Comment by digging
2 years ago
And pretty much every company is bad. But this is a wrong answer because the question is actually nonsense.
The answer to "What happens when you move faster than light" is not "nothing", it is undefined because the question is invalid. Asking if a person or a company is good or bad isn't a question that can ever have a well-defined answer: the answers we give are rounded according to our own values. To get more specific, not all of us have a huge amount of choice in who we work for.
If apenwarr believes I want to be a good person they should hire me at Tailscale. What's that, they won't? They don't have openings, or I'm not qualified? I guess they're the bad person because now I have to work for a bad company or lose my income. And if I lose my income, my co-habitants lose their housing, and my donations to good causes dry up. Do I just not do enough good for apenwarr? They must be a paragon of virtue. Surely they don't eat meat, or even associate with meat-eaters. Surely they don't fly in airplanes.
It doesn't need a well defined evaluation scheme. You're the one asking the question, you can provide your own scheme, and come up with your own answer. Whether you're honest with yourself in this process is up to you.
It's still useful to point out that IF you think your company is bad THEN you should do something about that. It establishes that "I was just following orders that I know are wrong" isn't a valid excuse (e.g. like if you end up in court for something you did on the job).
> You're the one asking the question, you can provide your own scheme
Well, I'm responding to someone else providing their scheme for everyone else to use.
> the answers we give are rounded according to our own values
I agree with this entirely.
And rounding does not change the answer in most situations.
Something that isn't well-defined can still be mostly-defined.
I have no idea what the point of that strawman is in your last paragraph. It doesn't make sense with or without rounding. Maybe if you round every single value to infinity, but that's not what "rounding" normally means...
I honestly don't know how to respond to this, it's too vague.
I can try to word it better?
You said when people look at moral situations, they use their own values to round their measurement. And I thought that was a good way to describe things.
Then for some reason you acted like "rounding" turns things into strawman-level black and white. The slightest blemish (not hiring a specific good person) qualifying as evil.
Let's say a scale of 0 to 10. If people disagree whether some issue is a 3 or 4, and a few people say 5, and that's 95% of responses, then that disagreement isn't a big deal. It doesn't matter that it's not well-defined, it's sufficiently-defined.
That would be rounding. Showing that the question is not nonsense.
If they disagree whether it's a 0 or a 10 that's a totally different thing that is not rounding.
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> Asking if a person or a company is good or bad isn't a question that can ever have a well-defined answer: the answers we give are rounded according to our own values.
Counterexample:
Was Hitler bad?
Good/Bad are consensus votes. Its hard to escape their use just because of how deeply ingrained the programming is. We just think it makes "sense" and is "obvious" because its a meme that is already in our head. There is nothing inherently evil or good about any past/present/future animal on this planet.
So, was Hitler evil?
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I hate this website.
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That really depends if you ask a neo nazi or not.
Due to chaotic effects of causality, most of us would not exist if any significant event from that long ago had happened differently.
How is that related? Other people would exist then. So what?
If the answer is yes, does that mean a junior web dev who implements user tracking on a shopping portal is equivalent to Hitler? Or is every who does less evil than Hitler "not a bad person"?
I don't think it's useful to say "Hitler was bad." Hitler did a lot of specific evil acts that are more useful to analyze. If anything, it's counterproductive to say "Hitler was bad," because lots of people do bad things and then say "well, at least I'm not Hitler."