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I used to work in reputation management in the healthcare space, and it was soul-crushing. Doctors who had killed patients through negligence or malpractice in

I used to work in reputation management in the healthcare space, and it was soul-crushing. Doctors who had killed patients through negligence or malpractice in other states and moved to get licensed would hire us to create a flood of content to push down sites that ranked in Google that showed the judgment against them. After doing that for a few years, I left because I was so burnt out. I'll never make that kind of moral compromise with myself again.

foobiekr 4y ago
Don't worry, there is ample evidence all around us that there are plenty - hundreds of thousands at least - of engineers who have zero moral compass.
random3 4y ago
Understand where you're coming from but your guilt is less waranted that with a defense attorney. It's not your job to enforce policies that don't exist. There's a broken policy if doctors cand switch jurisdictions like that. In Europe there's https://gdpr.eu/right-to-be-forgotten/ https://gdpr.eu/right-to-be-forgotten/ that gives poeple the right to for free what your company charged money for.
- __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
  > It's not your job to enforce policies that don't exist. If you have moral qualms with what you're being paid to do, then a policy exists. It just might not be a government policy. Maybe we shouldn't expect people to become crusaders for the cause, but I do think it's reasonable to expect them to distance themselves from that kind of work (which GP did, kudos).
- pictureofabear 4y ago
  Personal and societal morals supersede government policies. Ideally, government policies strengthen societal morals, but that is not always the case.
- salawat 4y ago
  Why would a defense attorney need feel guilty? All humans are fundamentally duplicitous, which includes "the good guys". I'm fine with a serial killer getting the best defense possible. Without a strong counterpressure in a system, no relative virtue has the capacity to be emerge. Everyone needs a good defense. No exceptions. In point of fact, before the emergence of Law & Order, it was often the defense attorney focused on as the person of virtue in the legal system. Governments gonna government. They have tons of tax money to throw at locking people up. A defense attorney has their assistants, wits, and maybe a PI or two they can reach out to to get them info to use in the defense of their client. And even with a 100% open shut, they done it case, the hypothetical defendant still deserves someone that will exercise every legal remedy/avenue on their behalf, because, damnit, no one else will, and if we're going to pretend our legal system is even remotely okay, there has to be someone to look out for even the scumbags. The only tragedy is that like so much these days, the inequity of the system is laid bare by the paltry quality/funding dispersed to the Public Defender's office compared to what gets raked in by the big firms & outfits.
  - random3 4y ago
    Agreed. Didn't intend to say defense attorneys should feel guilty (but some do feel guility, regardless), but that the reputation activity is not even related to the actual legal case. Moreover, feeling a duty to punish or extend the punishment for someone beyond the legal system reminds me of Monty Python stoning scene.
mdmglr 4y ago
Anyone know of an online database I can find these judgements by enter a doctors name?
mmsimanga 4y ago
In no way do I intend on defending the doctors. I am glad you quit and you don't have the moral dilemma. What has become murky for me is that often the truth lies in the middle. Doctor who killed someone isn't the best example so I will use technology as an example. It is often not clear when something goes wrong whether it was the technology, the manner in which technology was deployed, the skills of the personnel involved or some other external factor. If you talk to the people who chose the technology you will get one story, the people operating the technology another story and to the person who has to pay another story. This how we end up with companies successfully launching successful products using PHP and MySQL yet these same two technologies are trashed ad nauseum here on HN. Just who is right or telling the truth you will never really know.
jancsika 4y ago
How was it obvious that these doctors were guilty of negligence?
- whatshisface 4y ago
  They said "judgement" so they must have been ruled against.
  - jancsika 4y ago
    Ah, thanks. I somehow missed that part.
throwanem 4y ago
Don't worry! No one will ever ask you to again, now that we have LLMs that can do the same work faster, cheaper, and with no troublesome concerns over the morality of it all. (I'm laughing right now, but not because I'm happy...)
- __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
  The web was getting worse and worse even without them. Perhaps the inevitable weaponization of LLM's will be the hangover that finally gets us to quit. Quit implicitly trusting advertisers to direct our attention, that is.
  - throwanem 4y ago
    "Lol gottem." But seriously, in this connection I find I keep thinking back to another article [1] posted here a few weeks back, and about how the Bing chatbot seems on at least one occasion to have accidentally circumvented its lack of long-term memory via its ability to search the web. [2] Combine an emergent capability like that with an engineered capacity for anamnesis - something which seems theoretically feasible, albeit possibly expensive in practical terms; I'm sure there are teams already working hard to do it, if indeed it hasn't already been done - and... It takes a lot to make Ben Thompson to have as normal a one as the Stratechery Update post he un-paywalled this week [3] strongly suggests he did. So I don't feel too bad about admitting I have begun somewhat to wonder whether anything as trivial as merely abandoning the current dispensation of the web in its entirety would suffice to make a meaningful difference here. [1] https://sive.rs/anon https://sive.rs/anon [2] https://simonwillison.net/2023/Feb/15/bing/#threats https://simonwillison.net/2023/Feb/15/bing/#threats [3] https://stratechery.com/2023/from-bing-to-sydney-search-as-distraction-sentient-ai/ https://stratechery.com/2023/from-bing-to-sydney-search-as-d...
    - __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
      If we abandoned the web, I'm quite sure that we would have left behind whatever problems we have with the ordering of web search results, which is what I was talking about. But I'm curious about what you're talking about. What is the outcome that abandoned the web fails to save us from?

foobiekr 4y ago

Don't worry, there is ample evidence all around us that there are plenty - hundreds of thousands at least - of engineers who have zero moral compass.

random3 4y ago

Understand where you're coming from but your guilt is less waranted that with a defense attorney. It's not your job to enforce policies that don't exist. There's a broken policy if doctors cand switch jurisdictions like that. In Europe there's https://gdpr.eu/right-to-be-forgotten/ https://gdpr.eu/right-to-be-forgotten/ that gives poeple the right to for free what your company charged money for.

__MatrixMan__ 4y ago
> It's not your job to enforce policies that don't exist. If you have moral qualms with what you're being paid to do, then a policy exists. It just might not be a government policy. Maybe we shouldn't expect people to become crusaders for the cause, but I do think it's reasonable to expect them to distance themselves from that kind of work (which GP did, kudos).
pictureofabear 4y ago
Personal and societal morals supersede government policies. Ideally, government policies strengthen societal morals, but that is not always the case.
salawat 4y ago
Why would a defense attorney need feel guilty? All humans are fundamentally duplicitous, which includes "the good guys". I'm fine with a serial killer getting the best defense possible. Without a strong counterpressure in a system, no relative virtue has the capacity to be emerge. Everyone needs a good defense. No exceptions. In point of fact, before the emergence of Law & Order, it was often the defense attorney focused on as the person of virtue in the legal system. Governments gonna government. They have tons of tax money to throw at locking people up. A defense attorney has their assistants, wits, and maybe a PI or two they can reach out to to get them info to use in the defense of their client. And even with a 100% open shut, they done it case, the hypothetical defendant still deserves someone that will exercise every legal remedy/avenue on their behalf, because, damnit, no one else will, and if we're going to pretend our legal system is even remotely okay, there has to be someone to look out for even the scumbags. The only tragedy is that like so much these days, the inequity of the system is laid bare by the paltry quality/funding dispersed to the Public Defender's office compared to what gets raked in by the big firms & outfits.
- random3 4y ago
  Agreed. Didn't intend to say defense attorneys should feel guilty (but some do feel guility, regardless), but that the reputation activity is not even related to the actual legal case. Moreover, feeling a duty to punish or extend the punishment for someone beyond the legal system reminds me of Monty Python stoning scene.

mdmglr 4y ago

Anyone know of an online database I can find these judgements by enter a doctors name?

mmsimanga 4y ago

In no way do I intend on defending the doctors. I am glad you quit and you don't have the moral dilemma. What has become murky for me is that often the truth lies in the middle. Doctor who killed someone isn't the best example so I will use technology as an example. It is often not clear when something goes wrong whether it was the technology, the manner in which technology was deployed, the skills of the personnel involved or some other external factor. If you talk to the people who chose the technology you will get one story, the people operating the technology another story and to the person who has to pay another story. This how we end up with companies successfully launching successful products using PHP and MySQL yet these same two technologies are trashed ad nauseum here on HN. Just who is right or telling the truth you will never really know.

jancsika 4y ago

How was it obvious that these doctors were guilty of negligence?

whatshisface 4y ago
They said "judgement" so they must have been ruled against.
- jancsika 4y ago
  Ah, thanks. I somehow missed that part.

throwanem 4y ago

Don't worry! No one will ever ask you to again, now that we have LLMs that can do the same work faster, cheaper, and with no troublesome concerns over the morality of it all. (I'm laughing right now, but not because I'm happy...)

__MatrixMan__ 4y ago
The web was getting worse and worse even without them. Perhaps the inevitable weaponization of LLM's will be the hangover that finally gets us to quit. Quit implicitly trusting advertisers to direct our attention, that is.
- throwanem 4y ago
  "Lol gottem." But seriously, in this connection I find I keep thinking back to another article [1] posted here a few weeks back, and about how the Bing chatbot seems on at least one occasion to have accidentally circumvented its lack of long-term memory via its ability to search the web. [2] Combine an emergent capability like that with an engineered capacity for anamnesis - something which seems theoretically feasible, albeit possibly expensive in practical terms; I'm sure there are teams already working hard to do it, if indeed it hasn't already been done - and... It takes a lot to make Ben Thompson to have as normal a one as the Stratechery Update post he un-paywalled this week [3] strongly suggests he did. So I don't feel too bad about admitting I have begun somewhat to wonder whether anything as trivial as merely abandoning the current dispensation of the web in its entirety would suffice to make a meaningful difference here. [1] https://sive.rs/anon https://sive.rs/anon [2] https://simonwillison.net/2023/Feb/15/bing/#threats https://simonwillison.net/2023/Feb/15/bing/#threats [3] https://stratechery.com/2023/from-bing-to-sydney-search-as-distraction-sentient-ai/ https://stratechery.com/2023/from-bing-to-sydney-search-as-d...
  - __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
    If we abandoned the web, I'm quite sure that we would have left behind whatever problems we have with the ordering of web search results, which is what I was talking about. But I'm curious about what you're talking about. What is the outcome that abandoned the web fails to save us from?