statement as if it were a formal statement, and as a result interpreting it to mean something other than what was meant. Also, there may be a risk of people being more likely to derive in invalid ways when attempting the reductio, like making some hyperbolic statements, exaggerating the implications of a statement, and treating those exaggerations as if they actually logically follow. But this doesn’t make reductio an invalid technique, just one that people can fail to use properly.) Like I said in the other comment, the objection should be that the derivation of the absurd from the premise is invalid. For example, pointing to the “that you can stomach” part of your claim, and saying that the derivation was invalid in neglecting that part of the statement.
- mindcrime 7y ago
  you're better off taking your advice about ethics from a party that is ethical And when there is no such party?
  - gdy 7y ago
    Listen to your own conscience. In fact, that's enough.
- simple_phrases 7y ago
  No one who programs computers is going to change an organization from the inside. Company culture comes from the top.
- iamnothere 7y ago
  Interesting idea, but based on personal anecdata I wouldn't advise it. See also Zvi's recent series on what he terms "Immoral Mazes": https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/01/16/how-escape-from-immoral-mazes/ https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/01/16/how-escape-from-immo... His claim is that power in large organizations is a zero-sum game, and merely competing in this game in order to advance necessarily alters your personality and lifestyle. This is due to the demands that the game places on you. The whole series is worth reading.
- rrix2 7y ago
  But where is the true Scotsman??
- gatherhunterer 7y ago
  > it is a fact that you're better off taking your advice about ethics from a party that is ethical Read: Ad hominem arguments are easy so I accept them.
d1zzy 7y ago
> Just because we're all living in the status quo doesn't mean we can't change because we're all hypocrites for living with the status quo. Aspire to something better. Even if you're currently benefitting from or struggling against the status quo. I'm not convinced by this argument. The status quo may exist because there are fundamental issues with changing it. Those issues don't go away with wishful thinking. Attempting to change things while praiseworthy may end up do more harm than good. At the best, if it doesn't end up changing the status quo, you just wasted energy, and bothered other people. But much more likely seems to me that we are trading some pros/cons for others, it's not a strict improvement or even an overall improvement. If one tries to analyze attempts at change that failed there are lots of common patterns. One of them is being ignorant of the fundamental reasons why the issue you are trying to change is the way it is. Being ignorant of the reason behind that makes it much more likely you will fail at your task.
- guerrilla 7y ago
  > I'm not convinced by this argument. The status quo may exist because there are fundamental issues with changing it. Those issues don't go away with wishful thinking. Attempting to change things while praiseworthy may end up do more harm than good. At the best, if it doesn't end up changing the status quo, you just wasted energy, and bothered other people. But much more likely seems to me that we are trading some pros/cons for others, it's not a strict improvement or even an overall improvement. Can you imagine yourself arguing this in feudalism or the USSR?
  - drdeca 7y ago
    Well, what if you were under feudalism or under the USSR, and decided that the problem with the status quo that you should try to solve was not “we don’t have plentiful enough food” but rather “people need food to live at all”. One wouldn’t succeed in changing this. Of course, some conceivable changes to the way things are, are both possible to achieve, and are overall beneficial to make. Some changes are impossible (or effectively impossible) to make, and some are possible but have costs which outweigh the benefits. I suppose the question is determining, or estimating, which is which. (Though, I suppose the question isn’t just “what proportion are you right about as to what category they fall under” but rather, what is the average benefit and cost (and I suppose also the variance and other moments?) of your pursuit of the changes you choose to persue.)
pb7 7y ago
This response is completely warranted when you don't lead by example. It's easy to rally the troops to charge the front lines while hiding in your castle.
- enraged_camel 7y ago
  >> This response is completely warranted when you don't lead by example. No, it is a logical fallacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
  - pb7 7y ago
    This informal fallacy is generally unrecognized. Having a Wikipedia article doesn't make it an accepted norm. What you're doing is called the appeal to authority fallacy which is generally recognized.
    - wizzwizz4 7y ago
      Both of you are wrong. Appealing to fallacies doesn't make a good argument, but neither does pointing that out knock down an argument. That'd be the “fallacy fallacy”. Appealing to "accepted norms" is another case of appealing to authority – except a less verifiable authority, in that case. Ironically, I am currently listing fallacies, which itself does not a good argument make – so I will add to it that that's not what “informal” means; the adjective is merely specifying that it is not a logical flaw, but instead falls into a broader category (such as implying stronger evidence than exists, or something). Your original argument is flawed, however; it neglects that organisations cannot increase the talent available to ethical companies and decrease the talent available to unethical ones by participating in the job market, and invokes an argument similar to the tu quoque fallacy by implying that Mozilla's actions have any bearing on how good its advice is. Merely calling out that you used a fallacy (and misidentified at that!) is not a sufficient counterargument alone.
      - jshevek 7y ago
        Did you mean pb7, the poster you responded to, when you wrote "Your original argument"?
merpnderp 7y ago
No, this has nothing to do with what they said and everything to do with should anyone care that they said it. If a murderer says "don't murder", that is obviously true. But our response should be 'lol, who are you to inform my ethics or debate with me?'
codingmess 7y ago
Well other people hate people or institutions that preach moral behavior and don#t adhere to their own rules.
mav3rick 7y ago
Lol Google gets the same criticism. Have the same yardstick for everyone.
SilasX 7y ago
I have to disagree. The role of (this kind of) "gotcha" is to say, "Hey, you're asking something unrealistic; people are under the same constraints that lead you to do what you advised against. How can you expect us to operate under constraints even you can't live up to? Isn't that a prerequisite to giving such advice?" With that said, I don't think executive pay with layoffs is a good example of unethical behavior. A better one would be their behavior in the Looking Glass/Mr. Robot extension [1] or the forced updates via a mislabeled feature to cover their own screwup [2]. If a non-profit is so careless with security to promote their marketing and analytics, why would you expect others to heed less a stronger siren's call? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15931730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15931730 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19823701 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19823701

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago

I can't speak for the original commenter, but my concern is that Mozilla might be pushing for a vision of ethics in tech which excludes some ethics they'd prefer not to follow.

jacquesm 7y ago

That's all fine and true but it is a fact that you're better off taking your advice about ethics from a party that is ethical and Mozilla's record is less than spotless, to put it mildly. People far better placed than Mozilla the company have been saying this for years so they are late to that particular party anyway and plenty of the damage done they did themselves. Personally, my take is the opposite: if you are an ethical person find the very worst company that you are still willing to work for and try to change them from the inside. After all if only non-ethical people want to work at certain companies that will make things worse, not better.

bashinator 7y ago
Don't let the desire for perfection prevent improvement. And while I take your last point, trying to make e.g. an advertising company with tens of thousands of employees more ethical is going to be less productive than going somewhere that's trying to do some societal good in the first place.
newnewpdro 7y ago
It makes sense to go work for an unethical company if you're unskilled and/or lazy, and will essentially sit on your hands while burning their resources on a useless employee. Otherwise, you're depriving an ethical organization of your contributions while aiding the competition. Unless you're entering a leadership role it's very unlikely you'll be changing a damn thing from within, while being corrupted by the surely lavish compensation an unethical company generally can afford to shower on its individual contributors.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  Every company is to more or lesser degree unethical. I've yet to come across a company that was 100% good. So you will always be making this trade-off, I'm asking for it to be a conscious one and to then push in the right direction from where it has the most effect.
  - magduf 7y ago
    While I agree that I haven't found any 100% good companies, I have yet to see a company where any low-level engineer has any real input at all and can actually make any kind of difference as far as ethics. If you work up into management, sure, but then you're no longer an engineer.
- ForHackernews 7y ago
  > It makes sense to go work for an unethical company if you're unskilled and/or lazy, and will essentially sit on your hands while burning their resources on a useless employee. Now this is the kind of motivated reasoning I can get behind. I'm not lazy, I'm genuinely heroic!
hutzlibu 7y ago
"Personally, my take is the opposite: if you are an ethical person find the very worst company that you are still willing to work for and try to change them from the inside" That won't work. You do shape your enviroment, but your enviroment also shapes you. Meaning if you go to a miserable place on purpose, that place will just drain you, if you cannot change it completely. And changing a company on your own as a lonely employee ... is doomed from the start and will lead to burn out and depression very soon. I propose the opposite: ethical people gather together and create organisations and companies to show that things can be done better. Talk and criticism is cheap. Actually doing something better, is much harder. But you need likeminded people around you. If they are all dispersed everyone fighting on their own against a behemot .. will not make things better. All those cold "evil" corporate people? Well, at some point they were humans with ideals as well (in most cases) but got changed by their surroundings.
ancientworldnow 7y ago
The logical conclusion of this is to go join ISIS and do their IT. See how stupid this idea is? You're not going to change anything from the inside, you're just helping them do bad things.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  The only thing that shows is that reduction to absurds leads to absurdities.
  - drdeca 7y ago
    Showing that a claim implies an absurdity is what the “reduction to the absurd” proof technique is, yes. Generally, “implies a falsehood” is considered to be equivalent to “is false”. What’s your point?
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      My point is - and it is sad that this needs elaborating - that what works well for physics and maths problems does not necessarily work well for societal problems. Changing a company from the inside is something that can only be done by those that are on the inside, hence my qualification that you should only join those companies that you can still stomach and then push as hard as you can in the right direction, rather than to join the very worst organization that you can find in the world, and one that you - hopefully - can not stomach.
      - drdeca 7y ago
        It is an error to think that reductio only applies to “physics and math problems”. Logic is logic, it applies to all truths. (Though one has to be careful with things stated informally, to ensure that one is working with the claims that were intended. There is a danger of parsing an informal statement as if it were a formal statement, and as a result interpreting it to mean something other than what was meant. Also, there may be a risk of people being more likely to derive in invalid ways when attempting the reductio, like making some hyperbolic statements, exaggerating the implications of a statement, and treating those exaggerations as if they actually logically follow. But this doesn’t make reductio an invalid technique, just one that people can fail to use properly.) Like I said in the other comment, the objection should be that the derivation of the absurd from the premise is invalid. For example, pointing to the “that you can stomach” part of your claim, and saying that the derivation was invalid in neglecting that part of the statement.
mindcrime 7y ago
you're better off taking your advice about ethics from a party that is ethical And when there is no such party?
- gdy 7y ago
  Listen to your own conscience. In fact, that's enough.
simple_phrases 7y ago
No one who programs computers is going to change an organization from the inside. Company culture comes from the top.
iamnothere 7y ago
Interesting idea, but based on personal anecdata I wouldn't advise it. See also Zvi's recent series on what he terms "Immoral Mazes": https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/01/16/how-escape-from-immoral-mazes/ https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/01/16/how-escape-from-immo... His claim is that power in large organizations is a zero-sum game, and merely competing in this game in order to advance necessarily alters your personality and lifestyle. This is due to the demands that the game places on you. The whole series is worth reading.
rrix2 7y ago
But where is the true Scotsman??
gatherhunterer 7y ago
> it is a fact that you're better off taking your advice about ethics from a party that is ethical Read: Ad hominem arguments are easy so I accept them.

d1zzy 7y ago

> Just because we're all living in the status quo doesn't mean we can't change because we're all hypocrites for living with the status quo. Aspire to something better. Even if you're currently benefitting from or struggling against the status quo. I'm not convinced by this argument. The status quo may exist because there are fundamental issues with changing it. Those issues don't go away with wishful thinking. Attempting to change things while praiseworthy may end up do more harm than good. At the best, if it doesn't end up changing the status quo, you just wasted energy, and bothered other people. But much more likely seems to me that we are trading some pros/cons for others, it's not a strict improvement or even an overall improvement. If one tries to analyze attempts at change that failed there are lots of common patterns. One of them is being ignorant of the fundamental reasons why the issue you are trying to change is the way it is. Being ignorant of the reason behind that makes it much more likely you will fail at your task.

guerrilla 7y ago
> I'm not convinced by this argument. The status quo may exist because there are fundamental issues with changing it. Those issues don't go away with wishful thinking. Attempting to change things while praiseworthy may end up do more harm than good. At the best, if it doesn't end up changing the status quo, you just wasted energy, and bothered other people. But much more likely seems to me that we are trading some pros/cons for others, it's not a strict improvement or even an overall improvement. Can you imagine yourself arguing this in feudalism or the USSR?
- drdeca 7y ago
  Well, what if you were under feudalism or under the USSR, and decided that the problem with the status quo that you should try to solve was not “we don’t have plentiful enough food” but rather “people need food to live at all”. One wouldn’t succeed in changing this. Of course, some conceivable changes to the way things are, are both possible to achieve, and are overall beneficial to make. Some changes are impossible (or effectively impossible) to make, and some are possible but have costs which outweigh the benefits. I suppose the question is determining, or estimating, which is which. (Though, I suppose the question isn’t just “what proportion are you right about as to what category they fall under” but rather, what is the average benefit and cost (and I suppose also the variance and other moments?) of your pursuit of the changes you choose to persue.)

pb7 7y ago

This response is completely warranted when you don't lead by example. It's easy to rally the troops to charge the front lines while hiding in your castle.

enraged_camel 7y ago
>> This response is completely warranted when you don't lead by example. No, it is a logical fallacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
- pb7 7y ago
  This informal fallacy is generally unrecognized. Having a Wikipedia article doesn't make it an accepted norm. What you're doing is called the appeal to authority fallacy which is generally recognized.
  - wizzwizz4 7y ago
    Both of you are wrong. Appealing to fallacies doesn't make a good argument, but neither does pointing that out knock down an argument. That'd be the “fallacy fallacy”. Appealing to "accepted norms" is another case of appealing to authority – except a less verifiable authority, in that case. Ironically, I am currently listing fallacies, which itself does not a good argument make – so I will add to it that that's not what “informal” means; the adjective is merely specifying that it is not a logical flaw, but instead falls into a broader category (such as implying stronger evidence than exists, or something). Your original argument is flawed, however; it neglects that organisations cannot increase the talent available to ethical companies and decrease the talent available to unethical ones by participating in the job market, and invokes an argument similar to the tu quoque fallacy by implying that Mozilla's actions have any bearing on how good its advice is. Merely calling out that you used a fallacy (and misidentified at that!) is not a sufficient counterargument alone.
    - jshevek 7y ago
      Did you mean pb7, the poster you responded to, when you wrote "Your original argument"?

merpnderp 7y ago

No, this has nothing to do with what they said and everything to do with should anyone care that they said it. If a murderer says "don't murder", that is obviously true. But our response should be 'lol, who are you to inform my ethics or debate with me?'

codingmess 7y ago

Well other people hate people or institutions that preach moral behavior and don#t adhere to their own rules.

mav3rick 7y ago

Lol Google gets the same criticism. Have the same yardstick for everyone.

SilasX 7y ago

I have to disagree. The role of (this kind of) "gotcha" is to say, "Hey, you're asking something unrealistic; people are under the same constraints that lead you to do what you advised against. How can you expect us to operate under constraints even you can't live up to? Isn't that a prerequisite to giving such advice?" With that said, I don't think executive pay with layoffs is a good example of unethical behavior. A better one would be their behavior in the Looking Glass/Mr. Robot extension [1] or the forced updates via a mislabeled feature to cover their own screwup [2]. If a non-profit is so careless with security to promote their marketing and analytics, why would you expect others to heed less a stronger siren's call? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15931730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15931730 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19823701 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19823701