Well, perhaps you can clarify my confusion, which could be similar to the poster you are replying to:
I took your original point "caring about improving the world for others" to mean "you should make decent efforts/sacrifices to help others if you have the capacity".
That is, you should not go on this flight, because the CO2 released will make the world a worse place.
But if you have this moral obligation to help others, it seems like the much greater mistake here is to spend $1200/person on the flight. $1200 is enough to save ~240 children's lives for a year if donated to an effective charity (Helen Keller Foundation). Compared to that good, the moral harm of the CO2 released is a rounding error (someone mentioned a bit over 1 ton/person).
I've never understood the moral axiom that says "you need to make sacrifices for others, but only if those sacrifices are for carbon dioxide release. You don't have to make much smaller sacrifices which do vastly more good". That to me seems clearly absurd - can you help me understand what mistake I'm making?
To be clear, I'm not saying it's wrong to cut your carbon footprint - I'm saying that if there's a moral compulsion to do that, it seems like there's a stronger moral compulsion to donate a high % of your worth to effective charities. But nobody every seems to think that is the case!
I think solutions to this are more likely to come out of introspection of what you actually want in life, rather than a clever hack that gets you a high-paying programming job straight away.
Some questions that might be interesting to ask yourself:
- How much money do you actually need?
- Are there things beyond money that stop you wanting to be a junior dev (status, networks and friendships, parts of your identity)?
- Could you afford to take a year or more off work? If so, would a job where you have a junior dev salary be strictly better than that, financially?
- Are there ways you could "actually build something" that would be satisfying to you, that don't require a career jump? For example, maybe there are roles or companies in your current industry that offer better work/life balance (at the cost of some salary) and would allow you time for hobbies.
- You don't have to be a developer to work in tech. FAANG are massive companies with all sorts of employees (lawyers, doctors, investors, finance people). Are there roles at the big tech companies that would fit into your existing skill set, where you wouldn't take such a hit to salary? Would those satisfy you, or are you more concerned with changing your day-to-day work?
I think the gp is kind to even call this "hyperbolic". There is no comparison between Amazon and a concentration camp, just because people are worked hard at amazon.
The reason Auschwitz was bad was not because people worked hard there. It was because people were enslaved and murdered there.
It would be like comparing a camp site to a concentration camp, because both are "camps". The comparison yields no useful insights.
Random question for you: How feasible is it for someone with a software/ML background to get into this space? I'd like to get into learning a new domain through ML, but it feels very daunting.
I did something loosely related. As a present for my girlfriend's birthday, I made her a "90s website" with AI portraits of her dog: https://simoninman.github.io/
It wasn't actually particularly hard - I used a Colab notebook on the free tier to fine-tune the model, and even got chatGPT to write some of the prompts.
I took your original point "caring about improving the world for others" to mean "you should make decent efforts/sacrifices to help others if you have the capacity".
That is, you should not go on this flight, because the CO2 released will make the world a worse place.
But if you have this moral obligation to help others, it seems like the much greater mistake here is to spend $1200/person on the flight. $1200 is enough to save ~240 children's lives for a year if donated to an effective charity (Helen Keller Foundation). Compared to that good, the moral harm of the CO2 released is a rounding error (someone mentioned a bit over 1 ton/person).
I've never understood the moral axiom that says "you need to make sacrifices for others, but only if those sacrifices are for carbon dioxide release. You don't have to make much smaller sacrifices which do vastly more good". That to me seems clearly absurd - can you help me understand what mistake I'm making?
To be clear, I'm not saying it's wrong to cut your carbon footprint - I'm saying that if there's a moral compulsion to do that, it seems like there's a stronger moral compulsion to donate a high % of your worth to effective charities. But nobody every seems to think that is the case!