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Not sure I quite follow the general thesis of this article. Or at least, it doesn't seem well supported. The article seems to be trying to argue that company l
by wavemode 2y ago
Not sure I quite follow the general thesis of this article. Or at least, it doesn't seem well supported.
The article seems to be trying to argue that company leadership are not the ones responsible for the "evil" things that companies do. But this:
> If you’re an engineer at Google, Facebook, Apple, or Microsoft, it’s always easier to propose architectural changes that don’t hurt the bottom line, or perhaps bolster it by accident. Conversely, if your proposal stands to wipe out a good chunk of revenue, you either self-censor and don’t bring it up — or you end up getting sucked into endless, futile arguments.
strongly implies that company leadership are indeed the ones responsible.
Like, I think what the article is trying to say is that, Manifest V3 was designed due to real-world privacy concerns, not for profit motives. It just happened to get the right amount of support and buy-in from leadership due to being something that -also- aided profit motives.
In other words, when a company leader has a variety of possible projects to invest in, she will naturally tend to invest in the ones with a long-term profit motive for the company. This also necessarily means -not- investing in other, potentially good and helpful and consumer-positive projects, that simply aren't as promising from a profit perspective. This phenomenon is what the article calls the "asymmetry of nudges".
But I guess what I'm failing to grasp is how this means it was the engineers' doing and not leadership. Yes, the engineers came up with the idea. But in this scenario, it seems like the engineers were the ones who were well-meaning, and just doing their jobs. Whereas leadership were the ones chasing dollar signs at all costs. This is precisely in alignment with what most people posit when they say that big corporations are evil, no?
- immibis 2y agoIt means this is an emergent phenomenon, not something that any one individual in a corporation woke up and declared should take place.
- ec109685 2y agoI think it’s similar to this Sinclair quote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it” Even the most well intentioned engineers aren’t going to propose something that will dramatically impact the company bottom line. They are “nudged” (and the roadmap prioritized accordingly) to fall in line with the best interest of the company.
- delusional 2y agoBut the the article goes on to conclude: > And we — the well-meaning engineers — shoulder much of the blame. Which doesn't seem to align with that understanding.
- baq 2y agoOh nonono. The quote may be true for some people but engineers are paid to understand. It’s that they are also paid for solving customers’ - read employers - problems and not for warning about ethics. You want ethics to be a factor - you must introduce regulation so it becomes a non-zero weight in the solution space search engineers do.
- saurik 2y agoWhy must responsibility be with one party or the other? To me, it feels pretty obvious that both the executives and the engineers are to blame! Just because someone is paying you to do something, that doesn't automatically make it morally OK to do whatever makes the two of you the most money. The idea that someone is "just doing their job" is nothing more than a convenient excuse: even if you really really REALLY need the money for what feels like morally justified reasons, if you aren't at least simultaneously trying to get a job that doesn't require you to do something evil--much less doing what you can within your powers to stop and/or sabotage the effort--we shouldn't grant you a free pass.
- skulk 2y agoSo how, if engineers are equally responsible, do they enact their fair share of change? Adopt a strict guild-level code of ethics? I find this unlikely in the US political climate; someone will always happily step in to implement Manifest v3 Someone in leadership could literally flick their wrist 3 times and MV3 is dead. This doesn't sound like an equal responsibility type of situation to me.
- saurik 2y ago"If I don't do this morally bad thing, someone else will." can be used to justify almost doing any morally bad thing. Seriously: where do you draw the line on this? And even still: since when is "I can't stop it" an excuse in the first place? This is just such a strange model of morality if we believe we are merely responsible for change rather than what we profit from.
- skulk 2y agoI'm not going to say where the line is, but I hope we can definitely agree that it lies somewhere between murdering innocents and implementing dark patterns in software. I'm baffled that you think it's reasonable to spread the blame equally on the dictator and implementor when it comes to the latter.
- wavemode 2y ago
- viraptor 2y ago> But I guess what I'm failing to grasp is how this means it was the engineers' doing and not leadership. Maybe because the article doesn't claim that. (Shouldering some of the blame is not the same as what I quoted) It just presents different incentives that push decisions over time. The incentives that end up putting the engineers to do something in the end don't mean it's an engineers' fault. There's no point choosing one specific group to point fingers at, if we can instead learn more about the system and if we have the power, try pushing it slightly in a better direction.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]