They are letting perfect be the enemy of good. If they respond with "I love bacon" then tell them to eat plant-based + bacon. It's still a vast improvement environmentally than what they were doing previously.

to be fair, you can get "good" meat - factory farming is awful, but not all meat is factory farmed. You can eat happy animals, for example pigs that spent their lives outside being pigs, hanging out with their pig friends, and near the end of their pig lives had to go be eaten. If you believe plants are conscious too, that's probably more ethical than eating Nutella made with palm oil from forests that were completely massacred to harvest that oil (and even if you don't, the animals in those forests probably didn't enjoy their natural habitat being destroyed).

In fact, I've had the idea floating around my head for a while now for "fully ethical" meat, where you don't even kill the animal, just wait around for it to die of old age. Depending on your views on euthanasia, maybe if the animal gets like cancer or something and is evidently suffering, gently kill it to put it out of its misery because that might overall reduce suffering.

Also, pardon my asking a possibly stupid question out of ignorant curiosity, but if you're vegan for ethical reasons, why not eat eggs? My stepmom had some chickens a while ago, they lived lives that seemed pretty happy, they hung around the backyard eating stuff on the ground + the food we gave them, relatively free to move around (we did put up a small fence to keep them away from the dogs and cats, who did not exactly have a stellar track record of veganism, but they were free to roam inside that safe space) they laid eggs, because there was no rooster around to fertilize the eggs the eggs weren't going to go anywhere... did us eating those eggs hurt anyone?

Where did you go after tech?

I always think that this sort of culture and interaction was exactly was it was like to live during a time when slavery was legal and permitted. I hope in 100 year meat eating will be seen as similar.

Have you ever reflected on the legitimacy of your sentinents? As in, you find “terrifying” that people find factory farming bad, but choose to consume its products anyway. But have you considered that perhaps the moral severity that is causing your reaction of horror is actually miscalibrated and unwarranted?

This very closely resembles my philosophy. I too downplay vegan/veggie because I don't want to cause a stir.

It’s sort of interesting that “I love bacon” turns into “I must have bacon on a scale that can only really be satisfied inhumane farming practices.” I suspect we could raise meat humanely if we had it on a weekly or monthly basis.

I grew up watching my grandmother butchering a chicken for a Sunday dinner. Or my uncle butchering and skinning the calf. Knowing how the sausage is made does nothing for me.

I can understand someone being vegan because they believe eating plants is healthier. I can understand being vegan because you don’t like the taste of meat. But bringing any moral/religious reasons for it always seemed silly to me. There’s nothing more natural than one animal eating another. Humans evolved from mostly vegetarian monkeys to predators

>the impetus for me leaving tech.

What do you do now?

man look at everyone getting weird as hell about it under here. Good gravy!

Eating meat is normal.

Yes, animals have feelings and are intelligent (to varying degrees, but generally a lot more then most think). Modern meat factories are absolute shit shows and it's outlandishly bad our societies treat the animals like that.

However, it doesn't have to be that way. And killing an animal for food which lived a nice life is perfectly fine. We're all part of the physical reality in which the survival of the fittest reigns supreme. Even if you want to put your head into the sand and deny this, animals eating each other is perfectly normal. And yes, humans are animals too.

She sounds horrifying.

"When others explained that Facebook and Google didn't sell customer data, they didn't believe it"

I'm not sure there's a significant meaningful difference between direct selling and what they actually do, which is to make it available to target and manipulate people with extreme granularity. This is a huge part of why a person may not want their data to be held much less purchased to begin with, meaning it's "doesn't sell your data... but does or facilitates all of the things you do not want a group, in buying it from them, able to do."

It's a distinction without much practical difference.

Also: They buy your data from other brokers who do sell it, vastly enriching the degree to which customers of their ad platforms can make use of the data you already know they have far, far beyond your ability to know their full capabilities and the profile they have on you.

Again, it's not actually selling your data, but it's worth noting that when "they didn't believe it", that misconception was possibly helped along by Facebook or Google being on of the potential customers for that data either directly or via the proxy of a data broker whose largest customers are companies like that.

A key way people rationalize bad behavior is saying "everyone does it" without distinguishing the intensity or frequency of bad behavior.

Like a guy who has taken home office supplies from work is not on the same level morally as someone doing home break ins.

New Startup idea: Mordor is a company dedicated to doing evil. We actually plan to lay waste to the world, enslave everyone in it, enshittify anything in sight, and maximize the use of AI for the worst possible thing. Just negative externalities, all the way down.

A (covert) investment in us today can make you seem like an angel tomorrow! Also, with this agenda we're probably going to make a fortune so you might as well get in on the ground floor. Why just fall into hell when you could take one of our luxurious express elevators and get there twice as fast?

Indeed. It would be difficult to make person understand something if their salary depends on not understanding it.

The banality of evil is a well-known idea. That evil is often done by people who are just doing their jobs and see themselves as decent people.

Words are cheap, thoughts are cheap, and voting is cheap. A full-time job, on the other hand, is a substantial contribution towards something, and it comes with a huge opportunity cost. The job you have is a major factor in determining your moral character. Determining what kind of a person you actually are, as opposed to the kind of a person you believe to be, or wish you'd be.

The need for belonging is also really powerful, and companies actively try to fulfill that need. Not, generally speaking, for nefarious purposes, but because people do better work when they feel a sense of belonging.

If you decide that your work is against your values, you're also deciding to separate yourself from the group, even if you don't actually leave the company. That's painful. It's not an excuse, but it is a powerful motivator.

Yes, but once you're aware of these factors and leverage them for personal gain anyway, it's evil. It's not like it's impossible to make out the bigger picture on many issues, or to ask oneself if the upsides are really so great that it's worth being responsible for the downsides.

This is equally true for leftist projects. If one is dedicated to the cause of improving the general welfare and creating economic and social opportunities for as many as possible, that's laudable, but you can't use it as an excuse to just ignore the human rights whenever you run into a problem or a tricky ethical situation.

If your incentives and emerging behaviors land at an evil result, it is evil. I’d argue the problem is everyone who constantly generates these “well actually” reasons to excuse the consequences. Marx wrote about people being simultaneously perpetrators and victims of capitalism over 150 years ago, I assure you the left isn’t overlooking this very obvious mechanism.

It’s also a little funny to turn a thread about the blatant failures of a neoliberal “success” story into a weird criticism of the left.

Yeah but keep in mind what Zuck specifically has done. He copied Snapchat multiple times, Facebook overwrote people's public-facing emails, "dumb fucks" in IMs

Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was in university, we used to have at least one engineering ethics class in undergrad. Have they stopped those? It sure seems like it, given how many engineers are out there who only seem to care about how technically cool and interesting their projects are.

Yeah engineering as a discipline tends to be pretty naïve to the consequences of what they build, and sociopaths take advantage of it. Norbert Wiener [1] observed this about the engineers working on nukes in the 1940s-1950s:

“Push-button warfare... possible for a limited group of people to threaten the absolute destruction of millions, without any immediate risk to themselves.... Behind all this I sensed the desires of the gadgeteer to see the wheels go round.”

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener

this take is irritating because it implies that people at companies don't have to bother being ethical or holding the people around them accountable at a personal level for being ethical, as if it's somehow predetermined by the environment, being at a corporation, how you behave.

Certainly it's true that the incentives of corporations push you to ignore ethics. But that's why they're ethics: they're precisely the things you should do that you don't have to do. That's what morality is. Sure, for the purposes of doing things about unethical companies, it might be best to view all corporations as fundamentally unethical because that implies that the right place to make society better is by opposing their behavior with laws. But at an everyday human level everyone is responsible for exactly the things that they do and being at a corporation in no way changes it at all.

As far as businesses go, I'd say Palantir finds itself somewhere between "extremely ethically dubious" and "overtly, transparently evil."

Why not?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_Corporation_(certification)

sure.. but there is 'not ethical' and there is palantir...

> I believe it is in the best interest of the United States if the center of power shifts back from West Coast "tech bros" to the East coast.

Yes, because Wall Street is a paragon of ethical corporate behavior.

That power, today, is expressed through technology, and these overlords hold their control via proprietary software and anticompetitive business practices.

To seize power back, you need to relinquish their shackles by using technology that is designed with user freedom in mind, not "lock-in", and support businesses constituted of that ethos.

Silicon Valley must be destroyed to save America. Gladly more are waking up to this. There’s been a surge on both the right and left in my state of people wanting to reject the place and it’s disgusting “culture”.

> I believe it is in the best interest of the United States if the center of power shifts back from West Coast "tech bros" to the East coast

I'm not an American, never set foot in the US for that matter, but I'd say I'm pretty sympathetic to the people actually living there. All this to say that I've recently had the same realisation as you when it comes to West Coast people vs East Coast people, by this point the SV automatons are way, way outside of "normal life", maybe that has always been the case but for sure back in those days SV didn't have the same power as it has now (I'm not talking money, even though that is important, I'm talking actual power to have control over people's lives), not by a long shot.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”