4 ms·

No amount of personal action is going to matter on that front, all not working at companies that are morally dubious would net is a lower income for myself. Ju

No amount of personal action is going to matter on that front, all not working at companies that are morally dubious would net is a lower income for myself. Just like with climate change the solution is collective action at the govt/national level, anything else is virtue signaling.

deebosong 3y ago
C'mon now. I'm not trying to judge you. But every action each individual takes compounds into collective action. If you think only groups and masses have significance, and individuals do not, then I'd be genuinely curious to hear the worldview & belief system behind this. Like what's the phenomenon behind groups coalescing and forming a critical mass?
- lazide 3y ago
  If there are enough individuals that the group forms anyway, and being a member of the group is profitable, then any single individual who decides not to join just suffers the loss of that profit. Only if enough individuals decide together to not do it - enough to not allow the group to form - does it change the math. But unless there is a clear group of folks doing that, communicating that, and co-ordinating with that goal - no individual has any way of determining if they would ‘tip the scales’ or not. So it’s very unlikely to happen ‘naturally’ once a certain degree of momentum has happened. A type of social prisoners delimma perhaps? And if you’re noticing this also applied to the Nazi party, you’re not wrong. Also applies to any other group though.
  - deebosong 3y ago
    I hear what you're saying. Sounds like in either case, someone has to take a stance, and hold the line. And such folks might not have individual profitability that involves going along with the group as the highest order. Shout out to Godwin's law, though hahha.
    - lazide 3y ago
      Hah, thanks for noticing. The challenge I think is that for any individual the power/information dynamic is vastly against them. Taken to an extreme, one just ends up poor and ostracized (best case!) and made no difference at all. Any individual in Russia trying to stop the machine that attacked Ukraine would have accomplished nothing but their own destruction. If all the folks against it had taken action, it would have been stopped. Which is why coordination to do that was, has been, and will continue to be, illegal and targeted by extensive gov’t security apparatus’s. Not to say Meta is the Russian gov’t, but rather that for any potential employee, their incentive is always to get paid the most and go with the flow, and hope nothing too bad happens. Taking idealogical stances can be high risk, low reward.
  - an_aparallel 3y ago
    nicely worded. I agree with this as well...its just sad.
eru 3y ago
> [...] all not working at companies that are morally dubious would net is a lower income for myself. [...] Eh, everyone has a price. The question is just how much. You pretend that your price is zero or an epsilon away from that. I don't believe that. I don't think you would pick a job offer from a more 'evil' company, if they offered a hundred bucks more. (I can believe that your price is pretty low compared to other people. But I don't think it's zero.)

deebosong 3y ago

C'mon now. I'm not trying to judge you. But every action each individual takes compounds into collective action. If you think only groups and masses have significance, and individuals do not, then I'd be genuinely curious to hear the worldview & belief system behind this. Like what's the phenomenon behind groups coalescing and forming a critical mass?

lazide 3y ago
If there are enough individuals that the group forms anyway, and being a member of the group is profitable, then any single individual who decides not to join just suffers the loss of that profit. Only if enough individuals decide together to not do it - enough to not allow the group to form - does it change the math. But unless there is a clear group of folks doing that, communicating that, and co-ordinating with that goal - no individual has any way of determining if they would ‘tip the scales’ or not. So it’s very unlikely to happen ‘naturally’ once a certain degree of momentum has happened. A type of social prisoners delimma perhaps? And if you’re noticing this also applied to the Nazi party, you’re not wrong. Also applies to any other group though.
- deebosong 3y ago
  I hear what you're saying. Sounds like in either case, someone has to take a stance, and hold the line. And such folks might not have individual profitability that involves going along with the group as the highest order. Shout out to Godwin's law, though hahha.
  - lazide 3y ago
    Hah, thanks for noticing. The challenge I think is that for any individual the power/information dynamic is vastly against them. Taken to an extreme, one just ends up poor and ostracized (best case!) and made no difference at all. Any individual in Russia trying to stop the machine that attacked Ukraine would have accomplished nothing but their own destruction. If all the folks against it had taken action, it would have been stopped. Which is why coordination to do that was, has been, and will continue to be, illegal and targeted by extensive gov’t security apparatus’s. Not to say Meta is the Russian gov’t, but rather that for any potential employee, their incentive is always to get paid the most and go with the flow, and hope nothing too bad happens. Taking idealogical stances can be high risk, low reward.
- an_aparallel 3y ago
  nicely worded. I agree with this as well...its just sad.

eru 3y ago

> [...] all not working at companies that are morally dubious would net is a lower income for myself. [...] Eh, everyone has a price. The question is just how much. You pretend that your price is zero or an epsilon away from that. I don't believe that. I don't think you would pick a job offer from a more 'evil' company, if they offered a hundred bucks more. (I can believe that your price is pretty low compared to other people. But I don't think it's zero.)