I ask the same thing about Facebook and Google employees, and people who work for "defense" contractors.

At least defense contractors can argue they’re helping the “good guys”, people at Facebook know they’re part of the problem but they can’t turn down the money.

Huh, Monsanto employees can claim they are saving millions from hunger and death by providing GMO seeds. Also saving farmers from ruin by providing disease resistant seeds.

Now you can come claiming well that's bullshit. But that can again be said for most of the companies.

The "good guys" are whoever has the money and is favored by the administration.

It genuinely scares me that so many adults think in terms of "good guys" and "bad guys".

One of the things that drove me nuts about the Qanon family of conspiracy theories, despite them being insane, was the rhetoric their followers used, calling the US government "the good guys". First of all, what conspiracy theory actually suggests that the government is on their side and not out to get them, and second, do Q followers think we're in a superhero movie with good guys and bad guys?

Wait until you learn that we give people who think like this firearms, the license to kill, & qualified immunity.

Very rarely it backfires & we get things like this.

https://youtu.be/4fQcjmt2Q_o

Overwhelmingly, most people think this is fine.

I hate it here.

What is wrong with working for Facebook or Google?

I'd expect most Facebook employees working on the main project feel like they are doing good in the world helping people connect with their friends and families, organizing events, etc...

For Google I'd expect most employees feel like their products (search, android, chrome, chrome os, maps, gmail, etc...) help billions of people in positive ways.

They made a profit building some of the most pervasive anti-privacy software in the world. Google continually attempts to ruin the web, and communication (email), and Facebook uses AI to make people miserable.

Google and Facebook sure, but after watching Russia attempt to roll over Ukraine in modern evil explore fashion, I am thankful for defense contractors like those in Turkey who created drones and the software required to smash Russian invasion.

Same reason why some of our software engineering colleagues reading your comment right now work on Facebook.

I worked at Monsanto for a few years. I won't get into the ethics of the company on this forum, but as a software engineer it was a pretty great place to work. Good engineering culture, lots of very dedicated and smart people and some really fun challenges to work on.

I think you just summarized the problem pretty well.

Could you maybe summarize it further, for those of us who don't know what you mean by this?

Agree or not all you like but I flat out don't believe you don't know what is meant.

1) Doesn't wish to discuss the ethics at all.

2) The working conditions are very good.

They likely don't want to discuss ethics because the exact same arguments and insults get trotted out everytime. Especially because if his arguments don't align with the common narrative, several people will likely just dismiss him as a "paid shill." Why would anyone willingly wade into that mess with nothing to gain?

Yeah, this is what I was getting at.

Maybe say so plainly rather than faking at playing dumb?

What you're assuming was meant wasn't actually said either. Make your case. Make well. Make it clearly and forcefully but please don't go in for those kind of hollywood-drama-style courtroom argument tricks, it's not helpful to any given discussion.

The intent you're claiming isn't anywhere in the person's posts. All they said was that they didn't want to get into the morality argument in this forum, which is a reasonable position to have given there are people like you chomping at the bit to "prove him wrong" or whatever. Chill out, guy.

I did not claim any intent.

Inside life is great and people are nice, and all of the evil is generated at the boundary between the inside and the outside. On top of that, information about the evil is very much suppressed within the organization, so that the people working on it are even more ignorant about it than external bystanders. For example, take the oil industry in 2006: everyone inside it was inundated by detailed climate change denial, so that they were worse off (in terms of the accuracy of their beliefs) than relatively uninformed outsiders who vaguely recalled hearing something about how climate change was a problem.

(Not to change the subject, but this always strikes me as funny when people debate misinformation; some of the most damaging misinformation of the past 50 years was disseminated first and most intensely through the internal channels of powerful institutions.)

The real evil is always in not asking and not thinking about the meaning of the work.

If you work at a company because it has a great engineering culture, but the work it happens to make it super efficient to turn babies into cowfeed, you’re still evil…for not thinking about the meaning of what you do.

If you work at a company because it has an awesome engineering culture, and the work is to make it really easy and efficient for other companies to do whatever they do, how do you assess (and take responsibility) for your work? Can you? If you can’t, what are you doing?

If you work in the cloud, this is you.

You have got to make some finer distinctions for what is or isn't evil than "the cloud." All you will accomplish with overbroad strokes is convincing people that ethical distinctions do not actually exist. As for what the distinctions actually are, for a start, how about products that harm parties which have not agreed to anything?

Ah. I wasn’t calling the cloud evil, I was showing that working in the cloud poses some difficult questions about how to identify the meaning of the work. It would be easy to defer such a task. (But what would it mean to spend your life working in such a way that the meaning of your work is always up to someone else?)

I was pretty clear in locating the root of evil in thoughtlessness.

May people would view helping to feed the world's hungriest as an act of compassion

Presumably because they believe in the promise of GMOs.

I'm pro-GMO in the sense of "woohoo, science!", but a lot of it seems to be about making herbicide/pesticide resistance and encouraging that seems like a bad idea.

Case in point, BT GMOs have only trained the insect population for resistance to it: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2011/08/researchers-identif...

I'm not sure what you're thinking GMO technology should be used for. Pest control is a large part of successful agriculture. BT is used in organic farming as well (mentioned in your linked article) but instead of it being made by the plant itself as a GMO does, it's applied to the plant which means more of it needs to be applied overall. Pesticide resistance is nothing new, GMO or otherwise. That's the nature of nature and the reason 99.99% of the pesticides you consume are made naturally by the plant itself.

https://geneticliteracyproject.org/gmo-faq/do-gmo-bt-insect-...

https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/06/13/9999-pesticides-we-eat-...

RoundUp-ready crops allows for farmers to spray herbicide directly onto food. That means we are now eating the chemical in much higher than trace amounts. This is new, untested and seemingly bad (if you go by the non-Monsanto-funded studies).

My comment was in regards to Bt crops but regardless I think your perception of how much glyphosate actually gets used is rather blown out of proportion - most likely due to all the anti-gmo propaganda that’s out there. It’s certainly not “new” as roundup ready crops have been around for quite some time at this point and we likely would have seen obvious health problems directly attributable to it by now if there are any. Here’s just one counterpoint from someone who actually farms for a living: https://thelifeofafarmer.com/2016/05/22/how-much-roundup-do-...

>...and we likely would have seen obvious health problems directly attributable to it by now...

By the way, we did see health problems. Farmers and farmhands successfully sued Monsanto for health problems caused by RoundUp.

If you understand how these court cases are brought you would see that it’s problematic at best to rely on them as a determination of truth: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-science-behind-the-roun...

> ...glyphosate...

RoundUp. We are talking about RoundUp being sprayed onto foods. Not glyphosate. That is a tactic to avoid talking about the tests involving RoundUp.

The whole “Roundup not glyphosate” reframing was just a convenient shifting of the goalposts after their initial claims about glyphosate were debunked. But I still contend that your assertion that we are eating non-trace amounts of Roundup or glyphosate or whatever your demon dou jour is is quite false.

>The whole “Roundup not glyphosate” reframing was just a convenient shifting of the goalposts...

Yes, you and Monsanto are shifting the goalposts. RoundUp is sprayed onto foods. Studies show that RoundUp is toxic. Monsanto funded a bunch of studies on glysophate in isolation to try and show that RoundUp is not toxic. RoundUp has chemicals that make it possible for Glysophate to permeate the cells.

I ask the same question about Google

Google is unfairly villainized. It provides a service to advertisers, and it give away many billions of dollars of free online services every year. They’ve done literally nothing to harm you nor 99.9999% of people on earth.

Many of us would argue that providing privacy-invasion-as-a-service, at scale, to people who want to sell us shit is harmful and villainous. Even if you set aside the dangerous aspects of some of the "free online services", like YouTube serving as a massive engagement-driven platform for propaganda and radicalization, you're still left with web services designed to hoover up all your data and sell your eyeballs to businesses. That is the behavior of a hostile actor, and vast swaths of people accepting this tradeoff doesn't make its existence any less objectionable to some of us.

Google is exactly villainized because of the many billions of dollars of free services they provide and use as a source of the data they funnel to the advertisers, while killing competition as a second order effect.

Philanthropy should be done by entities dedicated to it and ethically responsible, not as a camouflage for private data brokering.

Do you have some links of Google funneling data to advertisers?

I assume you are making a fine distinction between straight handing down user identifying private information, and providing special access to targeted users that will only hit the advertiser in full as they hit the ad.

Technically and legally both are different, but I still see both as funnelling data to advertisers.

Excuse me, but one of those things is actually providing data to advertisers, and one of them clearly, legally, and functionally is _not._ You don’t get your own set of facts just because you irrationally hate Google.

This is like asking why census bureau employees work for the US government when they know the multiple genocides, wars, etc. it has perpetrated.

Not every position is responsible for the worst aspects of every decision made at a company/institution. No company is perfectly ethical, as people aren't perfectly ethical. Most of the work at Monsanto is for the greater good, and the world is a better place for it being around.

> compassion

Compassion doesn't pay and my second home won't pay for itself.

> Have they no compassion for their fellow humans?

Yes. Compassion for your fellow humans is quite unnatural for a lot of people.

It's why Christianity was a thing - a non trivial percentage of the population will only pretend to be a human being out of fear.

> Compassion for your fellow humans is quite unnatural for a lot of people.

Could you please quantify? I recall reading the exact opposite conclusion in behavioral and psychological science journals. It’s the reason why the military has to break people down to teach them to kill. Our natural reaction is to have compassion for each other and not to kill each other.

We are a cooperative species that works well together and survives as a group. If we weren’t naturally compassionate, the human endeavor would have died out a long time ago. It also goes a long way to explain why things like hatred, racism, and subjugation of the other require massive amounts of propaganda and disinformation to perpetuate themselves.

I also recall reading in specific cases where compassion seems to be lacking, that there are larger cultural, religious, tribal, criminal, and social pressures at work influencing the outcome of human behavior to limit compassion. Once these forces are controlled for (often with the help of changes to the legal system) compassion tends to return to normal, average levels. Examples might include Good Samaritan laws.

It is my experience that more people want to help than hurt, more people want to promote the general welfare of the group rather than a select few, and more people desire to see others happy and prosperous, rather than unhappy and suffering.

This enduring, popular myth that everyone is out for themselves and doesn’t care about anyone else is the product of larger, psychopathic forces at work wishing to control society for its own purposes. The masses of humanity wish to live peacefully and in harmony with others. It is a very tiny few that have chosen to take power and use it against others. They are the ones that lack compassion, not the whole of humanity.

Over many decades, I’ve personally made note of and observed a strange and unusual undercurrent to popular culture that seeks to make people more aggressive, violent, and unnecessarily competitive and war-like, while attempting to denigrate, decrease, and diminish our proclivity for sharing and cooperation. This behavioral system of control is obvious and omnipresent once you start looking for it. It is not natural and it only serves to increase inequality and give power to fewer and fewer people.

There are people dying of malnutrition and preventable diseases, right now.

If you are compassionate, surely your time is better spent trying to solve that problem, rather than posting on HackerNews?

> We are a cooperative species that works well together and survives as a group.

The dunbar number limits that cooperative inclination.

> It also goes a long way to explain why things like hatred, racism, and subjugation of the other require massive amounts of propaganda and disinformation to perpetuate themselves.

This exists without the propaganda and misinformation. Tribes are an evolved social form.

The bad things about Monsanto, like Facebook, are extremely over exaggerated by online panic porn. Monsanto Chemical did some genuinely bad things in the 80s with Vietnam, etc. But the modern company actually reduces pesticide use since RoundUp is more efficient.