John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

One of the better "service to humanity" opportunities for software engineers is to join a company like Meta or TikTok and perform awfully for as long as you can.

Yeah I'm making the world a better place by earning 500k a year doing a bad job to slow down this company. Look at how much good I am doing sorry I can't hear you over my paycheck clearing

Activism doesn't require participation in a poverty cult. Any socialist in a nation like the USA or the UK is by someone's lens a champagne socialist. Let's not participate in this tired trope.

I think a better service to humanity is to excel at your job even if you end up at a socially corrosive org like Meta or Tiktok but donate a decent chunk of your paycheck to effective altruist charities that save lives.

A better service to humanity yet is taking that money and spending it on whatever is valuable to yourself, thus providing more people with the opportunity to sustainably work for a living. Capitalism and all that.

Who said anything about socialism? There are many ways to criticize Meta from non-socialist angles.

There is no reason to expect "buy stuff you want" to be more charitable than charity. At a glance, the stuff itself obviously takes up a good chunk of the money and much is going to end up in the hands of people who already have plenty.

You emphasize "sustainably", but how is it more sustainable to give 500k/year to capitalism until you don't make that much / retire / die? In either option, that 500k/year is there until it isn't. With charity, you'd help more people but it would be no more or less sustainable.

The best way to serve humanity in your professional life is serve humanity in your professional life.

In other words, be useful. You don't have to worry about "being good" or "doing good" though many do and it's quite admirable to do so. But that's not the bar you have to clear.

The bar you should try to clear is to be useful. If what you're doing all day is helping people have shelter, or raise families, or be more healthy, or have more knowledge, or even be entertained or amused, you're being useful to people.

If what you do all day ultimately serves to make people poorer, more divided, more addicted, and more unwell, then what you're doing is not useful, it's harmful.

If what you're doing all day primarily contributes, even indirectly, to making people's lives worse, then nothing you do after that will erase it. Arguments to the contrary are just rationalization.

The idea that all decisions under capitalism are value-neutral is ludicrous.

By your definition, selling arms to dictators and using the money to buy a yacht and private security qualifies as "service to humanity."

So you mean like buying moral offsets, kind of like how people buy carbon offsets, to achieve morality-neutral jobs? Sounds like a brilliant idea - I'd definitely want to know I'm saving at least as many lives as my company's product is killing. Have you considered recording the morality offsets on a blockchain? Could be a great startup.

I don't think you need to be poor to protest injustice. I just think that joining Meta so that you can "bring it down from the inside" is unlikely to be effective and very easy to justify to yourself.