Guess what? That company does not exist today.
In a well-run humanities degree you would never pass the first year without being able to critically engage with difficult ideas, although I would have no trouble believing there are institutions that offer poorly-run ones.
I'll also raise the point a lot more people simply don't care or don't believe these things to be unethical than I think a lot of people are willing to admit.
Discussing the different sides of difficult ideas in a classroom setting is not critical thinking. The ideas don’t even need to be “difficult” to practice critical thinking on.
Humanities does focus a lot on teaching students the current critical views of lots of things in society. But they focus far too much on the substance of the critiques rather than the process of generating and meaningfully evaluating them.
Philosophy's basic main tenet is to critically engage with ideas. ONE aspect of that is to engage ideas in the politic sense
And humanities students no longer do this. If they did, the notion of suppressing the communication of ideas rather than refuting them would be repugnant. However, this instead the first tool reached for by students who find something uncomfortable. Title 9 inquisitions, etc.
It’s not necessarily brainwashing, but it’s awfully coincidental they have nearly uniform political opinions coming out of university and can’t defend them when critically challenged.
Having taken the time to pursue some amount of humanities education next to an engineering degree, this isn't even close to true. If anything, humanities education is a celebration of all the things that it can mean to be human. That certain ideas are currently broadly in vogue in society (in this case I guess for the vocal minority you could say it is "nice at all costs" and "being nice should be criminal" with very little in between) is immaterial to what's happening in such a classroom.
it is necessary but not sufficient.
Did Einstein make relativity or Nietzsche "Thus Spake Zarathustra " in a vacuum?
There’s a lot of bullshit papers in every field (including computer science) now, due to the corporatization of universities and its chase for numerical metrics. It’s our job as independent thinkers to wade through the bullshit, find the hidden gems, and arrive at our own conclusions. My current take is that if you’re actually trying to find some serious philosophy, don’t look at journal papers but actual full books by philosophers (which is becoming rarer and rarer due to the incentives to pump out high-metric papers).
I'm assuming by your concurrence with the comment above you and your association of that comment with "blindspots of morality" that you believe advertising is immoral. Forgive me if this is mistaken, but hopefully it's clear at least how I came by this impression. I am here to tell you that a person can be a reader of Orwell, or Mieville, or whoever, and still not agree with you on a position like the one you've implicitly espoused. You can have similar base principles as someone and come to very different moral conclusions based on a number of things, like access to different data or relatively subtle nuances in you take on some of those principles.
They're not asking for someone to read some particular books they like, but to go reading around and sampling the variety. Your criticism only really applies to the former.
Nope. With the possible exception of moral philosophy. And even then, you get most "points" for making sound arguments for (what most people would consider to be) morally dubious standpoints, which is precisely the dynamic in play at all of these ethically bankrupt tech companies.
People can think different things than you or do things that you don't find acceptable and still conform to their own system of ethics (or model of morality). You may not approve, but that doesn't make "ethically bankrupt" a meaningful value judgement. It almost doesn't say anything at all, except perhaps about your views on ethical and moral absolutism.
I have never heard anyone claim the first (Mind you, I don't go out of my way to ask people to say incredibly stupid things), but I have frequently heard the second statement getting misrepresented as the first. [1][2]
And there's also an entire canyon of statements on the spectrum[3] between the two, many of which I have heard.
[1] Mostly by engineers on, ah, this website.
[2] It's rather easy to make such a misrepresentation, just do a direct quote that drops everything after the word 'ads'.
[3] 'People prefer looking at ads[2] over paying', 'People prefer looking at X ads[2] over Y ads', etc, etc, etc.
This is a good distinction, if it also contains the nub of the problem - "with commercial intent". FAANG have very little (no, they have no) way of telling if my intent is commercial or just day to day existence.
I spend most of my life not wanting to buy stuff, and yet most of my online interaction assumes that I am wallet out ready to buy ... something.
(I assume (as a straight man) this is what most women feel like on a night out.)
this is also why I think duckduckgo has the right approach - for all FAANGs targeting based in behaviour etc, they are trying 99% of the time not to present the best match given commercial intent but they are trying to convert non-commercial behaviour into commercial behaviour. No wonder the ad conversion rates are poor. And we could get pretty much same response rates with context-only ads ala duckduckgo - or even a tag in google like "shopping: men's trainers"
In short FAANG are like those guys trying to "neg" women into sex. All the effort is in the wrong place.
If you live a truly ascetic life, it's possible that you don't make those kinds of searches.
OK: who was phil hartman, alan may quotes, history of netscape, treatment for wrenched neck muscle, dad jokes and campsites in the new forest.
So yes, you could sell me something related to each of those (a dad joke book, a phil hartman dvd) but there is no commercial intent there except for the last, and that's more research than intent.
I am not spending my life in a state of purchasing arousal (I think the analogy to women navigating a world of men is interesting)
But more importantly the lead quality is terrible. I think this is what people are learning - FAANG almost always provides low quality lead density. (More research needed)
It may be a good explanation of Amazon's 20 billion dollar new ad business - if you search for anything in amazon you are almost certainly doing so with commercial intent.
Jeff might win again :-)
It's not, but that's not what this subthread is about.