Relevant: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-...
can someone be a considered authority without being an expert.
edit:
I am using authority from the example in wikipedia
"One example of the use of the appeal to authority in science dates to 1923,[20] when leading American zoologist Theophilus Painter declared, based on poor data and conflicting observations he had made,[21][22] that humans had 24 pairs of chromosomes. From the 1920s until 1956,[23] scientists propagated this "fact" based on Painter's authority"
Painter presumably was an expert. So not sure why you are saying why its ok if the person is an expert.
This is why I think good people prefer a-political companies. It is sad, that there are people who have commitments/families, and they are taken hostage by this.
The immigrants in ICE detention centers?
All corporations are political. By accepting the ICE contract previously it was political. Now by reversing they would be changing sides. They were already in the political fray.
Sure it is.
The point of the fallacy is that an argument should stand on its own merit, and has nothing to do with the person making it. Guess what - experts can be wrong too (e.g. hand washing).
Just a reminder that government entities like ICE are executing the current laws of the land.
What's interesting is erosion of the norm that corporations should not be particularly political (picking and choosing customers based on politics, touting allegiance to one specific side). This was once a somewhat stronger (political) norm that has fallen by the wayside as the nation has grown more bitterly divided.
I would be happy to see it come back somewhat; I am not convinced that corporate CEOs having an outsized influence on politics is going to take our nation to a healthy place in the long term, either politically, economically, or intellectually. I also expect that the demands of the new orthodoxy will get much, much worse before the situation gets any better.
Anyone who says "let's not make this political" is very naive.
Companies do in fact involve themselves with politics quite a bit. It's called lobbying. I do think that lobbying is the single most important threat to Democracy, in the US and everywhere else. I do wish that companies stayed out of politics in that way.
I also think that when one side is literally putting children in cages it's not a "slippery slope".
This is a meaningless statement that people use to justify railroading their personal politics into everything.
By making my services available to everyone equally I am emphatically not making a political statement.
This same sentiment is effectively turning an increasing proportion of consumers away from entertainment media.
And just a reminder, "just following orders" brings up some scary historical context that a lot of people don't want to help recreate.
Aside and personal observation: it's interesting how the same people so vigorously crying for "law and order" are rather particular about which laws they care about enforcing, and which they're willing to overlook. Of course I'm not the first to make this observation.
Or how certain human rights can be maintained for one group and not the other.
The lies and high pressure tactics they use to force people to sign away their rights are also concerning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_reaction_to_Ignaz...
Were the outsized influence limited to run-of-the-mill pro-corporatism politics (Or anything that aligned with their social agenda, as in the case of firms like Hobby Lobby), we wouldn't be hearing a peep from that camp on the subject. (As if that's somehow apolitical.)
> I just wonder how long it will take two different subgroups trying push their own conflicting agendas and how the company should react in such a case.
Probably side with the one arguing that we should not commit atrocities.
This is normal: Just because some republicans think evolution is a hoax, doesn't mean every republican does. Every large political organisation is actually a coalition of people with different beliefs that overlap enough to put them on the same side for now.
Hypothetically, maybe GitHub don't know much about racism, but they're very much opposed to police cruisers intentionally driving into pedestrian protesters.
That would mean they support the current protests, but as long as ICE aren't deliberately driving cars into people, they're not yet opposed to ICE.
- No lobbying.
- No campaign or PAC contributions.
- No bandwagoning onto political social causes for marketing-only purposes.
A lot of corporations fail hard at being apolitical, despite the image they try to project publicly.
It's always a very small number of very loud people too. Worse yet, these people have mastered the art of silencing dissent from their colleagues by using kafkatraps.
There are tons of republicans and libertarians in tech, but in the average office, you wouldn't know that given how effectively such people have been silenced for fear of being accused of thoughtcrime and heresy.
If you have power, you are responsible for what happens with it. It's not just free money.
This is only the case if you can find a substantial number of customers Github has turned away. As long as the stance was "as long as it's legal," they stayed out of politics. They were willing to take ICE on as a customer, and they would have been willing to take on organizations fighting against ICE (if for some reason they needed software). That's impartial.
Trying to say that taking on the contract is a political decision just sounds like your forcing your political stances on Github itself... Github had never implied they took politics into account when taking on a customer.
All of which and much more are significantly worse under the vile, toxic, xenophobic current administration.
But nice try at attempting to derail the conversation with some good old-fashioned whataboutism! Better luck next time!
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/03/02/how-border-...
There is very little trust across the entire political spectrum that the US government is an effective policy maker and enforcer. It often feels like our representatives at the state and federal levels no longer represent individuals, and so we've turned to corporations and US government suppliers looking for leverage to force change instead.
Again, it's a meaningless statement. We deliberately draw the line somewhere, partly to avoid incessant infighting over pedantic "political" but not actually political things.
Do you want to know how to turn an entire generation of people against your cause? Impose your politics onto them at work and facilitate a culture of suppression and targeting for anyone critical. This is happening all across society right now and the pendndulum is already starting to swing back and when ivory tower CEOs impose their views onto people who just want to do their jobs, the swing only builds momentum
Appealing to an expert should not be an instant win, but an argument can be valid and useful without being sufficient to end the discussion.
Almost no corporations are overtly political in who they service.
I was worried it was going to be like the salmonella thing where it turned out washing a chicken* is terrible advice because it spreads it everywhere and so it turns out that every time I wash my hands after handling deliveries, I'm now covering my kitchen with Covid sauce. I'm very happy that's not the case.
* I've never washed a chicken, but I've definitely seen and heard the advice before.
Literally everything a corporation does is politics. Every hiring decision, every office they open or close, every client they take on, every vendor they ditch, every ad they publish. It literally all has political implications and messaging. Why is there an expectation on companies to "not be political" whenever one of those inherently political decisions intersects with something that happens to be a hot-button issue? Like wtf does that even mean?
Personally, I'm finding it a significant distraction in my organization. It does leave me wondering if I shouldn't leave for a more neutral one.
That's the most terrifying part to me as a dev. We don't even need neural networks to search petabytes of social media content for keywords. If we allow corporations to become politicized then we open ourselves up to unprecedented abuses.
Although right now since everybody is afraid to get cancelled on a whim, corporations are opening themselves to, and you are right in your logic, criticism for their lack of political activism.
Just a thought: what if the nation's divide comes from companies taking more political stances, instead of the opposite? As an example to entertain the thought, when Nike takes a political position through their advertising on social platforms, people react to it by taking side. If done at a scale big enough, with enough companies pushing their customers to take a side, would that be enough to result in visible divide in the country?
Have they tried growing as people to not be so horrid that people would recoil if they knew what was really inside their heads?
We have no obligation to tolerate the intolerant.
I'm sure they just can't edit the post because it's been too long.
The other is that it usually takes serious labor and negotiation to land a government contract. It's not like ICE went to some Web UI and bought GitHub Enterprise with a company credit card, and now we're asking GitHub/MS to ban them from the e-store.
If Github was to pull out, ICE could simply find someone else willing to sign a contract with them, except it will make things worse, as that other provider will not be as diligent or reliable (if it was just as good, it would have been picked in the first place instead of Github).
When you see an unjust law, it should be pushed to get changed. Back when gay marriage was illegal, it made more sense to push for its legislation, instead of providers refusing service to state governments where it was illegal. People need to protest, call their elected officials, sign petitions, etc. Most importantly, people need to regularly vote, not just during general presidential elections.
That has nothing to do with Github. As a customer, I want to be confident that my service won't get terminated for some arbitrary reason, as long as I obey terms of service and don't break any laws. Giving providers the ability to cancel my service due to random whims in their workforce isn't something that I want to see in tech.
Perhaps you could explain the difference?
The authority fallacy is that a certain position cannot be challenged as some expert are infallible. Similarly to how you believe 2 + 2 = 4 you also believe Aristotle was the arbiter of truth. As an argument it exposes no attack surface because you do not admit criticisms of the position.
It is not a fallacy if you are simply making an assumption of a fact (eg that rats are born out of rotting plants) that can be separately proven or disproven.
Sort of how a dictionary is used, it is not that the dictionary must be true we understand that it is possible for it to be wrong, it is just that we agree not to contest it in most cases for ease of conversation.
Those are not as different as you seem to believe.
> Sort of how a dictionary is used, it is not that the dictionary must be true we understand that it is possible for it to be wrong, it is just that we agree not to contest it in most cases for ease of conversation.
That is not how dictionaries are used. Dictionaries document how language is used in the recent past by a sufficiently large number of people. They are a trailing indicator of how language is used.
If you description was actually accurate, there would be no new slang (e.g. yeet) and words would not change their usage (e.g. "they" is now also a gender neutral singular).
At what point does this make sense in an objectively measurable way?
In a sense the power of a dictionary is that you are allowed to use those meanings (indeed they mostly contain positive information and rarely what words do not mean)
> If you description was actually accurate, there would be no new slang (e.g. yeet)
Completeness ad accuracy are different.
> words would not change their usage (e.g. "they" is now also a gender neutral singular)
Speech can be sometimes accurate and sometimes less accurate. As a medium the value of speech is what you can express with it, it is in general not a form of art per se.
>> In one case I am declaring that something needs to be true, in the other I am declaring that I believe something as true.
>Those are not as different as you seem to believe.
I indeed believe they are quite different, 2=2 must be true in terms of the statements I understand it to be. Evolution on the other hand is something that I simply believe.
I cannot even fathom[1] what a proof of "not 2=2" could be, as in even if you had one I would be unable to understand it or believe it.
Evolution is something that instead can be disproven, even more than that a huge chunk of why scientist believe it is because experimental result could disprove it but instead keep confirming it.
[1] this is an important logical concept: for a statement of facts to be (at the very least) well formed you must be able to understand what it would be required for a proof and/or a confutation.
It is the hallmark of extremism.
It was first used politically by Vladimir Lenin, then Benito Mussolini, and more recently by George W Bush after 9/11.
It's not surprising that modern liberals are so keen on its use.
I dunno, I think Cicero is at least as notable as Bush, if not Mussolini or Lenin. Orwell—who used it to describe a fundamental fact of the nature of war, always and everywhere—wasn’t a politician, but certainly a notable figure. The uses of perhaps the greatest significance are in the Bible, both in Joshua and by Christ in the Gospels.
But perhaps the most relevant to the immediate situation are figures like:
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor”
Elie Wiesel: “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented,”
John Stuart Mill, “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing”.
Or the form written as confessiom from the side complicit by complacency, Rev. Martin Niemöller:
---
First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists And I did not speak out Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews And I did not speak out Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me And there was no one left To speak out for me
---
> It is the hallmark of extremism.
The recognition that inaction is a choice with consequences, and that complacency is acquiescence is very much not limited to those espousing extremism.
Cutting off GitHub access to ICE engineers is like sitting outside their offices banging pots and pans together for a few weeks. A lot of people are generally worse off for a short while, GitHub revenue goes down, maybe they lay off a few engineers who were supporting that customer, a few news articles are written alternatively praising another step towards corporate activism or bemoaning cancel culture.
The most important part of convincing GitHub to cancel ICE to those who are rooting for it isn’t so much ICE losing access to GitHub, but another drop in the bucket toward normalizing the politicization and disruption of basic services to deplorable customers.
If folks at GitHub believe they offer a product of value (which I suspect that they do), then the necessary corollary is that by offering that product to an agency responsible for a reprehensible abrogation of human rights makes it easier, cheaper, and/or faster for that agency to degrade humanity. To stick one's fingers in one's ears and claim that it is "apolitical" to continue to do business with such an agency is embarrassingly similar to the defenses that IBM executives must have made in the 1930's.
1/3 of my people were subject to genocide infamously by oven, more recently than slavery, but I'm not expecting people to remove any reference to fire or pizza from my life, that would be absurd. So is this. None of the people coding were slaves, I guarantee it, and they can move past it just like all other populations move past various atrocities that they experience. This focus on blacks is a fad, you can arbitrarily define a near infinite number of "marginalized" groups if you carve up 360MM people.
But what does make it difficult is being told all your life that you are a victim, held back by something about yourself that you cannot change; that's how you breed weakness and teach learned helplessness.
Treating other humans with respect is a core value of mine. I try as much as I can to listen to their concerns and be mindful of them. I'm truly sorry that you seem to only see this long-awaited reckoning with America's deep white supremacist roots as a "fad".
That's not even true of just tech. IBM put engineers and machines in the hands of the Nazi party in 1930's as they were putting jews into camps.
If you would've spoken out, then you agree with the principle but don't agree that ICE is "bad enough" to warrant this treatment. If you wouldn't have spoken out but wouldn't have worked for them, then you agree that working on these systems is clearly unethical (and thus IBM was acting unethically) but feel that ethics are less important than not disrupting the freedom of a company to sell their services to whoever they like. If you would've worked for them and wouldn't have spoken out, then we have very different views on ethics and I'm not sure we're going to agree on anything.
Yes, laws should be changed but businesses should be held accountable for who they do business with. You'd better believe that the US government wouldn't have the same rosy outlook you do if they discovered that GitHub was selling software to known terrorist groups.