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> When you build a society where people worship money & fame instead of kindness or sincerity or any moral virtue at all, some people will do literally anything

> When you build a society where people worship money & fame instead of kindness or sincerity or any moral virtue at all, some people will do literally anything to maximize the $$$ and your society is fucked. It has nothing to do with technology. Money and fame are self-propagating, you're able to sell more products with fame and make more money with money. Kindness, sincerity, and moral virtues are better than their absence, I agree, but being kind to one person doesn't have the capability of exponential growth, you can't expect that the one act of kindness will allow you later to be kind to 100, then 10,000, then 1,000,000 people. Technology is a blessing and a curse, it's a Pandora's box that allows scalable ideas to scale to previously unimaginable levels. There was an article here yesterday about how WhatsApp scaled to 1 billion users with just 50 engineers. That kind of action - and its effects on society - would not be possible without technology.

joedevon 5y ago
If you build digital products that serve millions or billions of people, you can scale kindness. One easy change is to spend a bit of time learning about accessibility and incorporating it into your work.
skrebbel 5y ago
"But kindness doesn't scale!"
- LeifCarrotson 5y ago
  I'm not proposing that as a reason for taking an action; it's nothing like a justification for greed or cruelty. Instead, I'm proposing that as an explanation for the shape of the world as we observe it. Technology, capitalism, and human nature combine to make actors who prioritize money more powerful and visible than those who prioritize kindness. Likewise, I believe that dishonest, wealthy, power-hungry sociopaths make poor political leaders, and yet we seem to elect a lot of those. Power and morality are not well correlated - they might be orthagonal to each other, or even inversely correlated!

joedevon 5y ago

If you build digital products that serve millions or billions of people, you can scale kindness. One easy change is to spend a bit of time learning about accessibility and incorporating it into your work.

skrebbel 5y ago

"But kindness doesn't scale!"

LeifCarrotson 5y ago
I'm not proposing that as a reason for taking an action; it's nothing like a justification for greed or cruelty. Instead, I'm proposing that as an explanation for the shape of the world as we observe it. Technology, capitalism, and human nature combine to make actors who prioritize money more powerful and visible than those who prioritize kindness. Likewise, I believe that dishonest, wealthy, power-hungry sociopaths make poor political leaders, and yet we seem to elect a lot of those. Power and morality are not well correlated - they might be orthagonal to each other, or even inversely correlated!