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why does a person's interest in the application of their work serve as a signal for if you should hire them? I mean maybe for someone in a product role, but how

why does a person's interest in the application of their work serve as a signal for if you should hire them? I mean maybe for someone in a product role, but how is it relevant to hiring an individual contributor? not hiring someone just because of their internal philosophies feels like gate keeping to me. if someone is a cynic and realizes most start ups arent out there "making the world a better place"... doesn't really have any bearing on their potential output.

gfodor 5y ago
It is gate keeping. That's the point. I don't want to work with people who feel like it's reasonable to be unaware or agnostic to the effect their work is going to have on actual people. I don't believe in the meme that someone's role ought to dictate if they need to consider the consequences of their creative efforts on other human beings. I have a lot more respect for people who consider these things, and just have different opinions than I about what they consider worthy applications, than those who just consider it unnecessary to think about these things. We have an obligation, if we are going to call ourselves "engineers", to consider what we are working on from an ethical perspective.
- SubuSS 5y ago
  I think there is a bit of goal most moving happening here: - you started with ad systems as example of evil: they patently aren’t. They are more of a result of the deeper cause - folks don’t want to pay for things if possible. So now the bill gets moved to a different table, that’s all. All the humanitarian efforts (if any) are standing on the shoulders of the money generated from ads - if someone says ‘I just want to solve hard problems’ - it is quite a leap from there to assuming they don’t care about social problems. May be they don’t feel empowered/qualified to tackle the big social questions and are just trying to make a living and possibly be productive doing so. Or they don’t want to tackle a social conversation in a workplace setting. I am very wary of the forcing that’s happening of making everyone involved in social/philosophical questions whether they like it or not. A lot of people just want to make it through the day/build expertise in something and make it through their life. They’d prefer to pay taxes and let other entities / experts deal with those. This doesn’t mean apathy, it just means a lack of time and ability. I think that’s worth respecting.
  - burnished 5y ago
    Its ineluctable. If you are an engineer, your work has a moral and ethical axis that inseparable from the rest. This is what our professional societies believe, it is what you are taught in school, it is in many ways no more than taking responsibility for your actions. What you are describing is apathy. You don't get to stand apart from the work that you do because it is hard.
    - SubuSS 5y ago
      I see two issues with that way of thinking: - morality and ethics are a gradient and are fluidly getting defined as we evolve. Are you still immoral or apathetic if you use electricity generated from coal? Or are you saying we are all apathetic but this is the one instance you want to stake your argument on? - almost all systems get misused over time: are all those makers apathetic? What about the intent of the hustlers using such systems?
      - burnished 5y ago
        Great, you've successfully diluted the statement with questions that are adjacent, if you squint. Engineering work has an ethical element to it. I do not see how what you are your 'just asking questions' intersects with this.
  - Rioghasarig 5y ago
    > goal post moving You're being silly. The guy is explaining his perspective. He's explaining what he believes and why he believes it. He's not writing a thesis or constructing some logical argument. This isn't a debate. Applying the term "goal post moving" to this makes absolutely no sense. I just feel like you're taking a confrontational approach rather than just trying to understand his position. Nothing he says is inherently contradictory.
    - SubuSS 5y ago
      Lol isn’t it odd you consider the defense confrontational while the op started with calling a bunch of folks morally challenged? Fwiw - I don’t work on ad systems. I was just stating my opinion about how borderline ethical considerations from misuse are pervading engineering and science today. What about intent?
- greyivy 5y ago
  As someone founding an early-stage startup, I really appreciate hearing your thoughts on this and it's very encouraging to know I'm not alone.
Enginerrrd 5y ago
Holy Christ, Are you seriously asking why ethics and concern for how the systems you design interact with end users and targets of those systems might be a worthy consideration? Let me give you a concrete example: Imagine you are an software engineer tasked with working on a facial recognition system to help police identify known criminals to help find suspects near the time and location of a crime. It observes nearby people and assigns a probability to them being a known criminal. Police department demands 80% accuracy for the product. You design such a system using some blackbox facial recognition AI, and you get the following results: Overall 78% accuracy with: 6.5% False Positive rate 31% False negative rate Not too bad, you tweak some things, hit your 80% accuracy without messing with the false positives too badly, and you meet the specification provided by the client. Mission accomplished and you're ready to ship right? Makes the company money? No problems? Cool. Except, because you didn't really care that much about how the technology you deployed would be used or the ethics surrounding its use, you failed to consider the right performance targets despite what your client asked for and your system is nearly 100% racist. What happened? You trained on equal numbers of prison mugshots, and mugshot like photos of people with no criminal records. You failed to consider that black people are over represented in the US prison system. (38% of prisoners but 13% of US population) Your classifier just learned to label someone a likely criminal if they were black and essentially no other criteria. Yet, the actual likelihood the people identified by the system as "criminals" in fact have a criminal history is at most somewhere ~33% despite the fact your system labels it as 80% likely. Worse, even if we have a hypothetical situation where blacks and non-blacks are represented in their average proportions, there's a near equal number of black and non-black people with criminal histories in the vicinity of the crime! Worse still, since people tend to be more segregated than that, when blacks are in even more of a minority there will be more non-blacks with criminal histories around. When blacks make up a greater proportion, the likelihood of being falsely accused goes up even more. And FYI... such systems with similar flaws have actually been built and deployed in the past. How do you think that plays on trust in the company and the technology in general in the long run? Considering end-use ethics brings value.
- therealdrag0 5y ago
  It's a very troubling example, but most of it is focused on product failures. Isn't that a bit orthogonal to ethics? Maybe there's some traction between how hard something is to 'get right' and if it should be attempted, but it sure doesn't seem black and white.
SuoDuanDao 5y ago
Warren Buffet has a great quote on this topic. He says he hires on three criteria: Intelligence, energy, and character. He adds, "Those first two will kill you if you don't have the last one. If someone's immoral you want them to be dumb and lazy". Being a high performer is not a positive when someone's looking to take advantage of you.

gfodor 5y ago

It is gate keeping. That's the point. I don't want to work with people who feel like it's reasonable to be unaware or agnostic to the effect their work is going to have on actual people. I don't believe in the meme that someone's role ought to dictate if they need to consider the consequences of their creative efforts on other human beings. I have a lot more respect for people who consider these things, and just have different opinions than I about what they consider worthy applications, than those who just consider it unnecessary to think about these things. We have an obligation, if we are going to call ourselves "engineers", to consider what we are working on from an ethical perspective.

SubuSS 5y ago
I think there is a bit of goal most moving happening here: - you started with ad systems as example of evil: they patently aren’t. They are more of a result of the deeper cause - folks don’t want to pay for things if possible. So now the bill gets moved to a different table, that’s all. All the humanitarian efforts (if any) are standing on the shoulders of the money generated from ads - if someone says ‘I just want to solve hard problems’ - it is quite a leap from there to assuming they don’t care about social problems. May be they don’t feel empowered/qualified to tackle the big social questions and are just trying to make a living and possibly be productive doing so. Or they don’t want to tackle a social conversation in a workplace setting. I am very wary of the forcing that’s happening of making everyone involved in social/philosophical questions whether they like it or not. A lot of people just want to make it through the day/build expertise in something and make it through their life. They’d prefer to pay taxes and let other entities / experts deal with those. This doesn’t mean apathy, it just means a lack of time and ability. I think that’s worth respecting.
- burnished 5y ago
  Its ineluctable. If you are an engineer, your work has a moral and ethical axis that inseparable from the rest. This is what our professional societies believe, it is what you are taught in school, it is in many ways no more than taking responsibility for your actions. What you are describing is apathy. You don't get to stand apart from the work that you do because it is hard.
  - SubuSS 5y ago
    I see two issues with that way of thinking: - morality and ethics are a gradient and are fluidly getting defined as we evolve. Are you still immoral or apathetic if you use electricity generated from coal? Or are you saying we are all apathetic but this is the one instance you want to stake your argument on? - almost all systems get misused over time: are all those makers apathetic? What about the intent of the hustlers using such systems?
    - burnished 5y ago
      Great, you've successfully diluted the statement with questions that are adjacent, if you squint. Engineering work has an ethical element to it. I do not see how what you are your 'just asking questions' intersects with this.
- Rioghasarig 5y ago
  > goal post moving You're being silly. The guy is explaining his perspective. He's explaining what he believes and why he believes it. He's not writing a thesis or constructing some logical argument. This isn't a debate. Applying the term "goal post moving" to this makes absolutely no sense. I just feel like you're taking a confrontational approach rather than just trying to understand his position. Nothing he says is inherently contradictory.
  - SubuSS 5y ago
    Lol isn’t it odd you consider the defense confrontational while the op started with calling a bunch of folks morally challenged? Fwiw - I don’t work on ad systems. I was just stating my opinion about how borderline ethical considerations from misuse are pervading engineering and science today. What about intent?
greyivy 5y ago
As someone founding an early-stage startup, I really appreciate hearing your thoughts on this and it's very encouraging to know I'm not alone.

Enginerrrd 5y ago

Holy Christ, Are you seriously asking why ethics and concern for how the systems you design interact with end users and targets of those systems might be a worthy consideration? Let me give you a concrete example: Imagine you are an software engineer tasked with working on a facial recognition system to help police identify known criminals to help find suspects near the time and location of a crime. It observes nearby people and assigns a probability to them being a known criminal. Police department demands 80% accuracy for the product. You design such a system using some blackbox facial recognition AI, and you get the following results: Overall 78% accuracy with: 6.5% False Positive rate 31% False negative rate Not too bad, you tweak some things, hit your 80% accuracy without messing with the false positives too badly, and you meet the specification provided by the client. Mission accomplished and you're ready to ship right? Makes the company money? No problems? Cool. Except, because you didn't really care that much about how the technology you deployed would be used or the ethics surrounding its use, you failed to consider the right performance targets despite what your client asked for and your system is nearly 100% racist. What happened? You trained on equal numbers of prison mugshots, and mugshot like photos of people with no criminal records. You failed to consider that black people are over represented in the US prison system. (38% of prisoners but 13% of US population) Your classifier just learned to label someone a likely criminal if they were black and essentially no other criteria. Yet, the actual likelihood the people identified by the system as "criminals" in fact have a criminal history is at most somewhere ~33% despite the fact your system labels it as 80% likely. Worse, even if we have a hypothetical situation where blacks and non-blacks are represented in their average proportions, there's a near equal number of black and non-black people with criminal histories in the vicinity of the crime! Worse still, since people tend to be more segregated than that, when blacks are in even more of a minority there will be more non-blacks with criminal histories around. When blacks make up a greater proportion, the likelihood of being falsely accused goes up even more. And FYI... such systems with similar flaws have actually been built and deployed in the past. How do you think that plays on trust in the company and the technology in general in the long run? Considering end-use ethics brings value.

therealdrag0 5y ago
It's a very troubling example, but most of it is focused on product failures. Isn't that a bit orthogonal to ethics? Maybe there's some traction between how hard something is to 'get right' and if it should be attempted, but it sure doesn't seem black and white.

SuoDuanDao 5y ago

Warren Buffet has a great quote on this topic. He says he hires on three criteria: Intelligence, energy, and character. He adds, "Those first two will kill you if you don't have the last one. If someone's immoral you want them to be dumb and lazy". Being a high performer is not a positive when someone's looking to take advantage of you.