This is a paper / essay I was pointed to a couple of years ago, and it definitely made me think. It's too soon for me to really know how much it has shaped my own research path, I'm still a...
This is a paper / essay I was pointed to a couple of years ago, and it definitely made me think. It's too soon for me to really know how much it has shaped my own research path, I'm still a relatively junior PhD student, but it did make me reconsider, for example, a job offer I had after I finished my MS. I think it's an interesting read now, with the current debate around Apple's new feature, and I'm interested to hear what people have to say.
Please let me know if this belongs elsewhere, like ~humanities for example.
The use of gender is archaic for a paper written only a few years ago, but this is a very interesting paper. Thanks for sharing. It seems like the cypherpunks example shows that a concern with...
The use of gender is archaic for a paper written only a few years ago, but this is a very interesting paper. Thanks for sharing.
It seems like the cypherpunks example shows that a concern with ethics and real-world power relations doesn’t necessarily mean more ethical results? Bitcoin, PGP, Tor, and WikiLeaks all seem morally complex, in the sense that it’s hard to say whether they make the world better off. (Of these I think PGP is most defensible, though it was always too hard to use and it’s pretty much superseded by Signal.)
For example, much as I admire Tor as a technical advance, I really hesitate over whether I would want to run a node. I’d feel responsible for enabling criminal activity, even though I know that it’s often used for good causes, such as by activists in repressive regimes. You can’t have one without the other; it’s grey infrastructure just by the nature of what it is.
Running a Tor node or making other contributions to Tor would be getting entangled in a morally gray world of espionage. It seems better to look for less gray causes to contribute to?
But then again, I thought I was unambiguously joining the good guys when I went to work for Google more than a decade ago, and so much has happened since. I still think they’ve done a lot more good than bad, but that’s certainly morally grey and complex, and lots of people disagree.
It seems like, as in the song from Hamilton, basically you have no control over how your work will end up being seen by history.
Most likely, as in my case, your work won’t seem very important at all. I was on the edges of important events and moved the ball forward on partially successful open source projects. The assumption that your work will be important is a bit arrogant.
I’m not sure I agree with the part about not using cutesy language. The danger of treating everything seriously is that you take yourself too seriously. It seems like this science fictional power-tripping tendency should be resisted with language that encourages humility? Although it’s mostly forgotten, it seems good to remember that RFC stands for request for comments.
But just because you treat what you’re doing lightly doesn’t mean others won’t pick it up and treat it seriously. Dogecoin shows the perils of dabbling with a fully operational cryptocurrency in a jokey way. Language has limited power and infrastructure can outlast the joke.
This is a paper / essay I was pointed to a couple of years ago, and it definitely made me think. It's too soon for me to really know how much it has shaped my own research path, I'm still a relatively junior PhD student, but it did make me reconsider, for example, a job offer I had after I finished my MS. I think it's an interesting read now, with the current debate around Apple's new feature, and I'm interested to hear what people have to say.
Please let me know if this belongs elsewhere, like ~humanities for example.
The use of gender is archaic for a paper written only a few years ago, but this is a very interesting paper. Thanks for sharing.
It seems like the cypherpunks example shows that a concern with ethics and real-world power relations doesn’t necessarily mean more ethical results? Bitcoin, PGP, Tor, and WikiLeaks all seem morally complex, in the sense that it’s hard to say whether they make the world better off. (Of these I think PGP is most defensible, though it was always too hard to use and it’s pretty much superseded by Signal.)
For example, much as I admire Tor as a technical advance, I really hesitate over whether I would want to run a node. I’d feel responsible for enabling criminal activity, even though I know that it’s often used for good causes, such as by activists in repressive regimes. You can’t have one without the other; it’s grey infrastructure just by the nature of what it is.
Running a Tor node or making other contributions to Tor would be getting entangled in a morally gray world of espionage. It seems better to look for less gray causes to contribute to?
But then again, I thought I was unambiguously joining the good guys when I went to work for Google more than a decade ago, and so much has happened since. I still think they’ve done a lot more good than bad, but that’s certainly morally grey and complex, and lots of people disagree.
It seems like, as in the song from Hamilton, basically you have no control over how your work will end up being seen by history.
Most likely, as in my case, your work won’t seem very important at all. I was on the edges of important events and moved the ball forward on partially successful open source projects. The assumption that your work will be important is a bit arrogant.
I’m not sure I agree with the part about not using cutesy language. The danger of treating everything seriously is that you take yourself too seriously. It seems like this science fictional power-tripping tendency should be resisted with language that encourages humility? Although it’s mostly forgotten, it seems good to remember that RFC stands for request for comments.
But just because you treat what you’re doing lightly doesn’t mean others won’t pick it up and treat it seriously. Dogecoin shows the perils of dabbling with a fully operational cryptocurrency in a jokey way. Language has limited power and infrastructure can outlast the joke.