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The comment author does not advocate ignoring the world, he wants to separate his engineering work from politics and thus wants to look for employers who do not

• toiletfuneral 6y ago
  This response is mis-characterization and is acting in bad faith, no one in this thread is asking for forced demonstrating. That's not actually a thing that's happening.
• Barrin92 6y ago
  >Do you really want to make him jump and go demonstrate for/against your list of hot button topics? Yes I do and countless of scientists and artists do exactly that, which is why a lot of them ended up being subject to McCarthyism paranoia at one point or the other. Brilliant scientists, more than anyone else maybe, need to engage the political world to understand what influence what they built has on it. Technologists being painfully unaware of the political ramifications of their work, if anything, got us to where we are right now. It's no coincidence that the politically detached scientist is the archetypical citizen of autocratic countries. The technologist who does not care for politics is today, the most sought after person in China.
• tshaddox 6y ago
  Wanting to separate engineering work from reality is precisely what Barrin92 is saying should not and can not be done. Engineering work isn't just some insulated game that gives you tokens to buy things you need in the real world. The engineering work is itself part of the real world.
  • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    Everything is part of the real world. Would you go to a mattress company and demand that they make it harder for your political opponents to get a good night's sleep?
    • Apocryphon 6y ago
      Wouldn't be the first time a mattress company got involved in that space. Casper sponsors the Slate Political Gabfest podcast, or used to at least.
    • tshaddox 6y ago
      No, I wouldn't, but I don't know how that is relevant. If a mattress company refused to sell mattresses to gay people, I wouldn't do business with that mattress company, and I would also approve of employees of that mattress company taking part in political activism to oppose that practice.
      • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
        I guess I don't see how the response is relevant. If Coinbase refused to sell cryptocurrency to gay people, I'd be all in favor of employees and external political activists saying they should - and Coinbase agrees, they don't expect to be apolitical with respect to the actual work that they do.
      • Oricle 6y ago
        I would. Mental illness shouldn't be glorified. And has for trans, 84% attempt suicide and all of them cause hell for everyone around them. Thank the Jews for pushing this bullshit on us! Just like everything else
    • eli 6y ago
      I dunno, but I bet in the long run the mattress company that allows internal debate outperforms one that silences it.
      • 6y ago
• ryanisnan 6y ago
  This is impossible. When the very technology you work on is employed in entirely political ways (i.e. dragonfly), you cannot separate work from the world.
  • coryfklein 6y ago
    Cash is a technology that is one of the biggest enablers of drug trafficking and child prostitution. Does this serve as an argument for employees of the Treasury Department (which prints and mints said cash) to engage in politics in the workplace? Much of technology is agnostic to politics, and enables much evil and good alike. This does not, in my mind, serve as justification for technology creators to intertwine politics with the creation of said technology.
    • Apocryphon 6y ago
      Yes, if it will bring about more regulations and protections. https://www.wsj.com/articles/treasury-plugs-gap-in-anti-money-laundering-regulations-11600680611 https://www.wsj.com/articles/treasury-plugs-gap-in-anti-mone...
      • dirtyoldmick 6y ago
        Yes! More government regulations are exactly what I want to deal with at work. There aren't nearly enough.
    • pm90 6y ago
      This is quite Amusing, because the treasury department is involved in efforts to prevent human trafficking: https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/combatting-human-trafficking https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/combatting-h...
      • coryfklein 6y ago
        Which is a good and laudable thing! But you're talking about the place the Treasure Department has in advocating for political positions that are inline with it's mission. I'm talking about whether Bob the coin stamp machine operator holds responsibility for building a technology that is, in some cases, used for nefarious purposes. Bob doesn't want to be accosted by Richard from accounting because he doesn't do enough to advocate for anti-money laundering political causes or senatorial candidates. Bob just wants to show up and do his job.
• deleted 6y ago
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• paxys 6y ago
  While it isn't possible to separate engineering from politics in general, the sentiment is doubly hilarious when your goal is to enable a new global monetary system.
  • tshaddox 6y ago
    The Coinbase blog post is directly self-contradictory. First it lists some things that they focus on in order to accomplish their mission. One of those is this: > Enable belonging for everyone: We work to create an environment where everyone is welcome and can do their best work, regardless of background, sexual orientation, race, gender, age, etc. Then, just a few short paragraphs later, they list things that they focus minimally on, because they are "not directly related to the mission." One of those things is this: > Broader societal issues: We don’t engage here when issues are unrelated to our core mission, because we believe impact only comes with focus. It doesn't get more blatantly contradictory than that.
    • ironSkillet 6y ago
      I think what they're saying is that will work to make the environment within the company as welcoming as possible. However, they will not try and solve that problem for society at large. Although you may disagree with the approach, it doesn't seem contradictory to me.
      • tshaddox 6y ago
        And again, it's a false notion to think that those are two separate things. You can't, to use example that I hope is obvious, support making your work environment welcoming to everyone regardless of sexual orientation, while also refusing to oppose or even discuss a political movement or politician who would throw people in jail for having a certain sexual orientation.
        • sokoloff 6y ago
          While I would find that political position abhorrent, I wouldn't expect and certainly not demand that my company issue a specific public statement denouncing it.
• ardy42 6y ago
  > The comment author does not advocate ignoring the world, he wants to separate his engineering work from politics and thus wants to look for employers who do not push a particular political program on him. Which seems a perfectly valid (and attractive to me) view. A lot of engineering work is inherently political. For instance, an engineer designed the gas chambers at Auschwitz and by doing his engineering work he supported the politics of the holocaust since his work and those politics are inseparable. In most cases, the connection is not so obvious and clear cut, but it's still there.
• fivre 6y ago
  Are there no lines the op, or you, would not cross in the pursuit of your engineering work? Perhaps you're okay with Coinbase's mission specifically, but are you saying that you're okay with _literally anything_ in the pursuit of good engineering? Perhaps you and the OP would be quite happy, say, writing code for a lab that makes novel fentanyl analogues for the express purpose of including them in black-market knockoff heroin powder, which in turn leads to a number of deaths (accurately cutting in your microgram-potent meds is hard, and sometimes your downstream supply chain makes a hit that's got too high a fentanyl analogue/cut material ratio, go figure!), or an industrial system that captures unsuspecting babies to then drown them, strip their flesh, and harvest their valuable bones (not really that realistic in our normal reality, but per http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=25967.0 http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=25967.0 it works great in Dwarf Fortress! or it did, anyway, until that got patched out because of said bone harvester), or hell, let's just Godwin on it and say you'd be perfectly happy writing automation tooling to make Treblinka 10% more efficient. The respondent, whom you so readily chastise, has a quite valid point that we can't separate our engineering work from "politics" (ethics, really, but there does seem to be a side in this debate that prefers to say "politics", since that evokes more the admittedly annoying horse race electoraliasm and doublespeak-driven world of actual politics and takes away from the thrust of the issue, which is ethics, which happen to often overlap with politics but are very much their own thing) ever. That's an important thing to recognize, especially in an industry that has persistent issues with laying ethics aside in pursuit of "great inventions" (let's be pragmatic, it's mostly in pursuit of profit, with some good inventions as an occasional byproduct). What I think the respondent may be getting at is that there is a significant population in the industry that probably does have some lines they won't cross, but is privileged and willing to cross a great many lines that won't affect them personally. You perhaps think that's a laudable stance, and you can hold that opinion if you wish, but you should do so with the recognition that there are a number of people that will see that less as a commitment to honorable professional detachment and more as a willingness to trod over the rights and wellbeing of the less fortunate so long as it doesn't injure you immediately. I'd argue that it's important thing to at least consider in an industry that often speaks of changing the world for the better--perhaps that was more it drinking the consultant kool-aid about what millenials value in their work and deciding it needed to work that into messaging, if not action, but hey, if it wants to say that, it ought to put its money where its mouth is.
• deleted 6y ago
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• Zak 6y ago
  > he wants to separate his engineering work from politics So did Wernher von Braun. I've intentionally selected the most extreme example that came to mind readily to illustrate the point: designing rockets for the Nazis to be built by slaves and used to carry bombs to kill civilians has moral and political implications. It's reasonable to judge von Braun for knowingly participating in atrocities even if his only interest was in rocket science. It's not possible to separate the engineering from the politics. Cryptocurrency has political consequences, though they're not as obvious as those of ballistic missiles. For a company to work on cryptocurrency trading and pretend to be apolitical is disingenuous because if the company is successful, its actions will have a political impact. I'm inclined to think that anyone engaging in acts with political consequences should be proactive about what those consequences will be. Most technological change comes with the potential for political consequences. Of course, there's engineering work that's less political. Making incremental improvements to the efficiency of widely-used infrastructure is usually fairly neutral; it's good for everyone, but doesn't really change the balance of power.
  • deleted 6y ago
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• exolymph 6y ago
  > Do you really want to make him jump and go demonstrate for/against your list of hot button topics? Sadly for many people the answer to this is an unequivocal yes.