People far better placed than Mozilla the company have been saying this for years so they are late to that particular party anyway and plenty of the damage done they did themselves.

Personally, my take is the opposite: if you are an ethical person find the very worst company that you are still willing to work for and try to change them from the inside. After all if only non-ethical people want to work at certain companies that will make things worse, not better.

That won't work.

You do shape your enviroment, but your enviroment also shapes you. Meaning if you go to a miserable place on purpose, that place will just drain you, if you cannot change it completely. And changing a company on your own as a lonely employee ... is doomed from the start and will lead to burn out and depression very soon.

I propose the opposite: ethical people gather together and create organisations and companies to show that things can be done better. Talk and criticism is cheap. Actually doing something better, is much harder. But you need likeminded people around you. If they are all dispersed everyone fighting on their own against a behemot .. will not make things better. All those cold "evil" corporate people? Well, at some point they were humans with ideals as well (in most cases) but got changed by their surroundings.

See also Zvi's recent series on what he terms "Immoral Mazes": https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/01/16/how-escape-from-immo...

His claim is that power in large organizations is a zero-sum game, and merely competing in this game in order to advance necessarily alters your personality and lifestyle. This is due to the demands that the game places on you. The whole series is worth reading.

Generally, “implies a falsehood” is considered to be equivalent to “is false”.

What’s your point?

Changing a company from the inside is something that can only be done by those that are on the inside, hence my qualification that you should only join those companies that you can still stomach and then push as hard as you can in the right direction, rather than to join the very worst organization that you can find in the world, and one that you - hopefully - can not stomach.

Also, there may be a risk of people being more likely to derive in invalid ways when attempting the reductio, like making some hyperbolic statements, exaggerating the implications of a statement, and treating those exaggerations as if they actually logically follow. But this doesn’t make reductio an invalid technique, just one that people can fail to use properly.)

Like I said in the other comment, the objection should be that the derivation of the absurd from the premise is invalid. For example, pointing to the “that you can stomach” part of your claim, and saying that the derivation was invalid in neglecting that part of the statement.

Talking about changing ISIS from the inside as the IT administrator doesn't convince anybody that it's impossible to change an organization from within. It's a poor argument that might win Internet points for being a spicy hot take, especially on Twitter, but it does little to debunk the idea that, eg, an engineer could ethically join Facebook with the aims of elevating the company up, through working on the team to detect Russian trolling rings/Anti-vaxxers/MLM marketers.

Perhaps their derivation of the absurd conclusion from the claim <X> was based on a misunderstanding of the claim <X>, or perhaps their derivation of the absurd conclusion from it was based on some fallacy, or some false assumption.

But reductio is a valid logical step, so long as we have the validity of the argument that the absurd conclusion follows from the premise.

In this specific case, X is:

"Personally, my take is the opposite: if you are an ethical person find the very worst company that you are still willing to work for and try to change them from the inside"

with the response, Y: "join ISIS' IT department"

What is the refutation of this particular "X implies Y" you would have used instead? Is there one that doesn't require refining X and instead attacks the Y? X is already verbose, and adding additional verbiage does not help the case (IMO)

In this specific case, X is:

"Personally, my take is the opposite: if you are an ethical person find the very worst company that you are still willing to work for and try to change them from the inside"

with the response, Y: "join ISIS' IT department"

What is the refutation of this particular "X implies Y" you would have used instead? Is there one that doesn't require refining X and instead attacks the Y? X is already

Otherwise, you're depriving an ethical organization of your contributions while aiding the competition.

Unless you're entering a leadership role it's very unlikely you'll be changing a damn thing from within, while being corrupted by the surely lavish compensation an unethical company generally can afford to shower on its individual contributors.

Now this is the kind of motivated reasoning I can get behind. I'm not lazy, I'm genuinely heroic!

And when there is no such party?

I'm not convinced by this argument. The status quo may exist because there are fundamental issues with changing it. Those issues don't go away with wishful thinking. Attempting to change things while praiseworthy may end up do more harm than good. At the best, if it doesn't end up changing the status quo, you just wasted energy, and bothered other people. But much more likely seems to me that we are trading some pros/cons for others, it's not a strict improvement or even an overall improvement.

If one tries to analyze attempts at change that failed there are lots of common patterns. One of them is being ignorant of the fundamental reasons why the issue you are trying to change is the way it is. Being ignorant of the reason behind that makes it much more likely you will fail at your task.

Can you imagine yourself arguing this in feudalism or the USSR?

One wouldn’t succeed in changing this.

Of course, some conceivable changes to the way things are, are both possible to achieve, and are overall beneficial to make.

Some changes are impossible (or effectively impossible) to make, and some are possible but have costs which outweigh the benefits.

I suppose the question is determining, or estimating, which is which.

(Though, I suppose the question isn’t just “what proportion are you right about as to what category they fall under” but rather, what is the average benefit and cost (and I suppose also the variance and other moments?) of your pursuit of the changes you choose to persue.)

You should read about Perestroyka.

"Hey, you're asking something unrealistic; people are under the same constraints that lead you to do what you advised against. How can you expect us to operate under constraints even you can't live up to? Isn't that a prerequisite to giving such advice?"

With that said, I don't think executive pay with layoffs is a good example of unethical behavior. A better one would be their behavior in the Looking Glass/Mr. Robot extension [1] or the forced updates via a mislabeled feature to cover their own screwup [2].

If a non-profit is so careless with security to promote their marketing and analytics, why would you expect others to heed less a stronger siren's call?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15931730

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19823701

No, it is a logical fallacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

Appealing to "accepted norms" is another case of appealing to authority – except a less verifiable authority, in that case. Ironically, I am currently listing fallacies, which itself does not a good argument make – so I will add to it that that's not what “informal” means; the adjective is merely specifying that it is not a logical flaw, but instead falls into a broader category (such as implying stronger evidence than exists, or something).

Your original argument is flawed, however; it neglects that organisations cannot increase the talent available to ethical companies and decrease the talent available to unethical ones by participating in the job market, and invokes an argument similar to the tu quoque fallacy by implying that Mozilla's actions have any bearing on how good its advice is.

Merely calling out that you used a fallacy (and misidentified at that!) is not a sufficient counterargument alone.

Yes, "informal" isn't "logical", hence the italics specifying as much.

No, my response wasn't a counterargument because what I was responding to wasn't an argument to begin with. There was nothing to defend because nothing of substance was produced.

No, my original argument is not flawed because your counterargument has nothing to do with the concept we've been discussing in this sub-thread.

Allow me to summarize: Mozilla sucks and yes, students should consider ethics in their job search which means they should probably not work for Mozilla.

My personal hypocrisy doesn't make air travel any better for the planet.

1) Mozilla isn't right or wrong in this case, they just lack credibility on the matter which, again, warrants the type of response that the original and many other commentators here had.

2) Your analogy isn't quite 1:1 with this situation. If you were a railroad tycoon that flew daily to perform business and made a public statement about how awful flying on planes is and how everyone should stop in lieu of train travel, it would be hard to take you seriously and you would be rightfully called out. Mozilla likes to identify itself with the ethical side yet it is no better than the companies it is criticizing, going as far as being partially funded by one of them.

Edit: Sorry if I come across as belaboring, I hadn't read your other post. :)

Mozilla makes the argument that young people should consider the ethical issues before taking jobs.

HN user matheweis asserts that Mozilla's actions or past claims are inconsistent with their argument.

Therefore, the reasoning goes, the argument that young people should consider the ethical issues before taking jobs is false.

--

It should be incredibly clear how this line of reasoning is fallacious and therefore invalid.

HN user matheweis asserts that Mozilla's actions or past claims are inconsistent with their argument.

Therefore, the reasoning goes, the argument that young people should consider the ethical issues before taking jobs is false.

"""

This sequence strikes me as non sequitur and strawman. That is how "the reasoning goes" when one actually commits tu quoque, but merely pointing out hypocrisy is not tu quoque.

Edit: It's possible that I have not read all of his comments. I'm only aware of this:

"Mozilla wants young techies to consider ethics in their jobs?

Rich words indeed from the corporation that more than doubled executive pay and then found themselves needing to lay off 70 people to save costs on a restructuring"