Comment by mandmandam

It sounds like you rationalize that work a lot... But there's a whole lot of self-contradiction and logic abuse going on.

* "Pharma is super evil. Finance is super evil." But also, "nothing is purely good or bad, we all just make different tradeoffs." You see it, right? No?

* Tech "wasn't perceived as evil" when you made your career choice? After 2008? Buddy. And what happened to it all just being tradeoffs?

* "If you work for a fossil fuel company, are you equally unethical?" - this is what's known in the field as the false equivalence fallacy, if you remember that one. Also, yes, if you work for one of the companies which have used advertising to spread climate change FUD for 50 years, then I personally consider you ethically sus.

* "Basically everything interesting is caused and driven by lots of complicated stuff" - appeal to complexity.

* "our society is messed up for a bunch of reasons, of which advertising is one of the least dodgy" So you acknowledge it's one of the reasons... Until, at least, you again claim there's "weak evidence that it does much".

* "people find it easy to blame societal problems on external influences" - Oh, the critics are oversimplifying? Are there no sophisticated critiques out there based on psychological research that might identify specific harmful mechanisms? You studied this shit, so I know you must have at least heard of them.

* "I, with a PhD in psychology... don't understand why so many tech people hate advertising" - Idk man, feels like someone with a PhD in psych should be able to understand that just fine. Really dunno what you're missing there.

Taken together, these contradictions suggest to me that there's a lot of post-hoc rationalization going on. There are more consistent ethical frameworks out there than 'shit is complicated' and 'well, nothing is pure evil or pure good anyway'. They might not be super popular right now, especially in tech, finance, fossil fuels, advertising, pharma, etc - but they're out there.

A lot of psych research connects to that old quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it". Cognitive dissonance? Moral disengagement? Motivated reasoning? The bias blind spot? ... Idk man, I'm not a psych PhD.