4 ms·

It's good that you warned them in advance, but I don't think "there are much worse things they could be doing" really is a reason to discard those who are hurt

It's good that you warned them in advance, but I don't think "there are much worse things they could be doing" really is a reason to discard those who are hurt by this as "snowflakes" and the content they're exposed to as "silly and non-threatening." From what you're saying, there's also a big difference between what you were dealing with and what this article is talking about: in your case it was only still images, and only "regular" porn (and I assume they probably had to monitor every image posted if it was "a long time ago" so overall they were not exposed only to that content); in this case they're reviewing videos content including not only porn but also violence and sexual abuse, that was pre-flagged by an AI so with way less rule-abiding content mixed in.

lazide 8mo ago
The alternative is…. They don’t have a job? What else is going to happen? For many people, the alternatives can literally be death, wading unprotected through human excrement, sold into defacto slavery, etc. etc. AI can do some of it (now), but largely isn’t going to be more accurate and still needs humans to double check its work.
- ura_yukimitsu 8mo ago
  I really don't think it's fair to minimize someone's struggles just because their situation could be worse. Is only the most miserable person on the planet (by what metric anyway?) allowed to complain about their condition? I also don't think it's fair to exploit people who are in terrible situations by pushing jobs we don't want onto them, pay them a handful of crumbs, and then say they should be happy with what they get because their neighbor who does another job gets half a handful of crumbs.
  - lazide 8mo ago
    The women in this situation aren’t complaining. Very much the opposite. Why the compulsion to paternalistically ‘protect’ everyone even to the point of making them unemployed? I assume they weighed their options and decided this was the best one. It sounds like you want to stop them from doing that? Isn’t that the real minimization?
    - ura_yukimitsu 8mo ago
      You're misrepresenting both what the article says and what I wrote. The article explicitly mentions that the jobs aren't clearly labeled so they couldn't weigh their options beforehand, that concerns raised by the workers are being dismissed by management, and that several workers have developed mental health problems. I'm not arguing that these women should be "protected" by taking their jobs away or that they can't make their own choices; of course they're weighing their options and deciding accordingly (the article even mentions that some of them decided to leave). But it's not unreasonable to critique a system where the only choices they have are all horrible in (often more than) one way or another.
      - lazide 8mo ago
        I’m responding to the gp comment, which I thought was obvious
- 4MOAisgoodenuf 8mo ago
  There is plenty of productive work to do in the world that isn’t streaming through the dregs of the internet for hours on end. This argument is a false dichotomy.
  - lazide 8mo ago
    I take it you’ve never lived in India? Visited Pakistan or Bangladesh? Plenty of people would (literally) kill for those jobs, and have no other useful employment. In those countries, Women are often widely forbidden from doing most jobs, which makes them particularly vulnerable.
    - paulryanrogers 8mo ago
      Wouldn't it be better to give women more choice in general and the option of therapy if they take on a job with a risk of PTSD? Dismissing the concerns of the women actually doing the work isn't making things any better.
      - lazide 8mo ago
        Of course. I’m literally not seeing anyone offering to actually pay for that in this thread, are you?
        paulryanrogers 8mo ago
        Why yes, I've helped pay for girls to stay in school in impoverished countries. Are you willing to stop carrying water for misogynists and abusive employers?
        lazide 8mo ago
        That not only doesn’t answer my question, but might as well be ‘have you stopped beating your wife yet’. And how have you done re: ongoing jobs? The thing that was the actual topic here? The reality is that if there were better jobs available for folks relative to number of available employees, the employer wouldn’t be able to find the people to do the crap jobs we’re talking about, and would have to make them better to get anyone to do them. Or result to actual (or just de-facto) slavery anyway, which does happen in some places. It’s a continuum. Actual living conditions in India, in particular, are pretty brutal for most people. But certainly not just there!
- TitaRusell 8mo ago
  I actually had a conversation about this with my mom. We were talking about the hotel cleaners in Dubai walking around with toothbrushes to clean the shower which seemed mildly ridiculous to our European eyes. But we came to the realisation that these folks were probably happy that they could send money back to their villages. And we left a nice tip.
  - paulryanrogers 8mo ago
    Risk of developing trauma or mental illness is probably much lower for shower cleaners than CSAM / gore filters.
  - mmooss 8mo ago
    I don't question your good faith. You seem to have fallen into a trap of many of good faith (and those of not-so-good faith): For ~ the first half of the 20th century, the leading scholarly theory on US slavery was that the slaves were happy living in a civilized land, etc. You'll see the same claim about many things. I think the trap has two sufficient components: First, it lacks empirical observations - actual fact that tethers us to reality - and therefore is very prone to drift far from the ground truth. Second, it's a much more comfortable worldview for us, and we tend to adopt such worldviews until compelled to do otherwise. Just because there is an upside for them - sending money home - doesn't make them happy or make it good or ok. As an extreme example, some underage people go into prostitution because they need the food and shelter to survive - the fact that they get those benefits doesn't make them happy or make it good or ok.
    - lazide 8mo ago
      Wow, what a way to conflate consenting adults making rational economic choices (which, btw, the finger wagging in the article and here doesn’t actually PROVIDE BETTER ECONOMIC CHOICES) with…. child prostitution? The reality is that I’m not seeing anyone proposing actually making the situation better, or addressing why people might consider these jobs better than their alternatives. Rather people trying to shut down these jobs - and defacto pushing other people into what those people clearly seem to consider to be worse alternatives? Having actually seen up close and personal the alternatives many of these people are facing, while I think everyone would of course prefer the nice comfy joys of an office programming job, no one here seems to be offering those people those jobs are they? In fact, people are scrambling to keep those jobs. Instead, those folks would end up taking a similar job elsewhere, or even more fun - something likely far worse. Which is why they are applying for those jobs in the first place. Can we make the jobs a bit better? Likely, and we should. Does it change the nature of those jobs? Or make the alternatives better? Not a bit.
ThrowawayR2 8mo ago
People butcher livestock for pay on a daily basis, rendering a live animal dead and cutting it to bits, on a massive scale to provide the food that we eat. Rescue and medical personnel deal with the injured, ill, and dying on a daily basis on a massive scale. Merely watching videos, even of disturbing material, doesn't even come close to being as bad as those and some other professions.
- D-Machine 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - pavel_lishin 8mo ago
    > Yes, images and videos can be horrific, but that horror absolutely pales in comparison to what the world has to offer. "Eat your dinner, there's kids starving in Africa."
  - rramadass 8mo ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46921505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46921505
    - D-Machine 8mo ago
      As I've said, images can be horrific, and some people can be traumatized by them. That must not be dismissed. However, It is also important to carefully and properly quantify these things and not sensationalize. You've linked a 50+ minute documentary, without comment, that seems to prove that one person hired to curate content can become traumatized by that process. I can't be certain that is what it is about, because I will not waste time watching documentaries (the vast majority of which are outright propaganda or incredibly biased, while pretending to be objective), but still, I've no doubt the general claim is true, since I never claimed or believed otherwise. But you've not provided meaningful statistical or scientific evidence properly quantifying such harms in general.
      - 8mo ago
rramadass 8mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46921505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46921505

lazide 8mo ago

The alternative is…. They don’t have a job? What else is going to happen? For many people, the alternatives can literally be death, wading unprotected through human excrement, sold into defacto slavery, etc. etc. AI can do some of it (now), but largely isn’t going to be more accurate and still needs humans to double check its work.

ura_yukimitsu 8mo ago
I really don't think it's fair to minimize someone's struggles just because their situation could be worse. Is only the most miserable person on the planet (by what metric anyway?) allowed to complain about their condition? I also don't think it's fair to exploit people who are in terrible situations by pushing jobs we don't want onto them, pay them a handful of crumbs, and then say they should be happy with what they get because their neighbor who does another job gets half a handful of crumbs.
- lazide 8mo ago
  The women in this situation aren’t complaining. Very much the opposite. Why the compulsion to paternalistically ‘protect’ everyone even to the point of making them unemployed? I assume they weighed their options and decided this was the best one. It sounds like you want to stop them from doing that? Isn’t that the real minimization?
  - ura_yukimitsu 8mo ago
    You're misrepresenting both what the article says and what I wrote. The article explicitly mentions that the jobs aren't clearly labeled so they couldn't weigh their options beforehand, that concerns raised by the workers are being dismissed by management, and that several workers have developed mental health problems. I'm not arguing that these women should be "protected" by taking their jobs away or that they can't make their own choices; of course they're weighing their options and deciding accordingly (the article even mentions that some of them decided to leave). But it's not unreasonable to critique a system where the only choices they have are all horrible in (often more than) one way or another.
    - lazide 8mo ago
      I’m responding to the gp comment, which I thought was obvious
4MOAisgoodenuf 8mo ago
There is plenty of productive work to do in the world that isn’t streaming through the dregs of the internet for hours on end. This argument is a false dichotomy.
- lazide 8mo ago
  I take it you’ve never lived in India? Visited Pakistan or Bangladesh? Plenty of people would (literally) kill for those jobs, and have no other useful employment. In those countries, Women are often widely forbidden from doing most jobs, which makes them particularly vulnerable.
  - paulryanrogers 8mo ago
    Wouldn't it be better to give women more choice in general and the option of therapy if they take on a job with a risk of PTSD? Dismissing the concerns of the women actually doing the work isn't making things any better.
    - lazide 8mo ago
      Of course. I’m literally not seeing anyone offering to actually pay for that in this thread, are you?
      - paulryanrogers 8mo ago
        Why yes, I've helped pay for girls to stay in school in impoverished countries. Are you willing to stop carrying water for misogynists and abusive employers?
        lazide 8mo ago
        That not only doesn’t answer my question, but might as well be ‘have you stopped beating your wife yet’. And how have you done re: ongoing jobs? The thing that was the actual topic here? The reality is that if there were better jobs available for folks relative to number of available employees, the employer wouldn’t be able to find the people to do the crap jobs we’re talking about, and would have to make them better to get anyone to do them. Or result to actual (or just de-facto) slavery anyway, which does happen in some places. It’s a continuum. Actual living conditions in India, in particular, are pretty brutal for most people. But certainly not just there!
TitaRusell 8mo ago
I actually had a conversation about this with my mom. We were talking about the hotel cleaners in Dubai walking around with toothbrushes to clean the shower which seemed mildly ridiculous to our European eyes. But we came to the realisation that these folks were probably happy that they could send money back to their villages. And we left a nice tip.
- paulryanrogers 8mo ago
  Risk of developing trauma or mental illness is probably much lower for shower cleaners than CSAM / gore filters.
- mmooss 8mo ago
  I don't question your good faith. You seem to have fallen into a trap of many of good faith (and those of not-so-good faith): For ~ the first half of the 20th century, the leading scholarly theory on US slavery was that the slaves were happy living in a civilized land, etc. You'll see the same claim about many things. I think the trap has two sufficient components: First, it lacks empirical observations - actual fact that tethers us to reality - and therefore is very prone to drift far from the ground truth. Second, it's a much more comfortable worldview for us, and we tend to adopt such worldviews until compelled to do otherwise. Just because there is an upside for them - sending money home - doesn't make them happy or make it good or ok. As an extreme example, some underage people go into prostitution because they need the food and shelter to survive - the fact that they get those benefits doesn't make them happy or make it good or ok.
  - lazide 8mo ago
    Wow, what a way to conflate consenting adults making rational economic choices (which, btw, the finger wagging in the article and here doesn’t actually PROVIDE BETTER ECONOMIC CHOICES) with…. child prostitution? The reality is that I’m not seeing anyone proposing actually making the situation better, or addressing why people might consider these jobs better than their alternatives. Rather people trying to shut down these jobs - and defacto pushing other people into what those people clearly seem to consider to be worse alternatives? Having actually seen up close and personal the alternatives many of these people are facing, while I think everyone would of course prefer the nice comfy joys of an office programming job, no one here seems to be offering those people those jobs are they? In fact, people are scrambling to keep those jobs. Instead, those folks would end up taking a similar job elsewhere, or even more fun - something likely far worse. Which is why they are applying for those jobs in the first place. Can we make the jobs a bit better? Likely, and we should. Does it change the nature of those jobs? Or make the alternatives better? Not a bit.

ThrowawayR2 8mo ago

People butcher livestock for pay on a daily basis, rendering a live animal dead and cutting it to bits, on a massive scale to provide the food that we eat. Rescue and medical personnel deal with the injured, ill, and dying on a daily basis on a massive scale. Merely watching videos, even of disturbing material, doesn't even come close to being as bad as those and some other professions.

D-Machine 8mo ago
[flagged]
- pavel_lishin 8mo ago
  > Yes, images and videos can be horrific, but that horror absolutely pales in comparison to what the world has to offer. "Eat your dinner, there's kids starving in Africa."
- rramadass 8mo ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46921505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46921505
  - D-Machine 8mo ago
    As I've said, images can be horrific, and some people can be traumatized by them. That must not be dismissed. However, It is also important to carefully and properly quantify these things and not sensationalize. You've linked a 50+ minute documentary, without comment, that seems to prove that one person hired to curate content can become traumatized by that process. I can't be certain that is what it is about, because I will not waste time watching documentaries (the vast majority of which are outright propaganda or incredibly biased, while pretending to be objective), but still, I've no doubt the general claim is true, since I never claimed or believed otherwise. But you've not provided meaningful statistical or scientific evidence properly quantifying such harms in general.
    - 8mo ago

rramadass 8mo ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46921505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46921505