[simpaticoder]

His story is a cautionary tale about real life vs idealism. The two come into conflict frequently, and sometimes violently. Nothing is more difficult or dangerous than holding power to account; the mechanisms we imagine are in place to hold power accountable exist purely in that imagination. The personal feelings of shame, guilt, or ethical responsibility we imagine there to be, or the social pressure brought to bear on those who demonstrate a lack of those qualities, is missing when push comes to shove. Being an idealist, really believing in these things, is the setup for great tragedy. The fundamental mistake is to believe that others think like you do or value the same things you value. Of course I know nothing of this particular situation, but the shape of it is all too familiar - an idealistic, inspirational collegue forced out after speaking truth to power. How many tens of such people do we know? How many of them do not actually get back on their feet? How many of them did we speak up for?

[brailsafe]

Yep. I often reflect on some of my career mistakes, especially when evaluating current decisions within the context of a job or interacting with other institutions, and what I wish I'd learnt earlier would be to "read a room".

Sure, there is technically a process for reporting wrongdoing, but there's no process for reporting wrongdoing and keeping your job, and keeping your job is more important. What isn't your job is taking moral stances on things, having political opinions, provoking what others might see as unnecessary conflict, in any form.

Sure, you could spend some time ensuring accessibility standards are being met, but really you shouldn't unless someone complains, because although you think it's good practice, you're being paid to put visible results on the screen, unless you can make a business case for it that's sufficiently compelling and rewarding that it's worth pursuing. You'll lose your job for not getting the thing shipped, but probably won't for it not being theoretically good enough, unless you're a real doctor or real engineer

Don't stick your neck out unless you control the outcome (for positive or negative), and figure out what you're really being told to do or asked to do, and keep your effort to that. Don't go above and beyond, it's out of scope and you're better off sleeping. Not joking. If you can't do that, you might struggle to stay employed, and it's not worth your personal risk.

At work, keep your opinions to yourself, nearly all the time, they're rarely important, just get the work done and go home, work isn't that important either, don't pretend like you're saving the world.

[sneak]

> What isn't your job is taking moral stances on things, having political opinions, provoking what others might see as unnecessary conflict, in any form.

This is wrong, and how you end up with flying drone face recognizing skullpopping murderbots. "I just work here" is an abdication of adult responsibility to self, family, and society.

It's not some idealistic stance, it's the truth. It's how we ended up with concentration camps in the USA multiple times, and why many companies are gearing up to build more right now.

[GolfPopper]

I think you're both right and wrong. You're right that avoiding responsibility for the outcome of one's own work is wrong, and is how you end up helping to make the world around you a horrible place. At the exact same time, the previous poster is also right - you stick your head up because what your employer is doing is wrong (maybe not "personally enabling concentration camp right now" levels of wrong, but on the path to it all the same) and you will end up seeing your career and the lives of those who depend on your destroyed (as you lose the ability to keep body and soul together) without making a damned bit of difference to the final outcome.

In America, we've built our culture around collective abdication of responsibility for anything and everything, on almost any axis imaginable. The only way anyone with wealth and power ever faces justice is if they injure those with even more wealth and power.

It's easy to say, "if enough people just stood up for what was right, things would change", but how do you get from here to there without asking countless people to sacrifice their families on the altar of "maybe it will get better if you do, but don't count on it". At least in America, I think it will take widespread pain among the public before risking change becomes worth it.

It's awful to think about, but I think that's the heart of it: we (Americans) have built is a system where it is so easy to go from having everything (by historical standards) to having nothing (by current standards) that hardly anyone is willing to risk rocking the boat, even as it sinks and we all drown.

[brailsafe]

Yes, it's a sad reality, but a reality nonetheless. There is very little worth risking everything for, and most people's everything is pocket change to anyone who has the real influence. Make the best choices you can, but realize when it'll cost much more than it'll gain.

[Aeolun]

Absolutely, and 90% of people will happily do so. So your personal ‘line in the sand’ is just completely and utterly irrelevant (aside from your own satisfaction)

[BriggyDwiggs42]

I think this stance is mired in the big picture but ignores small altruism. Neighbors who sheltered jews during the holocaust didn’t alter the system, but they saved real lives. Clandestine action for the better, in line with one’s convictions, can be genuinely worthwhile.

[brailsafe]

That's a fair point too, I was mostly talking specifically about work culture though, and intensely agree with doing good things for people on an individual or community level. That's exactly what you can control and has a real impact. Do it at work too, just do it within your sphere of influence, don't have a savior complex.

[Aeolun]

Sure, but that relies on you being able to do so by yourself. If you are trying to hide the jews in a barn with fifteen others and one of them talks, you may have done a good thing, but it was ultimately meaningless.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t take that stand anyway, it’s just frustrating and doesn’t bring any actual benefit to the people impacted by the thing you refuse to do.

[brailsafe]

I think GolfPepper had a decent interpretation.

Yours is a particularly extreme example I guess, but I didn't say it was a happy reality, I don't agree, and I agree.

It's not your job unless it's your job, but otherwise it's not your job, that's basically it, and sometimes in life it's your job to make the war machine, or if it's in your power to not make the war machine, then don't. If you're taking care of kids, it's your job to take care of kids, not have a moral stance on what your labor is going to. You're not the Angel of Death, and ideally you should do whatever you can to not be. These are the tricky bits of life.

Edward Snowden stuck his neck out, and while he may have won a virtue medal and might be chilling these days with a wife and kids as Russians, what he probably should have done was nothing, that's a sacrifice you make for an overvalued sense of personal heroism imo. Now he's beholden to Putin.

If you've already ascended some ranks and can make decisions that are good for people more broadly, great, that's part of your job.

[aguaviva]

Now he's beholden to Putin.

Sucks for him, and it can't possibly be good for the US either.

But the Obama administration should have known better before pushing him into that hole.

[aoanevdus]

> Don't stick your neck out unless you control the outcome (for positive or negative), and figure out what you're really being told to do or asked to do, and keep your effort to that. Don't go above and beyond, it's out of scope and you're better off sleeping. Not joking. If you can't do that, you might struggle to stay employed, and it's not worth your personal risk.

Generally good advice but I would caveat it. Sometimes the org doesn’t know it wants something, or doesn’t know that you are the right person to ask. For example, I’ve had good success when finding ways to save millions of dollars. And other, more domain-specific things that make management happy.

Granted, you don’t need to do this if your position is stable and that’s enough for you. But if you are early in your career, trying to move up, or just want to be on the keeper list when there are layoffs, simply doing what is asked may not be enough.

[derangedHorse]

The two most important lines of your comment:

> you shouldn't unless someone complains … unless you can make a business case for it that's sufficiently compelling and rewarding that it's worth pursuing

> Don't stick your neck out unless you control the outcome (for positive or negative)

If there’s moral questions surrounding your employment and no structures to tackle them, then quit.

If there’s a way to garner support for a proposal in a way that will incur a significant cost to the organization if rejected, then leverage those closest to the top who you believe will understand this.

Basically, “If you come for the king, you best not miss”

[MichaelZuo]

It’s more nuanced then that. People don’t want others pretending to be superior to them, if they are not actually that much better.

e.g. A literal supergenius can behave very erratically nearly every week of the year, 40 years straight, and still achieve notable successes in life, such as Kurt Godel

But a regular genius pretending to be a literal supergenius and trying to do the same, is well at best going to be perceived as a clown.

And it gets even more lopsided as you go down. Someone merely very smart pretending to be a literal genius is never going to earn anyone’s respect around the table.

[Joel_Mckay]

Lets be honest, most faculty members eventually become simple Ectoparasites on student work, or ruminate on problems they stopped making progress on for decades.

As someone prone to idealism, you need to careful of the external consequences of work that runs into conflict with institution politics, government goals, and foreign/domestic intelligence services (professional thieves.)

I am probably just a clown, but often had to consider the escalation of coercion stages in the context of personal resolve. You will be evil one day too... Best of luck =3

[trinsic2]

How does this have anything to do with standing up to harms? Im sorry this is starting to sound like the philosophy that the Nazi regime operated under.

[MichaelZuo]

How does ‘standing up to harms’ relate to how other people assess you?

You can say anything, stand up to anything, etc., at a meeting but have differing underlying motives that is unsaid.

[catlifeonmars]

IDK, that seems like a pretty unfulfilling job. A lot of jobs are like that, but not all of them are. Staying in your own lane is boring.

[A4ET8a8uTh0]

<< Yep. I often reflect on some of my career mistakes, especially when evaluating current decisions within the context of a job or interacting with other institutions, and what I wish I'd learnt earlier would be to "read a room".

While I agree and even accept this answer in theory, I have a hard time putting it in practice. Just today it seems I unnecessarily ruffled some executive feathers by pointing out some -- otherwise clear -- issues no one dares to mention and I am wondering now if that was even worthwhile. After all, I am not paid for extra for it. Regardless of the choice made by executives, the only thing that would change is the amount of support work I would do for it.

I know for a fact that 9 out of 10 it is better for me ( and my career ) to stay quiet, but sometimes I just can't stay out of my way.

[trinsic2]

Sounds like 1981. Good luck with that.

[coldtea]

>Sure, there is technically a process for reporting wrongdoing, but there's no process for reporting wrongdoing and keeping your job, and keeping your job is more important. What isn't your job is taking moral stances on things, having political opinions, provoking what others might see as unnecessary conflict, in any form.

Up to a certain point. That answer didn't hold up well at the Nuremberg trials. After a point there's also dignity and morality, not just "keeping the job".

[passing_by_and]

That only happened because they needed some show trials to pacify people. A few were picked to take the fall and the rest were quietly brought to universities and government labs all across western powers. The United States has a proud tradition of totally ignoring all the agreements that came out of those trials.

[JumpCrisscross]

> they needed some show trials to pacify people

Which people? The Europeans were occupied or liberated under effectively caretaker governments. Americans didn't need pacification.

> the agreements that came out of those trials

The trials inspired some agreements. It didn't create any, other than the precedent of holding leaders accountable for crimes against humanity.

[foul]

> Which people? The Europeans were occupied or liberated under effectively caretaker governments.

They were occupied but they weren't entirely busy: while "low" people were happy to kill ex-Nazi collaborators themselves, it's the post-war governments (all of them, USA's included) who needed, with those trials, to manifest a re-establishment of the rule of law once again. 80 years later we can see it's been a hypocrite farce in every part of it, but it saved lives, those that were worth of living, although spared Nazis, fascists and sometimes communists too.

[JumpCrisscross]

> who needed, with those trials, to manifest a re-establishment of the rule of law once again

Do you have a source for this having been the motivation?

I’m admittedly most familiar with the French and American perspectives. Those weren’t concerned with pacification but creating an international sense of the rule of law and legal basis for the occupation and restructuring of those societies.

[refulgentis]

No.

[mistercheph]

What modern corporate employee wouldn't (haven't?) sleepwalk into perpetuating horrors on innocent people and then really and truly believe it when they say "I was just doing my job..." I am not excluding myself, we have not magically solved the social/political circumstances that lead to the second world war, and we are doomed to repeat those mistakes if we take for granted that those structures just fizzled away because we blood sacrificed millions of people and then the victors did a rain dance over the burial mound.

[maeil]

> What modern corporate employee wouldn't (haven't?) sleepwalk into perpetuating horrors on innocent people and then really and truly believe it when they say "I was just doing my job

Plenty? All whistleblowers, and the magnitudes larger group of people who were not able to whistleblow but did instead decided to quit their job for ethical reasons?

[riku_iki]

> That answer didn't hold up well at the Nuremberg trials.

that's just winners were punishing losers.

In alternative reality, those who dropped nukes were facing trial in Nuremberg.

[coldtea]

>that's just winners were punishing losers

Whether it's winners punishing losers, or e.g. the FBI/FDA/DEA/IRS/whatever punishing some company exexutives and employees, the potential for this to be a bad defense remains constant.

[riku_iki]

when it is winners vs losers, your line of defense is irrelevant, since winners decide rules of the game. We can partially tell the same that FBI/FDA/DEA/IRS punishes regular Joe much more harshly, compared to CEOs which almost never goes to jail unless he stole from other rich/in power.

[totetsu]

Not trying to troll here, but, what does something like Nuremberg trails matter in a country where someone who can incite an insurrection and then become president again, or a world where international criminal court orders are ignored?

[JumpCrisscross]

> what does something like Nuremberg trails matter in a country where someone who can incite an insurrection and then become president again, or a world where international criminal court orders are ignored?

Nuremberg had nothing to do with insurrections and revolutions. It also judged the Nazis according to standards that didn't exist when they committed their crimes; the ICC was created after Nuremberg as an imperfect system. Imperfect, however, is still better than nothing.

[yieldcrv]

Given that this highly improbable outcome involves two separate coalitions of countries invading yours from both sides, “read the room” is a safe bet for all parties to make, including last minute flights to Argentina

[coldtea]

If only I had used this outcome only as a highly understood example, as opposed to as the exact sitution that will befall the person I responded to... oh, wait!

[yieldcrv]

That’s cool but it’s something I think about a lot

Like how some well known companies are implicated because of government contracts with that short lived regime in the 1930s

and its like thats not really a deterrent because you don't really know what a government will do, and accountability requires a multi coalition invasion, losing, and subsequent leaking of state records

the threshold for that to occur is so high, like for one, that government has to actually lose, and the one everyone is mad at typically doesn't

makes more sense to contract with all parties in all countries and just collect the checks

I think that specific example is a perfect choice to undermine the specific lesson you were aiming for

[g-b-r]

"cautionary", "real life vs", "Nothing is more difficult or dangerous", "exist purely in that imagination".

You're claiming that real life is always as in this episode; and so, I guess, that you should never oppose someone at an higher position? Or with more power?

It's healthy to be aware of the possibility that things could go this way, but it's definitely not a guarantee that they will; in some environments it's more likely to happen, in others more likely to not happen.

But if we always acted as selfish cynics, then yeah, real life would be guaranteed to be what you describe

[medo-bear]

how about not being a coward being enough of a reason to stand up for what you believe in. no where is it written that being brave entails success. sometimes though it is said that success entails being brave

[benreesman]

Economists and auction theorists have a term of art: “revealed preference”. It’s typically not applied to society in the large, but I think it’s useful to zoom out from time to time.

Our society, whatever the internal dynamics, has a revealed preference in the extreme, a preference so forceful it’s an idee fixe, a singular objective.

We will sacrifice anything: arbitrary loss of life, arbitrary suffering and indignity, arbitrary damage to the planet to transfer wealth upwards constantly to the maximum extent that we can blow past the feeble speed bumps that our institutions represent.

This upwards wealth transfer is in two senses of the word “up”: from poor to rich, and from young to old. We openly advertise targets for the economy like “the stock market” (US equities overwhelming held by boomers and rich people), or GDP growth (real wages at the median, go back to Venezuela commie). We don’t even pretend we’re optimizing for anything else.

Lina Khan is trying to enforce laws already on the books and is deemed dangerously radical.

You think these sociopaths won’t kill people? They’ll kill millions of people if they have to, they’ve done it before.

[JumpCrisscross]

> to transfer wealth upwards constantly

This is overly simplistic. Truer: we will sacrifice a lot to maintain our relative standard of living.

[benreesman]

I want to answer this point separately.

My standard of living ten years ago was so high it was honestly gross, I imagine it was easily in the ballpark of a BlackRock quant. The year I quit was my second highest earning year in which I made an amount that is shameful given that my job was to sell digital fentanyl.

I will sacrifice my standard of living up to and including not living because I feel a deep identification with the abstraction I call “my fellow person”.

A lot of people will sacrifice their principles to preserve their standard of living. In what is looking to be a rough decade or two those people are a liability to that same abstraction.

[JumpCrisscross]

> lot of people will sacrifice their principles to preserve their standard of living

The line where principles outweigh personal interests (alternatively, where individual interest should be suppressed for the group) vary from person to person, group to group. But they are universally ahead of where those who’d prefer humans weren’t flawed, in their view, imagine them to be. The easy excuse is to conclude everyone is evil. The hard work, that granted few of us are cut out for, is making do with the world we have. (The fun, in exploring the richness these “flaws” produce.)

Note: I’m not asking anyone to settle for a lower moral rung. I’m saying: see the world as it is, not as you judge it to be. Would spacefaring be simpler without gravity? Yes. But the universe’s beauty, ourselves included, could not then exist. Human ambition and aspiration and yes, greed, are not aspects of ourselves I’d ever wish away. Even if it would make some problems easier.

[benreesman]

I want to express my admiration that you’ve engaged with me on this tricky and controversial topic.

I actually wish I had acknowledged several very astute points that I strongly agree with.

I’m not a RenTech quant, but I’ve spent enough time around heavyweights to know one when I see one.

I’d like to have a dialog. If you feel the same please email me at [e-mail]

[benreesman]

Who’s standard of living?

We will render arbitrary people homeless to constrain the supply and push up real asset prices for homeowners.

We’ll tolerate flagrant cartel monopoly and flagrant securities fraud and all manner of evil to drive equities up?

Qui bono? Not the working person at the median.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Who’s standard of living?

Each person's. It's an individual determination.

> We will render arbitrary people homeless to constrain the supply and push up real asset prices for homeowners

Yes. Because from the homeowner's perspective, they're maintaining their real standard of living.

Crafting good policy requires being very careful about whose relative standard of living you're sacrificing for the greater good. Because no matter how privileged you think someone is, for them, it's the baseline.

> We’ll tolerate flagrant cartel monopoly and flagrant securities fraud and all manner of evil to drive equities up?

No, not really. Shareholders win in the aftermath of antitrust action and trusted equity markets. We tolerate those things, the first much more than the second, but not for the reasons you presume.

[benreesman]

I’m not sure what the theme of your contention is: it sounds like you’re basically saying everyone will fight as hard as possible with whatever means at their disposal to be maximally selfish.

But that tired toy example from game theory shows that everyone loses if both grass the other up. Countless studies of both human beings and computer programs in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma show that the wining strategy is not in fact to drive housing prices so high that the homeless problem eventually wrecks your property value.

This smash and grab, “how much can you carry” mafia capitalism has been tried before and the result was a guillotine.

[JumpCrisscross]

> everyone will fight as hard as possible with whatever means at their disposal to be maximally selfish

No, I'm saying loss aversion is often misunderstood [1]. Both in its existence and strength. And the fact that it operates in relative terms, i.e. someone who is materially better off than they were 10 years ago may still throw their toys out of the pram if their neighbor is much better.

> the wining strategy is not in fact to drive housing prices so high that the homeless problem eventually wrecks your property value

Sure. The point is you also can't drive home prices down, because that hurts homeowners and activates them as a political bloc. (The solution is real home price growth as close to zero as possible amidst rising real incomes.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion

[benreesman]

The nuance around big-cap fraud is in fact wildly complex, sitting at the intersection of tired institutions and role models for young people like the Kardashians and emerging asset classes like BTC and the collapse of the traditional conservative movement and the bitch slapping of a DNC that coronates candidates rather than handing them primary ballots and the fucking Ito calculus of second degree non-stationary in the presence of a different underlying distribution every minute and exhaustingly many other factors.

But we went through the Enron thing, at a high level?

Because the public tolerates it. We have a financial sector where routine financing is run through permutations and combinations and evasions that in the default capital raise the legitimate entities would be far better served by some version of what YC does with e.g. the SAFE docs. When you apply string theory people to bond pricing you get one of two things: socially negative complexity / garish externalities and whatever the hell Medallion is doing.

Pushing that sector up into the double digits is weird: those people should be playing chess against Magnus Carlson not John Q Taxpayer. You can in fact convert genius into a gangrenous infection. And before you say that cheating is inevitable, inb4 predictable soundbyte, no it isn’t. The only two utilities of arbitrary wealth past mundane security and as much luxury as anyone can count (which is nowhere near billions) are blind “I Am The Repubkic” sociopathy and actual security in a world where the real ballers don’t feel safe on the same continent as their subjects. There are places where this is pushed even further: the City generally, let’s call it Canary Wharf is a wonder drug for international FX and outright fraud with thugs and just kind of a lesion on the Old Smoke.

Plus? Cheating is impossible or even difficult to detect or enforce or discourage to make an example of pour encorages les autres? Ask Madoff’s estate how it went to try that shit with the money of the donor dinner circuit. I recommend not fucking around and finding out on Jamie Dimon’s nest egg. You’ll wish you were never born.

Now if after all that unpleasant real talk about some but maybe not all the things you condescended via “reasons you presume” are actually a matter of the integrity of our companies and regulators and financial markets?

Then tell me you are already going through appropriate channels to bring the guilty to justice or can the TED talk and count your pieces of eight.

You seem like a really smart person with at least some basic moral instinct so I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and just ask you to not try to teach your grandfather how to suck eggs.

[AndrewKemendo]

I mean can you offer any suggestions as to solutions to get out of this situation? Feels intractable

[simpaticoder]

Creative idealists tend to abstract away the social politics of power and are often suprised by the result of their actions. They do not have enough fear of others and what they are capable of. The response is not only a personal surprise, but an epistemological shock. The solution is to remain aware of the reality of your situation. This is particularly difficult for thinkers and dreamers because their attention is often elsewhere; but one must make the effort or bad abstraction will hit you like a freight train. The other solution is to ally yourself with other less pragmatic principled idealists such that you can help them assess the situation and take mutually beneficial action. One must understand the battle to come, you must feel the fear of failure and the possibility of success. The worst thing you can do is be unaware of the game entirely, or be aware and disdain it, and so play it like a fool. Finally, if you are extremely talented and recognized for it, the de facto situation is that you acquire advocates to play the game for you. But this is a rare position, and not without its drawbacks.

[peetle]

The right answer for most people is to simply leave and pursue their ideals in a more favorable venue.

[thimkerbell]

How could that more favorable venue be made, and have been made visible to him and to people like him?

[yoyohello13]

It’s been the way of society since pre-history. Finding a solution would probably bring about utopia.