The way I read it, I don't think the Mission Protocol is about accomplishing the mission at all costs, even if it means sacrificing our morals or doing anything illegal.
It's very difficult to create meaningful and impactful change to improve society, and this advocates being laser-focused to give your mission the best chance be successful. If all (good) missions are given their full attention, they all have a higher chance of success instead of everyone trying to trying to do everything, and then not doing any mission well enough to be successful.
It is advocating for people to choose a company with a mission they believe in because they think it can make a positive contribution to society. For example, if you care about having a world-wide open financial system but take a job at Tesla, according to the Mission Protocol you would be doing a disservice to bringing clean energy to the world if you also asked Tesla to put effort into contributing to an open financial system.
Pointing out or "whistle blow" legal or ethical wrongdoings by a single person has nothing to do with a group coming together and agreeing on not participating in political topics that aren't essential to the groups mission.
>...isn't this just a fancy way of saying that the ends justify the means?
No, It doesn't discourage anyone from questioning the groups action at all. It should stop companies from having to decorate their office according to the current pride month to make a political statement that is completely irrelevant to its mission.
> Pointing out or "whistle blow" legal or ethical wrongdoings by a single person has nothing to do with a group coming together and agreeing on not participating in political topics that aren't essential to the groups mission.
Whether e.g. my colleagues that happen to be minorities feel comfortable in the working environment is super important for me as an employee, and should be important to the company too. Even as a purely profit-driven incentive, but hopefully also because empathy is a thing that exists.
My colleagues without citizenship, gender-minorities, and ethnic minorities in general are, for example impacted disproportionately by the policies of the current administration. If one of these colleagues talks about "politics" that aren't directly relevant to the mission, but impact them deeply as humans and emotional beings, they shouldn't be shut down. For them, it might instill a degree of confidence in the organization if the company, instead of ignoring their plight, chose to actively support them.
You exactly misunderstood it. Personal these topics may be relevant but for the groups mission they are not. It doesn't matter if the topic is relevant for a majority or minority at all. Even if the topic would be of interest for all people, if its not relevant to the mission it simply inst relevant in the scope of working and should not be handled at work.
If you are mistreated by others AT WORK for whatever reason including political reasons then you have (should have) a way to report that. The Mission Protocol isn't about looking away from wrongdoings its about focusing on the mission and avoiding mission non-critical stuff.
Your views on whatever outside of that scope can be emotionally affected by current events but that can not and should not be in the way of the companies mission.
Since the mission is only achieved as a function of the work performed by employees, the problems facing large groups of employees is surely in the interest of the employer. If 10% of your employees feel affected by e.g. a death by police hands, and the subsequent protests, then you _will_ notice that on your bottom line. Not to mention all of the non-black people that naturally are also affected by such events.
To take it out of racial lines, imagine how scared a member of the LGBT community must feel as the supreme court justice hearings, which could result in the reversal of crucial protections for that group, are playing out. My point here is that caring about the well-being of your colleagues and/or your employees should necessarily include the singular issues which negatively affect them to the degree that current events seem to have. Or, at least has for the people that I have spoken to.
I want to make it clear that the above argument isn't that "a group should speak out because they have a voice", even if I think such an argument could be made quite strongly. Rather, it's an argument focusing solely on context of keeping employees and/or colleagues somewhat happier, and less affected by events like we've seen. It's also a way to foster loyalty. If someone thinks their employer has their back, they're more likely to have the back of their employer too.
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On the topic of "at work" problems relating to political issues. Recently there has been a some high-profile but, in my view, quite meaningless changes proposed. Like GitHub changing the default branch name. It's a trivial change, doesn't do anything meaningful about the real problems faced by minorities, and primarily is a way to score a few feel-good brownie points. However, it still had an effect on the people I've talked to about this. Because when 30% of your colleagues care so strongly about _not_ changing the default branch name - something that, again, is utterly trivial and well-supported - it makes them feel less welcome. A change so small and trivial, suggested by some in a well intentioned effort to be nice, turns into exclusionary act by the employee that so strongly feel making that change is preposterous.
You might say that the change shouldn't have been suggested in the first place, and thus the whole thing would be avoided. But the conversation about that change was happening everywhere online in every technology-related sphere. You'd be hard-pressed to follow any news in our industry and miss the conversation. Which brings us back to the crux. It's such a small change that doesn't really matter to most people, but to some it _is_ important. Why not?
Work doesn't happen in a bubble with no connection to the outside world. The work affects the real world, and the real world effects the work. It's a two-way street that you can't ignore.
You completely make up BS. The whole "death by police hands" is a made up non existing threat to law abiding citizen. And the whole LGBTASDFQWERTY once was about equal rights. Equal rights means you show up at work and do your job or you get fired regardless of you gender and political happenings.
Imagine if the supreme court would be talking about the right to bear arms.
No matter your views on that topic its in no way relevant for showing up at work and do you job. How you handle that in you free time is up to you but at work this would be completely irrelevant even if you work in a gun factory.
Really cheapening Snowden here if you think he wasn't going to sacrifice his life to reveal these practices if a little mission protocol document had been there.
This protocol is meant for non-government agencies, i.e. tech companies. Don't obfuscate the intended purpose of this protocol. There are well-defined, existing whistleblower protocols in government for situations that Snowden encountered.
Did you mean to also exclude tech companies that work with the government (i.e. Palantir, Amazon, Microsoft, etc.)?
> Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corporation (informally Booz Allen) is the parent of Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., an American management and information technology consulting firm, headquartered in McLean, Virginia, in Greater Washington, D.C.
Gee, thanks for explaining what government contracting is.
I wasn't aware. /s
Contractors are also protected under existing whistleblower laws. There are clearly codified protocols for reporting and handling instances of governmental abuse. Any contractor that is dealing with sensitive information is working with either a Confidential, Secret, or Top Secret clearance. These projects and clearances are something you are specifically hired for, or voluntarily agree to participate in.
I suspect this is an anti-fragile position, i.e. exposed to varying stressors on a company's purpose, companies that follow this principle will simply sharpen their purpose and objectives and get better at it.
It'll be interesting to see if this is a competitive advantage. Personally, I think it is. I would happily accept a PR from a guy who wants to kill me. He can't kill me or hurt me in a PR.
Personally, I'd also prefer to (metaphorically) drive right off the cliff at full pace with a bunch of people who also think it's the right way than go nowhere because none of us agree on where to go.
> I suspect this is an anti-fragile position, i.e. exposed to varying stressors on a company's purpose, companies that follow this principle will simply sharpen their purpose and objectives and get better at it.
We might be inclined to ask ourselves what it would have looked like for lunch counters in 1958 to have done the same, and why that doesn't fly now.
It shows the subjectivity and flexibility one has when choosing a mission and framing though. The mission could be "serve the best lunch lunch we can to good 'old souther white people" or more insidiously, to "... to real Americans." People have a amazing ability to self-rationalize and are going to do what they want to do.
Setting boundaries on an organization's objectives is certainly a worthwhile thing to do, because coordination is hard and any alignment helps, but it is just going to reflect to consensus of the leadership regardless.
Right, but that's sort of the point of this protocol statement, no?
If a founder of a lunch restaurant starts out by saying "hello everyone, I'm here to make the best lunches possible but only for southern white people" I suspect, given my experience with lunches on three continents and in 37 states in the US, that he is going to have a hard time finding people who would actually be able to make good lunches.
Which is the point.
This does two things: it focuses people on what the actual mission of their company is or should be, and it can expose the kinds of missions that are nuts, or counter-productive, or just plain bad.
"We make sandwiches, taking a side on segregation is beyond the scope of our mission".
Which sounds fine, but Woolworth's chose not to serve Black Americans. This was legal[0]. With the benefit of hindsight, we can claim that refusing to serve Black people was indeed "taking a side", but there were places where supporting the pro-integration people was breaking the law. And refusing to serve Black people, until they staged sit ins, didn't appear to be taking a side, because it wasn't uncommon. It was the way most places worked.
Even the mission to "serve everyone a sandwich" doesn't require addressing segregation, you can have separate lunch counters and serve everyone. Perhaps that's fine, people at the time certainly thought it was.
>"We make sandwiches, taking a side on segregation is beyond the scope of our mission".
Idk, "we make [my edit: great] sandwiches", which sounds like a great mission, seems very much entwined with who gets to eat said sandwiches - especially if they're delicious. Since if you are denying certain classes the right to enjoy your awesome sandwiches, your sandwiches probably aren't that great to begin with.
If I steel man your argument about having segregated counter space - that they'd excuse the segregation because if everyone has separate counter space to eat the sandwich the underlying differences don't matter -, what I'm left thinking about is that, well, the experience of having a great sandwich also has to do with the environment in which you eat it. Who wants to eat a delicious sandwich when you have to sit at a crappy table, with crappy chairs and bad service? No one, that's who.
And then we're back to my original point about artificially constraining the market for awesome sandwiches.
I'd think this proves my point: we're having a debate, without an obvious "victor" about whether or not a mission to focus on sandwiches without distraction would lead to fighting segregation.
You say that someone could justify that. I'm saying they could also do the opposite. My point is that a "mission-oriented" code of conduct if you will allows the people who set the mission (read: leadership) to set the ethics too.
Fighting segregation can be part of the mission, or not. But if it isn't, you can't work on it.
Why would you work for a lunch counter with a racist mission? Boycotting is the correct way to combat it. If there's a law forcing lunch counters to segregate, then the problem is in the government, and the correct way to counter that is political activism.
The observation is that (1) people are willing to excuse environmental racism as long as they don't feel personally responsible for it, and (2) the environment of business is optimized for ensuring that individual employees do not feel guilty for their small roles in larger wrongs.
It's hard to blame someone who's just trying to get by for taking a job, and I'm not especially interested in levying blame. What I'm more interested in is ensuring that people feel able to lodge their complaints about injustices.
I don't follow. Can you explain why choosing to not work for or dine at a racist lunch counter, instead of work there and then complain to management about their racism, is ignoring the problem?
People should be political about which missions they support. What I think is wrong is accepting a position at a company knowing what their mission is, and then using one's position at the company to push for a different mission while castigating others in the company for not doing the same. If media reports are correct, this is what happened at Coinbase, as a handful of employees refused to work unless their CEO made a political statement about the issue of alleged systemic racial injustice against black Americans.
As for lodging their complaints about injustice - that's vague. Injustice in the workplace? Nothing in the protocol discourages that. Or injustice in the wider world? The complaints should be lodged with the relevant parties, outside of the workplace.
> I don't follow. Can you explain why choosing to not work for or dine at a racist lunch counter, instead of work there and then complain to management about their racism, is ignoring the problem?
It isn't! It's strictly better to boycott than to abide.
The observations are as follows:
* Boycotting is, for a multitude of reasons, not always a reasonable option for individuals
* Companies are aware that some of their best potential talent won't work for them unless they emphasize at least some social good
* It's not especially surprising that people who are attracted by the promise of some social good want more, and are upset or angry when they realize that their company's ethical stances are superficial or self-serving
* Conversely, it's not especially surprising that companies that aggressively pursue "apolitical" positions are the ones that are perhaps the most objectionable: defense contractors, financial companies that benefit from organized crime, &c, and find themselves in the company of employees who actively favor the company's unethical positions
To be clear: it's a double bind for companies, and it's always been one. I wouldn't want it any other way!
> But these conversations often lose sight of the main way our projects produce social good: through good work on our mission.
At the risk of being maybe a little plaintive: what happens when that mission is bad? It's not clear to this (government-funded) researcher that good (meaning quality) work, even when it's always open-sourced, translates to a good (meaning ethical) mission.
It's also playing into the exhaustive narcissism that some Founder wrote down a Social Mission and the best way to help society is to just work towards it.
As if employees or the culture at the company or conversation about a changing world or taking in new information and adapting (etc. * 100) could have no positive impact.
> Bad companies can't be fixed by internal activism
Maybe I'm misunderstanding that you're saying, but wouldn't this imply that unionisation from within ought to necessarily always fail? It's a pretty textbook example of activism, and is generally pointed to as one of the great strengths of the American midcentury.
I updated my comment to clarify. If a company has a neutral mission (like selling cars or something) but treats workers poorly then activism can fix internal issues. If a company's fundamental goal is harmful (tobacco, war, etc.) then I don't think unions can fix that.
I think I understand, but to bring the point home: it's not clear to me that selling cars is, in fact, neutral: they're environmentally destructive (both to manufacture and over the long tail), contribute to unsustainable housing patterns (suburbanization), and are the lynchpin in some of the US's most callous urban development decisions in the last century[1].
This doesn't make an engineer who works at a car startup a bad person. It's just an admonishment to maybe be a little more cognizant of the bigger picture that we're all a part of.
When the GP said "internal activism," I don't think they meant unionization in the sense of worker rights. I think they were referring to workers objecting to projects that hurt other people, rather than workers collectively bargaining wages etc.
I think that idea is you start with a the basis of a mutually agreed upon mission, rather than produce rationalization to retroactively justify the work.
This can be hard if people came to the project for difference reasons and it is an interesting point, because missions can be narrowly or broadly defined. They can be framed in terms of a variety of ends.
But if you can agree on what the common ground looks like ... which might beed a BDFL or steering committee, then you can proceed from that point.
I don't think there is any way to get around the potential for misuse or misappropriation though. Either those concerns are in scope or out of scope of the project. The framing of a mission presumes they are ignored unless explicitly accounted for the in the mission itself.
Is the mission of the Linux Kernel to build a core of a "free" in the GNU/stallman sense OS? Or is to just build a world-class os for diverse environment that just happens to be copy-left licensed as a means to encourage broad participation? If maintainers of proprietary drivers needs more hoo
I thought that strange too, it's something young people obsessive over perhaps? It just opens up the ambiguity again.
It should just be about code (or whatever the project is made of). We need to get back to a system that maximises the project, not bike shedding.
https://missionprotocol.org/codeofconduct/
"Our objective is to focus on the mission we set out to accomplish, which we believe will produce an important social good in the world"
How about just being honest and saying that the main purpose of the company is to make a profit and let's cut the shit with the superficial social and political stances.
It would be great if companies could work towards something greater but the incentives are not aligned with how the system is currently built.
There is something gross to many people when you just openly say you want to make money and started / work at company to do so. Not to me however - my philosophy sees nothing wrong with working hard and making money. The mission is important to remind yourself out of all the ways to make money you are doing this one. But convincing free people to voluntarily give you money is proof that you are providing true value to the world, which is a great thing.
Honestly though, I go somewhere where I can contribute and my efforts and time in exchange for money. Work is work, it's not who I am. That being said I get the point of the Bill Ayres crowd with this zinger "How will you live your life so that it doesn't make a mockery of your values?"
Like, yeah- If I was a die hard Catholic I may have issues working writing software to make abortions easier. On the flipside if I were an Environmentalist I am sure I would have issues working at BP drilling in Alaska or something.
Dont work for BP and then complain that they are expanding drilling operations. Dont work at Planned Parenthood and then complain about free birth control. Opinions are like bootyholes, we all got em'. Better question is can you sit across from someone you disagree with and accomplish a common goal. That is professionalism. Rise above the differences you may learn that everyone's viewpoint has some shimmer of value- and you are not always right.
Because if someone asks me whether I'm picking up anything on the radio telescope and I say "yeah, the cosmic microwave background", then I'm a complete and utter idiot (or a pretty funny guy).
The interesting thing about a company is its path to making money, not that its objective is making money. Everyone knows it's for making money.
identity & individualism? that's the new creed being pushed from above. ...only it's not new, it precedes the french revolution. divide and conquer. rule by banking elite, who continue to work to institute neomarxism across nations.
> Mission focus produces social good: Working in a single direction on a strong, well-considered mission is the best way to make a socially positive impact.
Facebook seems like the obvious counter example to this.
The whole statement seems to be: "Trust the business, we know it's going to be good. Ignore the larger societal issues we might be causing."
Facebook lays it out plainly: "Facebook's mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what's going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them."
It's so vague as to never be controversial. However, their behavior in the details...the implementation, if you will.
I suspect this mission might actually end up being controversial. It's quite possible that the fundamental mission of facebook is simply a bad idea. Maybe the world is better when it's not so easy to form communities solely based on shared opinions and activities.
Their mission used to be "make the world more open and connected". They changed it because it because they've mostly achieved it and being open and connected has a different set of negative externalities.
But people these days don't have tolerance for 'middle of the road' politicking. You're either for or against. There is no grey anymore. Independent thought is no longer allowed. So you either get the 'trust the business' or 'quit doing business and bring all of your personal shit to the office' groups.
Politics have been destroying Silicon Valley. This restores my faith in tech. I believe that the spirit of innovation and diversity of thought still has a chance to prevail if people embrace the philosophy behind Mission Protocol. If employees want to be activists, then they should either pursue activism in their free-time, change their career to further the cause full-time, or create a company with a mission that furthers their agenda. There's no judgement. However, hijacking the mission of large, powerful companies to serve near-sighted political agendas is socially destructive and morally reprehensible.
Silicon Valley destroyed ['] politics. The reason everything is political is literally because of social media and the internet.
I understand that these are hard issues; I don't think SV companies are sitting on the solution under locked doors. But the strategy of "we're totally neutral, whatever happens, happens ¯\_(ツ)_/¯" is clearly not tenable. Solving that literally requires employees (and stakeholders) to take a stance about the world they want going forward, instead of letting this machine coast.
['] supercharged, made malignant, transmuted, whatever.
As cliche as it may be to repeat, companies like that have real value they can benefit from in missions like these, not to mention there is a good argument to be made for preservation viewed as an investment for modern companies with anthropologic climate change at our doorstep.
If you view codes of conduct as a form of entryism, an anonymous one at least indicates that the author is not directly looking to raise their own status.
There does not seem to be any text to say this is Coinbase-inspired. The FAQ does refer to Tesla's and Coinbase's corporate mission statements, but there is no claim or indication that this code of conduct is inspired by either.
Perhaps that part is commentary added by the submitter?
This is 100% correct. It's disappointing that this is needed, but in an age where many people are out of touch with principles of social collaboration, sometimes the obvious needs to be spelled out.
I don't agree with you that good is purely subjective.
But, in practice, what is good is highly contested, and open to philosophical and political debate. In some ways, something which is objective but very difficult to know with certainty is difficult to practically distinguish from the subjective.
If I am running an open source project, I would like to welcome contributions from people who have widely differing ideas of what the "good" is. Participation in the project should not require a general agreement on what is good, or even a general agreement on what the good is (in philosophical terms), simply an agreement on the bare minimum of shared ethics necessary for the project to successfully function.
This is a substantial claim, and requires substantial evidence. Claiming that the Good (meaning the metaethical object) is objective is also a substantial claim, but observe that it's not necessary to be a moral realist to think that things can be, for all practical purposes, bad: in an intersubjective sense, a thing is bad if everybody around you agrees that it's bad.
They can all be wrong (and they frequently are!), but I'm going to go ahead and wager that they're not wrong about civil rights, not drone-striking civilians in other countries, indefinite detention of undocumented migrants, &c &c.
To say good isn't subjective is to say there is some part of the universe at some fundamental level that defines good. That's the claim that requires evidence.
Show me the "good particle" and then we'll talk. Until then I can only rationally assume something doesn't exist until proven otherwise.
Metaethics has been in discourse on this for some time. I think most the prevalent systems do reduce down to a small set of axioms (foundationalist propose a strong form of this), or a least a set of internal consistent, self-reinforcing propositions (coherentism, which doesn't necessary presume a prepositional hierarchy).
Some of the more interesting (to me) arguments of the realists/naturalists (the justification question rather than the ontological question above), consider there to be emergent properties from the nature of interaction between agents. Basically game-theory. Presume we all were psychopaths, but intelligent self-maximizing agents and not the irrational kind. What behaviors would maximize achieving our ends? What behaviors would we need to hold others accountable to support our ends? You can take this thought experiment pretty far to get an "emergent" moral system with first-order properties similar to those we see in real societies. I find this insufficient though, you still need some base value system. Even the psychopath example presumes a set of ends for individuals like "continued survival" and so boils down to something like a form "utilitarianism."
> To say good isn't subjective is to say there is some part of the universe at some fundamental level that defines good.
Not especially: there is an abundance of immanent ethical theories that define the Good (or Right) in terms of basic things in our grasp: the number of people who go hungry, the number of people who die of preventable diseases, &c. These don't require some spooky or transcendental universal fundamental: they're about seeing people suffer in ways that we can measure, seeing that many patterns of suffering are generalizable, and taking actions to countermand that.
(There are also plenty of ethical systems that are both immanent and non-consequentialist. I follow one of them. But it's maybe beyond the point of the original comment to explain them.)
> there is an abundance of immanent ethical theories that define the Good (or Right) in terms of basic things in our grasp
The problem with all those theories, is they can be attacked as simply efforts to define "good" – with the ensuing problem that other people will define "good" in contrary ways, and if "good" is just a definition, then how can a mere definition be, in an objective sense, superior to a competing proposed definition?
That's basically G. E. Moore's argument against naturalistic objective ethics. If one agrees with it, then the only options available are to reject objective ethics, or to reject naturalism.
Fair enough! I wasn't expecting to have Moore's naturalistic fallacy pulled on me :-)
Neither intersubjective nor Kantian ethics have this problem: intersubjective ethics doesn't admit of an objective Good, and Kantian ethics don't admit of an is-ought distinction (all "ought"s are in fact "is"es that are bound in actions).
> intersubjective ethics doesn't admit of an objective Good
I agree, but intersubjective ethics might not actually work in practice in a world in which people are approaching ethics from wildly different starting points. Consider an issue like abortion – people who support the legal availability of abortion, and people who oppose it, have such widely different ethical views that I think there is no intersubjectivity to be had (on that issue at least)
> Kantian ethics don't admit of an is-ought distinction (all "ought"s are in fact "is"es that are bound in actions).
I wonder, if you could expand on that point?
In my mind, Kant's categorical imperative could be viewed as either a proposed definition of the good (in which case Moore's argument is applicable), or a claim about what actually is good (in which case it escape's Moore's argument)
> In my mind, Kant's categorical imperative could be viewed as either a proposed definition of the good (in which case Moore's argument is applicable), or a claim about what actually is good (in which case it escape's Moore's argument)
It’s an academic opinion, but I believe it’s the latter: the very first line in the GMS asserts that the metaethical object itself is the good will: “nothing in the world (or indeed beyond it) can possibly be conceived as good without qualification except for the Good Will.”
The CI is the logical consequence (according to Kant) of what the good is. But that distinction is definitely subtle in the context of his normative ethics.
All those still depend on the idea that humans and life itself are more than just a long running, self-replicating electrochemical reaction which again pushes the burden of proof on to you.
Going back to the original response: you don't actually need to be a moral realist to observe (as in, witness with the globs of goo in your eyesockets) intersubjective ethics.
You don't have to agree with them, but it's a real phenomenon. It's up to you to decide how you handle it.
You are assuming naturalism / physicalism / materialism is true.
I agree, that if naturalism / physicalism / materialism is true, then the concept of "objective good" becomes hard to justify. Certainly, some people have tried, but a lot of people question whether those attempts can be successful – indeed, doubting those efforts is one thing that both naturalists who doubt the objectivity of the good, and non-naturalists who believe in the objectivity of the good but reject the idea that it can be given a naturalist foundation, can agree on.
This brings to mind what Snowden revealed to the world. Few inside the CIA new about domestic warrantless surveillance.
Had Snowden followed the "Mission Protocol," we might still not be aware of the laws being broken routinely in the name of security.
Following the Mission Protocol seems like a thinly-disguised attempt to get workers to subject themselves to someone else's agenda.
I mean, isn't this just a fancy way of saying that the ends justify the means? Every mission is political in one way or another.