And I doubt it's a mass exodus either.
If you read "Surely you're joking Mr Feynman", the author clearly states that when making the bomb, they had a lot of fun. Lots of budgets. Only smart people. Working on the coolest projects. He even plays with the censorship and security practices.
They never really thought too hard about the ethic part of it: they need to end the war, and that's it. They really said "oh we fucked up" once the bomb exploded.
And we are talking about brilliant minds with very positive personalities.
While skilled, I doubt than more than a small fraction of FB work force is close to Feynman's IQ. And they have a very arrogant culture. Somehow I doubt FB is going to bleed talent anytime soon.
Barring a couple of teams that work on interesting projects, Facebook has little other than money and reputation to throw at people. The former isn't that hard to find in our field, though, and the latter is kindda fickly. Facebook may well keep its talent pool constant, but largely by having people for whom the latter (or, more generally, what they work on and what impact it has) is important replaced by people for whom it is not.
Fortunately (for most of us, at least), the kind of talent that money, disregard for ethics and public doublespeak attracts is pretty self-destructive in the long run.
And they got the best projects and the most money.
Yet when I said to my relatives, 5 years ago, that I refused an interview from google and facebook, they questioned my sanity.
I don't pretend to have the moral high ground here, as i made enought bad things in my life, but this kind of pondering work opportunities doesn't happen enough imo.
I think what they don't have is their CEO testifying in front of the Congress after building a platform whose hunger for money made it an exceptional weapon against society. Smart, young people start avoiding companies only after public perception turns against them. Facebook is closer to that than Amazon or even Google.
You were prematurely anti-facist.
(It's an old phrase: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/premature_antifascist )
What they failed to do was reevaluate the project after the Allies won the war in Europe. It was after Hiroshima they said, "oh, we fucked up." (to parapahrase)
I think the public discussion probably hits FB most in hiring - I mean, if I were doing an interview there I'd at least ask the question and see how they responded (maybe negotiation point on what I'd be working on or increased comp).
—- J. Robert Oppenheimer, after watching the first test
-- J. von Neumann, about Oppenheimer
There have been plenty of other highly intelligent people who acted ethically, often at great danger to themselves, rejecting many financial and social incentives to act unethically.
I usually try to keep that in mind now. In the back of my mind I'm saying "they knew, someone told them" and lo and behold, if I go looking for said detractors I can usually find them in spades.
I'm not defending or excusing anyone. Just pointing out that its unlikely these employees were unaware.
But it just doesn't seem likely.
Japan came later.
Also the group was sequestered to a remote lab (Los Alamos?) and working under strong secrecy. You either try to keep a good atmosphere or you go crazy.
But they didn't think about that. They don't mention that they thought that they were working on something that could literally end humanity.
And the thing is, we didn't even use the bomb to win against the Nazi.
That the bomb was a good decision or not is a hard debate that I still think about sometime.
But there was not that much debate reported from the people building it.
It brought to mind words from the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
I'm sure those scientists thought about it and discussed it among themselves, but they were in a super top secret lab in the middle of nowhere. Not much opportunity to leave an historical record of what they thought (letters highly censored, etc).
Yes, however the point is moot if your adversary hits you with it before you are finished.
Pacifists get shot first.
Now given the cold war event, I can't say for sure if the bomb was a good or a bad thing.
But's saying "we had no choice" is a really dangerous way of putting things.
Feynman is semi-famous for testing at a much lower IQ than most people assume. (He scored 125 on his test at school).
See: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/finding-the-next-ein...
There is no friggin way I'm remotely as intelligent as Feynman was so there goes any faith in IQ tests being meaningful. Most of the people who have worked for me are demonstrably smarter than me and none of them are close to Feynman. Smart people but not at his level IMO.
RIP IQ tests :)
You don't have an IQ. It's a test that you take that can provide some useful information, but it isn't a fixed score, and "intelligence" (a word that is too ambiguous to use without careful definition) can't be reduced to a single number.
If we don't call one's skill at mental tasks 'intelligence', just how should we label it?
It will take me a long time to write out my thoughts completely, but I plan to do it at some point.
Tests are not perfect, he could have had a bad day
Maybe he didn’t care
Maybe he misremembers taking an actual IQ test etc
Do you think "very positive personalities" were a plus in this case? Obviously you don't want homicidal sociopaths on the team, but someone whose first thought was "What's the worst possible thing that could happen here?" might have come in handy.
And saying having the bomb is the only way to counter the enemy building one is excluding the search of any other possible solution.
In fact Feynman's IQ was merely "above average" according to Feynman himself, who got a look at his score after taking the test in school.
But if you're using "IQ" as a proxy for actual, you know, intelligence then yeah, I agree :-)
Feynman was only speaking for himself there. It's been 25 years since I read that book but I thought he described some of the efforts by Einstein, et al. to prevent the bomb from being used.
having worked in Facebook games in 2012, I think some today forget how much worse for privacy Facebook used to be than it is today
I think you hit the nail on the head. I doubt it has to do with moral qualms as employees. More to do with your friends and family giving you crap for working at a company that's getting bad press.
> Having known so many people involved with Facebook for so long, I have come up with a phrase to describe the cultural phenomenon I’ve witnessed among them – ladder kicking. Basically, people who get a leg up from others, and then do everything in their power to ensure nobody else manages to get there. No, it’s not “human nature” or “how it works.” Silicon Valley and the tech industry at large weren’t built by these sorts of people, and we need to be more active in preventing this mind-virus from spreading.
You are making an uninformed judgement based on a generalization of over 20,000 people.
But a repeated theme of the conversations was me trying to get inside their heads: I said: "Your job is to figure out when I'm going to be making a decision, purchase or whatever else, and make sure that your advertisers' message is in front of my eyes just as it's occurring to me to make a choice".
With creepy consistency, the replies were rejections of this idea. "No, we're connecting the world!".
My conclusion was an echo of the Upton Sinclair quote:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
I hope that the quitting phenomenon is real, and that it represents the creme de la creme, with many other options, leaving because they can no longer avoid understanding. If this is happening, then FB's decline will just accelerate.
Perhaps it was not prioritized because a certain amount of scale, in terms of active members, is required to be very successful (to the extent of getting to "rule the world" kind of level)? Many companies start with fewer user hostile items until they reach a massive scale so as to protect their turf from competitors who may use that against them as well as to keep people coming back to the platform often and for long durations.
Given that FB is now a public company, it needs to prove to shareholders, beyond anything else, that it's growing its revenues and profits. Turn FB into a company that puts its users first instead of its profits, and its stock price would probably be 1/3 of what it is today.
"Connecting the world!" is indeed the job of almost all employees at Facebook. You can have a large majority of the company focus on this one goal, and also know that the byproduct of that goal allows you to expand another part of a bigger goal: to make more money on ads.
A company in a capitalist economy must make money, of course. No one is arguing that and no one is saying that Facebook doesn't want - indeed must - make money.
It's like asking an Uber driver what is job is: "to transport people!". Of course, that much is obvious. If you ask someone in the "growth" department (or whatever) what their job is - the description will necessarily be much different.
Doesn't need to be cynical. "I never thought of it that way" is maybe one of the most important phrases you can say.
These people didn't see their jobs as unethical until someone really put a spotlight on what they do. It forced them to look at their roles in all of this and say "is this right?". To quote David Mitchell: "Are we the baddies?".
That reflects a certain quality in the individual that I generally think of as bad, but I suppose may have some place in the greater scheme of coporate america. However I generally think that we have a moral imperative to constantly ask ourselves, "is this right? . . . 'Are we baddies'?
I've understood that Facebook is essentially evil for a decade. People who work there who are jumping ship now either look like they aren't paying attention but are moralizing the company's action or are abandoning a sinking ship, neither are really positive traits in a potential employee.
Data collection is what enabled the Nazis to find Jews and homosexuals, the next mass percution can be more specific than race. Anti-vaxers, pizzagaters, people who don't watch anough TV.
As the world becomes more aware of the dangers of algorithms and AI, Facebook engineers are rethinking their career path.
It's clear to me that Zuckerberg was entirely too willing to abuse his power from the start, he doesn't seem to have good intentions at all.
It's also worth noting that a certain American tech company was responsible for this.
The other groups maybe, but I doubt even Stalin thought the Great Purges would have gone better if he purged 49% of the Soviet Union's population.
I think your parent's point is that all of this information has been out there even in the news.
As he said:
>they were very clear about what they were doing
Might this be the last straw for some that were already close to leaving? Sure. But it's not the only reason, just the one that's simple to explain and/or easy to spot.
That said, I have to wonder how often unintended consequences are discussed at FB, or at any of the other (tech) powerhouses. I mean, targeting ads based on personal info hardly sounds like a big moral / ethical problem, until someone finds a loop hole and attempts to exploit it (in what should have been foreseeable ways?).
The best case scenario here is many people simply didn't ever consider the actual ethics of the business that was paying them until everyone else started talking about it.
Not thinking about it until someone makes you doesn't make you a terrible person of course, but I won't be throwing any admiration your way.
Employees rarely flip until the organization stops making them money, then they flip en masse. As long as Facebook's stock remains stagnant, the insider leaks will likely continue.
The information about their business model and data practices which people seem to be so surprised by was/is common knowledge among people who work with these technology stacks. Going to work for Facebook seemed like it would have meant supporting and abetting those practices; they were very clear about what they were doing, and the roles were in no way ambiguous.
The cynic in me wonders if these employees are just responding to how others are starting to view their positions, more than ethical or moral quandaries.