Re:Clean code won't save the planet
by kodah on Friday November 06, 2020 @02:59PM
(#25010601)
People are arguing outcomes here and I think that ignores an element that seems to be highly prevalent among society, especially these days.
These are my own thoughts and observations based on watching a litany of issues play out in tech and in the public from 2016-2020.
There are three types of arguments you can make: moral, descriptive, and normative. I won't dive too deep into these but if you're unfamiliar you should look at how these compare. The gist of it is that descriptive arguments talk about the state of things but don't attempt to produce a direction or judgement. Normative and moral both establish intended direction. Normative seeks to compare against the status quo, or a baseline that is widely accepted. Moral issues require no baseline for comparison and are most often phrased as "ought to be" and attempt to infer some things about people and things on both ends of the problem.
If you haven't noticed by now, the only thing that actually seeks to cast judgement on people are moral issues. Moral issues have a side effect of producing "oh, I'm/you're a bad person if I/you don't do/agree with this". These moral arguments are extremely useful in drumming up support for short term change, but are often fraught with grandiose language and extrapolation that aim to smooth over where people could object. Combining that with the intentional fallout of objecting, it makes moral arguments increasingly difficult to refuse. The long term fallout of this is that people eventually realize that the language was grandiose and feel misled, especially as predictions don't come true.
In my own experience, the astro-turfing of net neutrality is a great example here. Almost none of the claims came true, even if they did it was in very limited contexts that even professional advocates have a hard time trying to extrapolate. Does this mean that the argument for a net neutrality spirited framework is totally debunked? No, it just means that people over-promised and under-delivered in business speak. Regular people probably call this lying, misinformation, etc but I hesitate to assign intent to the deception.
Moral arguments also have a side effect which is empathy exhaustion. If every issue is a moral issue then eventually you'll have to separate yourself from the constant aura of morality, especially if you occasionally or even regularly have to face times where you object to something that is presented as a moral issue.
Another side effect of moral issues is because they don't usually subscribe to a baseline, or they subscribe to a maximalist baseline, so they require a lot more debate to take effective action on. Worse, they aren't fully debated and then outcomes which were supposed to improve life "for all of us" begin negatively impacting people and our way to deal with that is to prioritize people and their pain. This churn I think produces a lot of the descent that you read on HackerNews.
I don't know where the lines or thresholds lie. It sucks that we're even here, but I think what I've learned is we need less moral arguments and more normative and descriptive. Unfortunately, both of our political parties, which are now entirely interwound into societal issues as well, have their own morality and advocate their positions as such. It looks like a game of tug of war, except that rope fraying in the middle is the people affected by a given issue.
These are my own thoughts and observations based on watching a litany of issues play out in tech and in the public from 2016-2020.
There are three types of arguments you can make: moral, descriptive, and normative. I won't dive too deep into these but if you're unfamiliar you should look at how these compare. The gist of it is that descriptive arguments talk about the state of things but don't attempt to produce a direction or judgement. Normative and moral both establish intended direction. Normative seeks to compare against the status quo, or a baseline that is widely accepted. Moral issues require no baseline for comparison and are most often phrased as "ought to be" and attempt to infer some things about people and things on both ends of the problem.
If you haven't noticed by now, the only thing that actually seeks to cast judgement on people are moral issues. Moral issues have a side effect of producing "oh, I'm/you're a bad person if I/you don't do/agree with this". These moral arguments are extremely useful in drumming up support for short term change, but are often fraught with grandiose language and extrapolation that aim to smooth over where people could object. Combining that with the intentional fallout of objecting, it makes moral arguments increasingly difficult to refuse. The long term fallout of this is that people eventually realize that the language was grandiose and feel misled, especially as predictions don't come true.
In my own experience, the astro-turfing of net neutrality is a great example here. Almost none of the claims came true, even if they did it was in very limited contexts that even professional advocates have a hard time trying to extrapolate. Does this mean that the argument for a net neutrality spirited framework is totally debunked? No, it just means that people over-promised and under-delivered in business speak. Regular people probably call this lying, misinformation, etc but I hesitate to assign intent to the deception.
Moral arguments also have a side effect which is empathy exhaustion. If every issue is a moral issue then eventually you'll have to separate yourself from the constant aura of morality, especially if you occasionally or even regularly have to face times where you object to something that is presented as a moral issue.
Another side effect of moral issues is because they don't usually subscribe to a baseline, or they subscribe to a maximalist baseline, so they require a lot more debate to take effective action on. Worse, they aren't fully debated and then outcomes which were supposed to improve life "for all of us" begin negatively impacting people and our way to deal with that is to prioritize people and their pain. This churn I think produces a lot of the descent that you read on HackerNews.
I don't know where the lines or thresholds lie. It sucks that we're even here, but I think what I've learned is we need less moral arguments and more normative and descriptive. Unfortunately, both of our political parties, which are now entirely interwound into societal issues as well, have their own morality and advocate their positions as such. It looks like a game of tug of war, except that rope fraying in the middle is the people affected by a given issue.