I found the top level comment to highlight useful ideas.
Operationally, so many people would benefit from understanding bottlenecks, critical components, etc
It feels a little silly to say "a more ethical organization doesn't deal with such things"
If we're here to discuss the links, then it's a little frustrating to have a hundred responses by people who haven't read the doc or are unable to set aside their preconceptions about someone saying things that feel fairly off topic to the top level comment
> but if you find yourself casting away the ethical doubts too easily, you might be in a dangerous spot to begin acting unethical yourself
Oh please. If I start a company and link this doc? Sure, then raise some concerns. If I am reading it and finding interesting operational advice about getting things done or inter team communication, I'm not particularly worried about becoming antisocial or accidentally behaving immorally (perhaps amorally is more apt)
I have got the feeling you are creating a disagreement where there is none. As I said: it is okay to look at how evil-corp is doing things, as long as you can disentangle that from their evil bits, keeping in mind the context within which it was written. That isn't stiff over-moralistic behavior, that is common sense. What isn't usually as okay is going all: "Let's ignore the ethics of $X and don't think about the context within it was written". E.g. a simple bureaucratic rule to collect the religious belief of people might be innocent in some free society, but if the same rule was written in a Nazi-occupied country it gets a completely different meaning. Casting aside the context is like robbing a thing of its meaning. Now just because the Nazis abused that rule doesn't mean other societies elsewhere couldn't use the very same rule in a positive way -- they would just be stupid if they ignored the negative abuses of that rule provided they know of them.
Yes, the context matters a lot. One of the frustrations with this conversation (and this is a thing that happens sometimes and doesn't other times - I don't mean to say this is always a problem on hn) is that we aren't able to discuss the thing because we have to spend the right number of tokens acknowledging globally recognized facts.
I want there to be one comment at the top level saying: hey just in case you're not aware, here's context that you need to know when evaluating a document by Foo.
And then I want the rest of us to be able to discuss it with the understanding that we all have that context.
Operationally, so many people would benefit from understanding bottlenecks, critical components, etc
It feels a little silly to say "a more ethical organization doesn't deal with such things"
If we're here to discuss the links, then it's a little frustrating to have a hundred responses by people who haven't read the doc or are unable to set aside their preconceptions about someone saying things that feel fairly off topic to the top level comment
> but if you find yourself casting away the ethical doubts too easily, you might be in a dangerous spot to begin acting unethical yourself
Oh please. If I start a company and link this doc? Sure, then raise some concerns. If I am reading it and finding interesting operational advice about getting things done or inter team communication, I'm not particularly worried about becoming antisocial or accidentally behaving immorally (perhaps amorally is more apt)