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Why do people work for companies like this? Have they no compassion for their fellow humans?
by fartcannon 4y ago
Why do people work for companies like this? Have they no compassion for their fellow humans?
- pmoriarty 4y agoI ask the same thing about Facebook and Google employees, and people who work for "defense" contractors.
- nickpeterson 4y agoAt least defense contractors can argue they’re helping the “good guys”, people at Facebook know they’re part of the problem but they can’t turn down the money.
- geodel 4y agoHuh, Monsanto employees can claim they are saving millions from hunger and death by providing GMO seeds. Also saving farmers from ruin by providing disease resistant seeds. Now you can come claiming well that's bullshit. But that can again be said for most of the companies.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pstuart 4y agoThe "good guys" are whoever has the money and is favored by the administration.
- heavyset_go 4y agoIt genuinely scares me that so many adults think in terms of "good guys" and "bad guys". One of the things that drove me nuts about the Qanon family of conspiracy theories, despite them being insane, was the rhetoric their followers used, calling the US government "the good guys". First of all, what conspiracy theory actually suggests that the government is on their side and not out to get them, and second, do Q followers think we're in a superhero movie with good guys and bad guys?
- s5300 4y agoWait until you learn that we give people who think like this firearms, the license to kill, & qualified immunity. Very rarely it backfires & we get things like this. https://youtu.be/4fQcjmt2Q_o https://youtu.be/4fQcjmt2Q_o Overwhelmingly, most people think this is fine. I hate it here.
- ohyoutravel 4y agoGoogle and Facebook sure, but after watching Russia attempt to roll over Ukraine in modern evil explore fashion, I am thankful for defense contractors like those in Turkey who created drones and the software required to smash Russian invasion.
- pronlover723 4y agoWhat is wrong with working for Facebook or Google? I'd expect most Facebook employees working on the main project feel like they are doing good in the world helping people connect with their friends and families, organizing events, etc... For Google I'd expect most employees feel like their products (search, android, chrome, chrome os, maps, gmail, etc...) help billions of people in positive ways.
- fartcannon 4y agoThey made a profit building some of the most pervasive anti-privacy software in the world. Google continually attempts to ruin the web, and communication (email), and Facebook uses AI to make people miserable.
- spyremeown 4y agoSame reason why some of our software engineering colleagues reading your comment right now work on Facebook.
- tptacek 4y agoPresumably because they believe in the promise of GMOs.
- pstuart 4y agoI'm pro-GMO in the sense of "woohoo, science!", but a lot of it seems to be about making herbicide/pesticide resistance and encouraging that seems like a bad idea. Case in point, BT GMOs have only trained the insect population for resistance to it: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2011/08/researchers-identify-insect-resistance-bt-pesticide https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2011/08/researchers-identif...
- gcheong 4y agoI'm not sure what you're thinking GMO technology should be used for. Pest control is a large part of successful agriculture. BT is used in organic farming as well (mentioned in your linked article) but instead of it being made by the plant itself as a GMO does, it's applied to the plant which means more of it needs to be applied overall. Pesticide resistance is nothing new, GMO or otherwise. That's the nature of nature and the reason 99.99% of the pesticides you consume are made naturally by the plant itself. https://geneticliteracyproject.org/gmo-faq/do-gmo-bt-insect-resistant-crops-pose-a-threat-to-human-health-or-the-environment/ https://geneticliteracyproject.org/gmo-faq/do-gmo-bt-insect-... https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/06/13/9999-pesticides-we-eat-are-produced-plants-themselves-11415 https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/06/13/9999-pesticides-we-eat-...
- mike00632 4y agoRoundUp-ready crops allows for farmers to spray herbicide directly onto food. That means we are now eating the chemical in much higher than trace amounts. This is new, untested and seemingly bad (if you go by the non-Monsanto-funded studies).
- gcheong 4y agoMy comment was in regards to Bt crops but regardless I think your perception of how much glyphosate actually gets used is rather blown out of proportion - most likely due to all the anti-gmo propaganda that’s out there. It’s certainly not “new” as roundup ready crops have been around for quite some time at this point and we likely would have seen obvious health problems directly attributable to it by now if there are any. Here’s just one counterpoint from someone who actually farms for a living: https://thelifeofafarmer.com/2016/05/22/how-much-roundup-do-farmers-actually-use/amp/ https://thelifeofafarmer.com/2016/05/22/how-much-roundup-do-...
- e2le 4y ago> compassion Compassion doesn't pay and my second home won't pay for itself.
- zionic 4y agoI ask the same question about Google
- geotus 4y agoGoogle is unfairly villainized. It provides a service to advertisers, and it give away many billions of dollars of free online services every year. They’ve done literally nothing to harm you nor 99.9999% of people on earth.
- nyx 4y agoMany of us would argue that providing privacy-invasion-as-a-service, at scale, to people who want to sell us shit is harmful and villainous. Even if you set aside the dangerous aspects of some of the "free online services", like YouTube serving as a massive engagement-driven platform for propaganda and radicalization, you're still left with web services designed to hoover up all your data and sell your eyeballs to businesses. That is the behavior of a hostile actor, and vast swaths of people accepting this tradeoff doesn't make its existence any less objectionable to some of us.
- makeitdouble 4y agoGoogle is exactly villainized because of the many billions of dollars of free services they provide and use as a source of the data they funnel to the advertisers, while killing competition as a second order effect. Philanthropy should be done by entities dedicated to it and ethically responsible, not as a camouflage for private data brokering.
- pronlover723 4y agoDo you have some links of Google funneling data to advertisers?
- makeitdouble 4y agoI assume you are making a fine distinction between straight handing down user identifying private information, and providing special access to targeted users that will only hit the advertiser in full as they hit the ad. Technically and legally both are different, but I still see both as funnelling data to advertisers.
- cm2012 4y agoThe bad things about Monsanto, like Facebook, are extremely over exaggerated by online panic porn. Monsanto Chemical did some genuinely bad things in the 80s with Vietnam, etc. But the modern company actually reduces pesticide use since RoundUp is more efficient.
- alexashka 4y ago> Have they no compassion for their fellow humans? Yes. Compassion for your fellow humans is quite unnatural for a lot of people. It's why Christianity was a thing - a non trivial percentage of the population will only pretend to be a human being out of fear.
- sammalloy 4y ago> Compassion for your fellow humans is quite unnatural for a lot of people. Could you please quantify? I recall reading the exact opposite conclusion in behavioral and psychological science journals. It’s the reason why the military has to break people down to teach them to kill. Our natural reaction is to have compassion for each other and not to kill each other. We are a cooperative species that works well together and survives as a group. If we weren’t naturally compassionate, the human endeavor would have died out a long time ago. It also goes a long way to explain why things like hatred, racism, and subjugation of the other require massive amounts of propaganda and disinformation to perpetuate themselves. I also recall reading in specific cases where compassion seems to be lacking, that there are larger cultural, religious, tribal, criminal, and social pressures at work influencing the outcome of human behavior to limit compassion. Once these forces are controlled for (often with the help of changes to the legal system) compassion tends to return to normal, average levels. Examples might include Good Samaritan laws. It is my experience that more people want to help than hurt, more people want to promote the general welfare of the group rather than a select few, and more people desire to see others happy and prosperous, rather than unhappy and suffering. This enduring, popular myth that everyone is out for themselves and doesn’t care about anyone else is the product of larger, psychopathic forces at work wishing to control society for its own purposes. The masses of humanity wish to live peacefully and in harmony with others. It is a very tiny few that have chosen to take power and use it against others. They are the ones that lack compassion, not the whole of humanity. Over many decades, I’ve personally made note of and observed a strange and unusual undercurrent to popular culture that seeks to make people more aggressive, violent, and unnecessarily competitive and war-like, while attempting to denigrate, decrease, and diminish our proclivity for sharing and cooperation. This behavioral system of control is obvious and omnipresent once you start looking for it. It is not natural and it only serves to increase inequality and give power to fewer and fewer people.
- geoffeg 4y agoI worked at Monsanto for a few years. I won't get into the ethics of the company on this forum, but as a software engineer it was a pretty great place to work. Good engineering culture, lots of very dedicated and smart people and some really fun challenges to work on.
- nickpeterson 4y agoI think you just summarized the problem pretty well.
- tptacek 4y agoCould you maybe summarize it further, for those of us who don't know what you mean by this?
- whatshisface 4y agoInside life is great and people are nice, and all of the evil is generated at the boundary between the inside and the outside. On top of that, information about the evil is very much suppressed within the organization, so that the people working on it are even more ignorant about it than external bystanders. For example, take the oil industry in 2006: everyone inside it was inundated by detailed climate change denial, so that they were worse off (in terms of the accuracy of their beliefs) than relatively uninformed outsiders who vaguely recalled hearing something about how climate change was a problem. (Not to change the subject, but this always strikes me as funny when people debate misinformation; some of the most damaging misinformation of the past 50 years was disseminated first and most intensely through the internal channels of powerful institutions.)
- aporetics 4y agoThe real evil is always in not asking and not thinking about the meaning of the work. If you work at a company because it has a great engineering culture, but the work it happens to make it super efficient to turn babies into cowfeed, you’re still evil…for not thinking about the meaning of what you do. If you work at a company because it has an awesome engineering culture, and the work is to make it really easy and efficient for other companies to do whatever they do, how do you assess (and take responsibility) for your work? Can you? If you can’t, what are you doing? If you work in the cloud, this is you.
- oh_sigh 4y agoMay people would view helping to feed the world's hungriest as an act of compassion
- moeris 4y agoThis is like asking why census bureau employees work for the US government when they know the multiple genocides, wars, etc. it has perpetrated. Not every position is responsible for the worst aspects of every decision made at a company/institution. No company is perfectly ethical, as people aren't perfectly ethical. Most of the work at Monsanto is for the greater good, and the world is a better place for it being around.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]