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by shiroiushi 651 days ago
No, it's not bad faith at all. He's trying to use a collective blame argument: "software engineers" as a group are supposedly to blame for adware, in his argument, rather than a small minority of software engineers. It's absolutely no different than blaming all <minority group> for the crimes committed by a few <minority group> members, and paint them all with the same brush.
2 comments
ryandrake 651 days ago
Just to clarify what I mean is it is a little bit of both: 1. Our profession is collectively allowing this by not having a widely agreed-upon ethical standard for conduct, and 2. (some) Individuals are actively doing it by actually building the bombardment code.

I feel the same way about software for war fighting, which obviously has higher stakes. The profession itself doesn't push back on the ethics of it AND individual practitioners are actively developing death-dealing software.

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shiroiushi 651 days ago
>1. Our profession is collectively allowing this by not having a widely agreed-upon ethical standard for conduct,

You're acting like the profession has some kind of central authority. It does not. It's like asking for agreed-upon ethical standards for dog walkers; you're not going to get it, because there's nothing resembling a centralized organization, nor any kind of licensing for this profession.

>I feel the same way about software for war fighting,

If you want to eliminate software for war fighting, this is a fool's errand. Weapons for war are absolutely necessary, unless you want to be a victim to some dictator who doesn't agree with your ethical principles. History is full of examples of peaceful people who couldn't withstand an assault by other people who didn't believe in peace. In fact, I'd go so far as to claim that eliminating warfare (and the military apparatus for it: armies and navies etc.) is impossible as long as separate countries exist. Only if we manage to either conquer everyone or get everyone to agree to join a single planetary government can war really be eliminated. And that assumes that hostile aliens won't ever be a problem.

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thayne 650 days ago
> Our profession is collectively allowing this by not having a widely agreed-upon ethical standard for conduct

Even if there was some centralized group that created an ethical standard for conduct, do you really think that that would escape the influence of software companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. that have a vested interest in advertisement? Or that every software engineer would follow such a standard of conduct?

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shiroiushi 650 days ago
The idea that Russian and Chinese software engineers working for troll farms, bot farms, government cyberwarfare groups, etc. are going to follow an international ethical standard of conduct is completely laughable.
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oska 651 days ago
> It's absolutely no different than blaming all <minority group> for the crimes committed by a few <minority group> members, and paint them all with the same brush.

Members of a minority group, such as race or religion or sexual orientation are generally members of that group by birth, not by choice.

Members of the group 'software engineers' are members of that group by (career) choice.

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