Thread · 8 tweets · 30 Sept 2019

This is an issue I struggle with repeatedly as well. I've been in tech almost 25 years, I know a lot of outstanding people — people with *local* moral excellence. But some (I feel) support morally dubious behaviour at a higher organisational scale. What can we do about this?

My basic contention is that "governance is ethics at scale". Not in the sense of having an organisation virtuous in the same way that an individual is, but rather following the view that we can build structures that enable global moral excellence (from varied local excellence).

That might sound cool (to me, at least ;) but how do you go about this? The details are complex but one simple notion is tying local action to global and nth-degree outcomes, with a focus on adversarial thinking to help avoid motivated reasoning and "unintended" consequences.

That's how we look at things on my team and what I would expect us to be held accountable for. But am I certain that we're globally virtuous? Relatively, but never completely. The uncertainty stems from scale and interconnectedness.

This internet thing has brought us to a place where we build with insane scale and distant effects. You could be locally virtuous in a virtuous team in a virtuous department of a virtuous organisation and *still* building the Death Star.

I am not making excuses for anyone, but when you can think of saying "hey, we destroyed democracy but at least the frames rendered on time" and it doesn't sound like an exaggeration, you know you've got your work cut out.

Alex's example of taking a job at the gas station if you need the cash is real but we could take it to be the simpler end of the spectrum. The harder end is: how, given massive power, levels of indirection, and the perils of motivated reasoning do we hold ourselves to account?

I don't claim to have the answer — only that we need to solve this and if you have ideas I'd love to talk. 🔚