7 ms·

> McDonald became a fierce advocate of ethical decision-making My hero, but also Don Quixote. I'm a huge believer in Personal Integrity and Ethics, but I am pa

> McDonald became a fierce advocate of ethical decision-making My hero, but also Don Quixote. I'm a huge believer in Personal Integrity and Ethics, but I am painfully aware that this makes me a fairly hated minority (basically, people believe that I'm a stuck-up prig), especially in this crowd. I was fortunate to find an employer that also believed in these values. They had many other faults, but deficient institutional Integrity was not one of them.

ModernMech 2y ago
If the world had more stuck up prigs, billion dollar corporations wouldn’t be using customers to beta test their lethal robots on public streets. Here’s to prigs!
- sebzim4500 2y ago
  And the million people being killed by human drivers every year? I guess they are a worthy sacrifice for idealogical purity.
  - VHRanger 2y ago
    They're a sacrifice at the altar of biased decision making. I think Tesla is somewhat reckless with self driving, but we all need to agree humans aren't much better and don't generate any controversy.
    - pdonis 2y ago
      > we all need to agree humans aren't much better At the current state of the art for self-driving, this simply is not true. Humans are much better, on average. That's why the vast majority of cars are still driven by humans. The technology will keep improving, and at some point one would expect that it will be more reliable than humans. But it's significantly less reliable now.
  - woodson 2y ago
    The human driver is liable, the machine is not (or not in the same sense).
    - pwndByDeath 2y ago
      And we all know that liability makes accidents less fatal after the fact ;)
    - sebzim4500 2y ago
      "I can tolerate a million people dying, but I draw the line at one person dying without a clear person to sue."
  - ModernMech 2y ago
    I’m not saying they should, but that there’s a right way to do things and a wrong way to do things. The right way asks for community buy in, follows safety procedures, is transparent and forthcoming about failures, is honest about capabilities and limitations. The wrong way says “I can do what I want, I’m not asking permission, if you don’t like it sue me” The wrong way throws the safety playbook out the window and puts untrained operators in charge of untested deadly machines. The wrong way doesn’t ask for community input, obfuscates and dissembles when challenged, is capricious, vindictive, and ultimately (this is the most crucial part) not effective compared to the right way of doing things. Given a choice between the safe thing to do and the thing that will please Musk, Tesla will always choose the latter.
  - noelherrick 2y ago
    Self-driving cars are a solution to a problem we already fixed a hundred years ago: we fixed transit with trains. PS: I'm not claiming that every single transport need can be solved by trains, but they do dramatically reduce the cost in human life. Yes, they have to be part of a mix of other solutions, such as denser housing. Yes, you can have bad actors that don't maintain their rail and underpay/understaff their engineers which leads to derailments, etc. I say this because the utopia of not having to drive, not caring about sleepiness, ill health, or intoxication, not having to finance or repair a vehicle or buy insurance, not renting parking spots, all that is available today without having to invent new lidar sensors or machine vision. You can just live in London or Tokyo.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
      > Tokyo I traveled there regularly, for over 20 years. Their train system is the Eighth Wonder. A lot of the reason, is cultural. Trains are a standard part of life. Most shows have significant scenes on commuter trains, as do ads. Probably wouldn’t apply to nations like the US.
    - pdonis 2y ago
      > Self-driving cars are a solution to a problem we already fixed a hundred years ago: we fixed transit with trains. Not for everyone, we didn't. Self-driving cars have the potential to serve people who don't want to restrict themselves to going places trains can take them. > You can just live in London or Tokyo. Not everyone either can or wants to live in such places. If I prefer to live in a less dense area and have a car, the risk is mine to take. And if at some point a self-driving car can drive me more reliably than I can drive myself, I will gladly let it do so.
  - pdonis 2y ago
    > the million people being killed by human drivers every year? If self-driving cars at their current level of reliability were as common as human drivers, they would be killing much more than a million people a year. When I am satisfied that a self-driving car is more reliable than I am, I will have no problem letting it take me places instead of driving myself. But not until then.
  - immibis 2y ago
    That comment was about self-driving cars? Here I was thinking it was about Israeli arms manufacturers testing their intentionally-lethal robots on Palestine before selling them to the USA. Anyway, subways are awesome.
- LikelyABurner 2y ago
  "I'm sorry ModernMech, but you're in violation of our CoC with your overly negative and toxic tone. We're going to go ahead, close your issue, and merge the PR to add Torment Nexus integration." This is what happens in the real world when you're a stuck up prig, not the Hollywood movie ending you've constructed in your head.
optimalsolver 2y ago
>I'm a huge believer in Personal Integrity and Ethics, but I am painfully aware that this makes me a fairly hated minority This is like when you tell an interviewer your great flaw is being too much of a perfectionist.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
  …and… here we go… I have no idea why the tech industry is such a moral cesspool.
  - beezlewax 2y ago
    It isn't though it's not really even one industry. It's used by every industry and some of that is a cesspool and some solutions/products are purely tech based cessools.
  - sneak 2y ago
    All industries that involve huge amounts of money are moral cesspools. Tech are saints compared to the “defense” industry, or healthcare.
    - Sakos 2y ago
      Or anything in manufacturing or food/beverage (see Nestle and water rights) production. I think most of tech has it pretty good. Tech has the potential for incredible amounts of bad, but this is limited to the handful that dominate social media (see Facebook and the civil war in Ethiopia) or, I don't know, the ones selling surveillance software to governments and law enforcement.
      - Kim_Bruning 2y ago
        I thought ICT was terrible, so I decided I'd try the industrial side of things. Ok, on the one hand, getting to play with cool robots, and eg using an actual forklift for debugging? Absolutely priceless, wouldn't trade it for the world. But the ethical side of things? There's definitely ethics, don't get me wrong. Especially on the hardware side - necessary for safety after all. But the way software is sold and treated is ... different.
fjdjshsh 2y ago
[flagged]
Aurornis 2y ago
> I'm a huge believer in Personal Integrity and Ethics, but I am painfully aware that this makes me a fairly hated minority (basically, people believe that I'm a stuck-up prig), This doesn’t match my experience at all. In my experience, the average person I’ve worked with also believes in personality integrity and is guided by a sense of ethics. One company I worked for started doing something clearly unethical, albeit legal, and the resulting backlash and exodus of engineers (including me) was a nice confirmation that most people I work with won’t tolerate unethical companies. I have worked with people who take the idea of ethics to such an unreasonable extreme that they develop an ability to find fault with nearly everything. They come up with ways to rationalize their personal preferences as being the only ethical option, and they start finding ways to claim things they don’t like violate their personal integrity. One example that comes to mind is the security person who wanted our logins to expire so frequently that we had to log in multiple times per day. He insisted that anything less was below his personal standards for security and it would violate his personal integrity to allow it. Of course everybody loathed him, but not because they lacked personal integrity or ethics. If you find yourself being a “hated minority” or people thinking you’re a “stuck up pig” for having basic ethics, you’re keeping some strange company. I’d get out of there as soon as possible.
- tedivm 2y ago
  I've left two companies over ethical concerns, but it's not as easy for most people implied here. Losing income can be challenging, especially if the industry is in a downturn.
  - Aurornis 2y ago
    Generally when people talk about leaving a company, they mean to go to another company. I don’t think most people expect you to quit on the spot and walk straight into unemployment.
    - datameta 2y ago
      Sometimes the alternative to unemployment is far less attractive (exuberant burnout or total time sink preventing a meaningful job search).
pyrale 2y ago
> I was fortunate to find an employer that also believed in these values. Same here, it's not paying well, but it feels refreshing to know that babies won't get thrown into mixers if you stop thinking for 10 minutes.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

ModernMech 2y ago

If the world had more stuck up prigs, billion dollar corporations wouldn’t be using customers to beta test their lethal robots on public streets. Here’s to prigs!

sebzim4500 2y ago
And the million people being killed by human drivers every year? I guess they are a worthy sacrifice for idealogical purity.
- VHRanger 2y ago
  They're a sacrifice at the altar of biased decision making. I think Tesla is somewhat reckless with self driving, but we all need to agree humans aren't much better and don't generate any controversy.
  - pdonis 2y ago
    > we all need to agree humans aren't much better At the current state of the art for self-driving, this simply is not true. Humans are much better, on average. That's why the vast majority of cars are still driven by humans. The technology will keep improving, and at some point one would expect that it will be more reliable than humans. But it's significantly less reliable now.
- woodson 2y ago
  The human driver is liable, the machine is not (or not in the same sense).
  - pwndByDeath 2y ago
    And we all know that liability makes accidents less fatal after the fact ;)
  - sebzim4500 2y ago
    "I can tolerate a million people dying, but I draw the line at one person dying without a clear person to sue."
- ModernMech 2y ago
  I’m not saying they should, but that there’s a right way to do things and a wrong way to do things. The right way asks for community buy in, follows safety procedures, is transparent and forthcoming about failures, is honest about capabilities and limitations. The wrong way says “I can do what I want, I’m not asking permission, if you don’t like it sue me” The wrong way throws the safety playbook out the window and puts untrained operators in charge of untested deadly machines. The wrong way doesn’t ask for community input, obfuscates and dissembles when challenged, is capricious, vindictive, and ultimately (this is the most crucial part) not effective compared to the right way of doing things. Given a choice between the safe thing to do and the thing that will please Musk, Tesla will always choose the latter.
- noelherrick 2y ago
  Self-driving cars are a solution to a problem we already fixed a hundred years ago: we fixed transit with trains. PS: I'm not claiming that every single transport need can be solved by trains, but they do dramatically reduce the cost in human life. Yes, they have to be part of a mix of other solutions, such as denser housing. Yes, you can have bad actors that don't maintain their rail and underpay/understaff their engineers which leads to derailments, etc. I say this because the utopia of not having to drive, not caring about sleepiness, ill health, or intoxication, not having to finance or repair a vehicle or buy insurance, not renting parking spots, all that is available today without having to invent new lidar sensors or machine vision. You can just live in London or Tokyo.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
    > Tokyo I traveled there regularly, for over 20 years. Their train system is the Eighth Wonder. A lot of the reason, is cultural. Trains are a standard part of life. Most shows have significant scenes on commuter trains, as do ads. Probably wouldn’t apply to nations like the US.
  - pdonis 2y ago
    > Self-driving cars are a solution to a problem we already fixed a hundred years ago: we fixed transit with trains. Not for everyone, we didn't. Self-driving cars have the potential to serve people who don't want to restrict themselves to going places trains can take them. > You can just live in London or Tokyo. Not everyone either can or wants to live in such places. If I prefer to live in a less dense area and have a car, the risk is mine to take. And if at some point a self-driving car can drive me more reliably than I can drive myself, I will gladly let it do so.
- pdonis 2y ago
  > the million people being killed by human drivers every year? If self-driving cars at their current level of reliability were as common as human drivers, they would be killing much more than a million people a year. When I am satisfied that a self-driving car is more reliable than I am, I will have no problem letting it take me places instead of driving myself. But not until then.
- immibis 2y ago
  That comment was about self-driving cars? Here I was thinking it was about Israeli arms manufacturers testing their intentionally-lethal robots on Palestine before selling them to the USA. Anyway, subways are awesome.
LikelyABurner 2y ago
"I'm sorry ModernMech, but you're in violation of our CoC with your overly negative and toxic tone. We're going to go ahead, close your issue, and merge the PR to add Torment Nexus integration." This is what happens in the real world when you're a stuck up prig, not the Hollywood movie ending you've constructed in your head.

optimalsolver 2y ago

>I'm a huge believer in Personal Integrity and Ethics, but I am painfully aware that this makes me a fairly hated minority This is like when you tell an interviewer your great flaw is being too much of a perfectionist.

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
…and… here we go… I have no idea why the tech industry is such a moral cesspool.
- beezlewax 2y ago
  It isn't though it's not really even one industry. It's used by every industry and some of that is a cesspool and some solutions/products are purely tech based cessools.
- sneak 2y ago
  All industries that involve huge amounts of money are moral cesspools. Tech are saints compared to the “defense” industry, or healthcare.
  - Sakos 2y ago
    Or anything in manufacturing or food/beverage (see Nestle and water rights) production. I think most of tech has it pretty good. Tech has the potential for incredible amounts of bad, but this is limited to the handful that dominate social media (see Facebook and the civil war in Ethiopia) or, I don't know, the ones selling surveillance software to governments and law enforcement.
    - Kim_Bruning 2y ago
      I thought ICT was terrible, so I decided I'd try the industrial side of things. Ok, on the one hand, getting to play with cool robots, and eg using an actual forklift for debugging? Absolutely priceless, wouldn't trade it for the world. But the ethical side of things? There's definitely ethics, don't get me wrong. Especially on the hardware side - necessary for safety after all. But the way software is sold and treated is ... different.

fjdjshsh 2y ago

[flagged]

Aurornis 2y ago

> I'm a huge believer in Personal Integrity and Ethics, but I am painfully aware that this makes me a fairly hated minority (basically, people believe that I'm a stuck-up prig), This doesn’t match my experience at all. In my experience, the average person I’ve worked with also believes in personality integrity and is guided by a sense of ethics. One company I worked for started doing something clearly unethical, albeit legal, and the resulting backlash and exodus of engineers (including me) was a nice confirmation that most people I work with won’t tolerate unethical companies. I have worked with people who take the idea of ethics to such an unreasonable extreme that they develop an ability to find fault with nearly everything. They come up with ways to rationalize their personal preferences as being the only ethical option, and they start finding ways to claim things they don’t like violate their personal integrity. One example that comes to mind is the security person who wanted our logins to expire so frequently that we had to log in multiple times per day. He insisted that anything less was below his personal standards for security and it would violate his personal integrity to allow it. Of course everybody loathed him, but not because they lacked personal integrity or ethics. If you find yourself being a “hated minority” or people thinking you’re a “stuck up pig” for having basic ethics, you’re keeping some strange company. I’d get out of there as soon as possible.

tedivm 2y ago
I've left two companies over ethical concerns, but it's not as easy for most people implied here. Losing income can be challenging, especially if the industry is in a downturn.
- Aurornis 2y ago
  Generally when people talk about leaving a company, they mean to go to another company. I don’t think most people expect you to quit on the spot and walk straight into unemployment.
  - datameta 2y ago
    Sometimes the alternative to unemployment is far less attractive (exuberant burnout or total time sink preventing a meaningful job search).

pyrale 2y ago

> I was fortunate to find an employer that also believed in these values. Same here, it's not paying well, but it feels refreshing to know that babies won't get thrown into mixers if you stop thinking for 10 minutes.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]