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A comment on Monsanto’s ghostwriting to influence science and media. Parent comment

Re:Monsanto’s ghostwriting to influence science and media by whatshisface on Sunday May 08, 2022 @11:38PM (#31310328)
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.)

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Re:Monsanto’s ghostwriting to influence science and media by aporetics on Monday May 09, 2022 @12:12AM (#31310538)
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.

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Re:Monsanto’s ghostwriting to influence science and media by whatshisface on Monday May 09, 2022 @12:27AM (#31310624)
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?
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Re:Monsanto’s ghostwriting to influence science and media by aporetics on Monday May 09, 2022 @02:26PM (#31317895)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]