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?