Correct. But we're not talking about people here, we're talking about a corporate entity as a whole. It's a bit more complex than a person. It has an incentive model and a set of norms (culture) which enables people to do good/bad based on the situation to maximize their personal gains (whichever those are - personal, material, spiritual, you name it).
If this consistently enables people to do what is perceived externally as unethical, we have a problem.
Nice spin on it, but Facebook is still a bad actor (despite what you say). I held this opinion since the beginning, before all the leaks and all the scandals but nobody believed me. Very smart people were incentivized to join using the entourage (come work with other smart people) and money, then slightly brain-washed in a cult-like manner (us vs them, wartimes, etc..). This enabled them to ignore blatant unethical behavior. I've seen all of these first-hand and it's bad. Bad bad bad.
This needs to be a conclusion, not a premise. I do not have a firm belief about whether or not this is true, but I keep seeing people list bad things about FB and draw a straight line to “thus it is evil”. Ideally, we would list the good/bad it does and assign weights to these points to determine if it is net harmful.
I want to be convinced, HN, but when I read comments like the ones in this thread (FB has no positive value whatsoever for its users, FB sells users’ data), it makes it hard for me to appraise.
In general, I agree, but the context here is dozens of HN commenters claiming that FB is a bad actor/net negative for the world. These commenters cite lists of gripes about the company, many legitimate, some illegitimate, but get hand-wavy when someone asks about the "net" in "net negative".
I'm not rejecting the conclusion, here, by the way! If the company is ultimately bad for society, this line of questioning should embolden the consensus HN opinion.
Faceboot directly optimizes to increase time spent on their site, wasting human potential.
Faceboot also provides an effortless way to check in with loved ones after a disaster, easing human suffering.
Two people will look at both of these facts, value each one differently, and come up with a different "net".
Furthermore, it is not appropriate to give Faceboot all the credit for either facet! People could check in with text messages, and people would be in dopamine loops even with software purely under their control.
So the only thing we can really do is discuss each facet independently, in the context of first principles / morals.
I personally think much of what is wrong with Faceboot is due to the conflict of interest from a third party mediating social relationships, and the inhuman scale of centralization. But the more that comes out about inherent social media narcissism, I also see that there is no silver bullet.
In practical terms, coming up with qualitative points and weighting them in a good-faith-but-ultimately-arbitrary-manner is good enough, and something that everyone does constantly. For example, I suspect the average HNer weights "wasted human potential from FB" more than "benefit of disaster reporting from FB" (which I also agree with - however "benefit of disaster reporting" almost certainly outweighs "detriment from nebulous analytics firm scandal").
It's not hard - it's impossible. Even we fully agree on a specific metric, a situation still has to be weighed against possible alternatives and integrated on timescales longer than our lives. A very basic example of this is a company optimizing for "profits", but they're actually optimizing for short term profits at the expense of going out of business two years later. The future is unknowable in the same exact sense that every NP-hard problem is. Heuristics are the only way to tackle this.
> coming up with qualitative points and weighting them in a good-faith-but-ultimately-arbitrary-manner is good enough, and something that everyone does constantly
Of course, which is why I'm referring to "Faceboot" even while recognizing that people get utility out of it. I just think that focusing on arbitrary pairs of specific facets is already headed down the path of madness, which is why I stated my initial critique in terms of basic principles.
Yes. This is why every single comment of mine in this thread recommends a specific heuristic with which to tackle this exact problem.
How do you weight the individual criticisms, or individual benefits to achieve an objective positive/negative score? How do you weigh "installing spyware to see what companies we might buy" against "share photos with nan"? How does the Facebook "only visible to people you interact with enough" algorithm affect the previous question's balance?
Without the weighting I think we've easily reached the point where the number of negative revelations is incessant and the benefits declining (thanks in part to that previously mentioned feed algorithm).
Such discussion wasn't required of anyone before they were allowed to express support or praise, so why would it be required from anyone who reached the point of boycott or criticism, before they are granted that they have reached that point?
I mean, it's fine to ask people why they think what they think of Facebook, but why refuse to accept others are moving for good reasons, maybe for better reasons than others have for not moving -- and ask them questions while letting them pass, without attempting to delegitimize them until they "explained themselves"?
What makes you think it's a premise and not a conclusion?
> Ideally, we would list the good/bad it does and assign weights to these points to determine if it is net harmful.
I have 11 years of data points and experiences about FB, I'm not going to enumerate all of them whenever there is another. I'll just say "typically fucking Facebook".
At this point, I don't even feel obligated to remember it all -- I can trust myself enough. We do that with "evil" people in our lives, too. We don't remember every dirty detail. We remember that there were a bunch of things, and that overall, we had it at some point. I save the conclusion and the checksums and that's enough.
If you think I'm operating on a premise, instead of having come to a conclusion, how is that not you operating on a premise?
> I want to be convinced
Maybe, maybe not. What you are doing is delegitimizing even the conclusions others arrived at, by simply calling all of that mere premises. You saw a bunch of posts that struck you as knee-jerk, so all of it is knee-jerk.
You have to form your own opinion either way, that burden is not on others. Do you also expect anyone who says anything positive to give some kind of thorough, 1000-page assessment of all the benefits and cons? No, of course not. Same goes for criticism.
I for one don't care about the "evilness" of people I never met. For me the harm done through ignorance or fear or "evil" (which is just another form of weakness really) or not caring enough is the same harm.
> If you think I'm operating on a premise, instead of having come to a conclusion, how is that not you operating on a premise?
A mental conclusion can be a discussion premise. It doesn't invalidate your conclusion to say it should be a conclusion not a premise, because you're asserting a premise in a discussion which you are not (yet) supporting.
Also consider that you have seen eleven years of data points and experiences from the point of view of a small subset of users; there could perhaps be an equivalent cache of positive datapoints which tend to be significantly less interesting to report on.
Thus, supporting your point with concrete examples is how you contribute to a discussion, because then you and any adversaries can challenge you on the merits of your argument.
That's what the conclusion/premise separation is about.
You know what a thief can be like? 99.99% of the time, they don't steal. They sleep, they brush their teeth, they do all sorts of stuff, and every 2 weeks they take all the savings from an elderly woman.
How often you do need to see someone doing that to consider them a thief? Would you really care about any positive stories after seeing what you saw?
> That's what the conclusion/premise separation is about.
You can't speak for that other person. Let them respond for themselves.
Sounds like you're more interested in competing with someone than talking about ideas.
> Would you really care about any positive stories after seeing what you saw?
...yes? Of course? I don't automatically dehumanize that hypothetical person for their deeds, whether I approve or not, or believe there should be consequences. Like, doesn't Facebook collaborate with law enforcement in tracking down predators and scammers and the like? It's not as simple as "bad. go away."
You should remember enough to make a proper argument, dude. A solid conclusion needs solid support.
No, I want to talk about the idea they expressed, not what you read into it. I can only do that with them.
> ...yes? Of course? I don't automatically dehumanize
Who's talking about dehumanizing? How is considering someone a thief dehumanizing?
edit2: Facebook is a company. It can't be dehumanized, it's not a person in the first place. People in it are responsible for what they do. Someone who fought shitty decision and then left is different than someone who, say, hires a firm to smear critics. That goes without saying as far as I'm concerned. But my thief example refers to Facebook, you see? Just because apparently my argument isn't easy to follow for everyone, doesn't mean it doesn't stand.
So, where is the dehumanization? Who is being dehumanized when someone comes to the conclusion that FB is on the whole "bad"? Because we're not appreciating all the good, supposedly? When someone is a thief, or a murderer, or a company is, then all their fantastic properties they may have is interesting for their personal friends. But not to the police, judges, or wider society. They know that the person has probably a lot of reasons for how they became that way, and nice sides to them, but they already have their own friends, it's simply completely out of scope of the subject at hand, unless it's directly related to the "crime".
> Like, doesn't Facebook collaborate with law enforcement in tracking down predators and scammers and the like?
Yes, and that thief who sometimes robs elderly women who then freeze to death outside, also has child, and he's very great with that child, and he's singing in a choir, and all sorts of great things. But you don't judge a meal by the freshest ingredients, but by the most spoiled. You judge a person by their worst deeds, and likewise a company. Again, we're talking about judgement with a capital justice here, not being friends, thinking we're better, or thinking they're evil and we're good, or any of that.
> You should remember enough to make a proper argument, dude.
I think my argument is just fine, and it even seems to get to you a little.
edit: And what post of mine are you even referring to? Where did I make an argument without examples? I was responding to someone else complaining that everyone who thinks Facebook is "evil" (let's just say bad) is operating on a premise. I was responding to that general point, I'm not decebalus1, who in turn didn't have "Facebook is evil" as their main point either.
Their main point, if you would follow the guidelines, hasn't been addressed by anyone. Their main point is the first two paragraphs, the rest is bonus. How come you are trying to teach how to "make a proper argument, dude", but didn't notice that?
Oh, and clicking buttons instead of reasoning kinda gives away who is interested in discussion, and who is interested in dehumanization and censorship.
Conducting psychology experiments on people without their consent (or awareness of it)
Documented evidence that Facebook as it is now decreases people's quality of life, but they don't want to mess with their formula because that's what brings the dollars in.
Theres many more. But these two are the biggest I can think of off the top my head.
Compartmentalization is part of the problem, not the solution. It's why some people can exploit and hurt a hundred thousand other human beings in the morning, enjoy their lunch break, fuck up the environment a bit more in the afternoon, and come home to a happy evening with their spouse. We shouldn't be encouraging more people to separate their private happiness from their interactions with society.
> ... in groups: if everyone good leaves organizations because they're "bad," well, those organizations will just be filled with the worst of us soon enough.
The hope is that if enough people leave, the organization won't be able to keep functioning. Or, if it survives and becomes an evil-people-filled cesspool, it'll be easier to direct regulatory actions against it and just shut it down.
Also, Napoleon was famous, but not exactly a paragon of morality.
This, this and this again. We as people are absolutely allowed to be complex, contradicting beings, but it is because of this richness of breadth and depth in our characteristics and beliefs that we ought to consider deeply the consequences of our actions.
Compartmentalization acts effectively in the opposite direction of that.
Some people have determined that Facebook is an organization that's producing some bad results. Socially shaming employees, removing the status they might have hoped to acquire and spiking attrition are tools being deployed to change Facebook's behavior and the behavior of Facebook's competitors.
You might claim that this pressure will never work, or that it will cause Facebook to shut down the "Are You Safe" feature, or gut the charity tools, or avoid developing these kinds of projects in the future. But we should avoid hand-wavy claims that Facebook and the people who work there are just too complicated to influence.
So if we're nicer to facebook, maybe it'll decide to not spy on people quite so much, undo the engineered-for-addiction notifications and feed, and curb it's anti-competitive practices (but not give back any market advantage it has already gained through them, of course)? The executives will voluntarily decide to make the company earn less money, so they can be more ethical?
Is there any precedent for a large corporation acting in this way?
Is Facebook universally bad? No. It's done lots of good things. And lots of good people work there. But Facebook is also doing lots of bad things. Your policy chief hired a PR firm to push antisemitic conspiracy theories about George Soros. "People are complicated" isn't an excuse.
From the ad campaign run by Facebook in 2018: "...From now on, Facebook will do more to keep you safe and protect your privacy, so we can all get back to what made Facebook good in the first place: friends. Because when this place does what it was built for, then we all get a little closer."
To anyone looking closely at the actions of executives and living outside the SV echo chamber, this statement is laughable.
While the actions of the many inside the company have been noble, they too have been taken advantage of just as those who used the platform for so many years.
Also, the Napoleonic Wars killed 3 to 6 million people.
Facebook as an entity might be run by great people who love their families and support their communities, but the entity has done tons of very sketchy things and anyone who willingly or knowingly takes a part within that, especially for personal benefit is responsible for the actions of the group as a whole.
Humanity might transcend class and social status, but it doesn't excuse anything.
And that is on top of "The Responsibility of Intellectuals"
Is this not potentially an optimal outcome?
If companies who have a track record of doing unethical things suffer for it by being depleted of all employees who are not either unethical, incompetent, or both, this should dramatically compromise the effectiveness of the company. If this happens repeatably, it provides a disincentive for unethical corporate behavior.
At best it's invisible, at worst it just kicks people out with no recourse, because some troll reported them, and because they're not a FB employee or a celebrity. These people are people, too. You barge into the public and drag it onto your platform, and then you don't just dehumanize people on it, you completely remove them. The rest either is friend or not friend, blocked or not blocked, posts are liked or not liked. Yes, it's a very poor model -- don't assume everybody else is using it, too.
> It makes me really happy to see my friends thriving.
That's the equivalent of "it's fun with friends" for game reviews. Every multiplayer game has that. Every site that allows sharing of photos and text has that. Because people have that.
> With people, by compartmentalizing some unsavory perspective someone has, you have the ability to change it later on through discussion.
When later? When was Facebook ever up for candid discussion? How come you blame it on those who, in absence of any say, ever, now think badly of Facebook?
An interesting analogy... The 10th amendment to the Bill of Rights was intended on allowing each state to be diverse in its laws. If people in state x want the laws in state y to change, a constitutionalist would say that you should move to that state and work in changing the laws from the inside, via the 10th Amendment and the state's own Constitution. If you don't want to put in the work of changing the state from the inside, and would rather change the laws from the outside (i.e. via federal authority) then you're probably an authoritarian.
I guess the only point I'm trying to make, is yeah, it's hard. Thanks for your contribution.
And then the organization becomes bad enough that it crumbles and dies.
As opposed to when? When you worked there? When was this period that Facebook was a beacon of ethical behaviour?
> to explicitly dehumanize them for the sake of making the world simpler.
Like aliasing people into a point on a social graph and a wallet? Dehumanising behaviour and monetising that is the main ethical problem with Facebook. It's a bit rich to accuse opponents of over simplification.
>It is a poor model
FB market cap seems to disagree. Pidgeon-holing people for profit is an exceptionally lucrative model.
> Projects like charitable causes have raised a lot for charity
And the trains in Italy ran on time!
You worked there for five years and never had a clue. Maybe you're not the right person to provide a judgement on judgement.
...and because treating them differently based on their actions may cause good people to apply their skills to endeavors other than growing Facebook’s wealth of private data?
>>To take a person and alias them into being "good" or "bad" based on an action or a series of actions is to explicitly dehumanize them
The only reliable method for evaluating someone’s values is to assess the choices they make. What values do their actions suggest? Do these choices affect your ability to trust these people?
I fundamentally disagree that it dehumanizes to do this, and I also fundamentally disagree that anyone intends to dehumanize them with this approach. I find it troubling that anyone expresses such a black and white assessment of people trying to determine where others should fit in the herd.
Put another way:
the only way to judge someone’s ethics is by evaluating their action and comparing it against their words.
This is just complete rubbish and it appears you are still rationalising the time you spent working for the company. If you are trying to achieve 'good' inside a company like Facebook then you are a complete sucker or, as Zuckerberg would say, just a 'dumb fuck'. You're being played. Facebook is not interested in doing good; that has been abundantly clear since almost day 1.
To take a person and alias them into being "good" or "bad" based on an action or a series of actions is to explicitly dehumanize them for the sake of making the world simpler
Baruch Spinoza more or less invented the concept of ethics in the 17th century, which (partially, and simplifying) is premised on the effect of "an action"[1] being good or bad. If this doesn't reach, let's go back 2,000 more years to Jainism, in which karma is comprised of particles in the universe that stick to a person through their actions (good/bad/undefined).
tl;dr: If your argument is that a person's actions should have no bearing on a sense of "good" or "bad," know that significant parts of the entirety of recorded history contradict you. [insert your own Godwin reference here]
Point being, calling someone "bad" or "good" only speaks to the preponderance of evidence one way or another, and it's absolutely within all of our rights to have an opinion on what FB/Zuck/SS have done with the aspects of our lives to which they have had access, down to discrete decisions. I mean, I don't think anybody would say that FB has obviated the concept of reputation, and having an effect on society doesn't only refer to the good. And really, I don't see anybody saying "Zuck = bad" nearly as much as I see "Zuck = good" and "Zuck has done bad things and made bad decisions." He's the face of the company, this is how society works when you're not moving fast and breaking things.
It's not about people being complex, it's about people shitting in the world's PII sink at the party. Specific people, with witnesses. These were actual choices made under consultation with many people, all of whom are extremely highly-compensated, to reduce the control you have over information about your actual life (what focus groups pay big money for). It's not outlandish to say that the ability to trade pictures with and keep up with people has not been a fair trade.
Forgive me if I discount the hosting of online charity facilities (and really: [3]), and the supplanting of phone calls and neighborly phone trees in times of disaster or crisis, but in the words of Nelson Muntz, "If you hadn't done it, some other loser would have. So quit milkin' it,"[4] and maybe that other loser would have protected their users more. (and please don't insult us with anything along the lines of "personal information doesn't have value until someone sells it")
To conclude with an even larger shadow, FB has made a shitton of money from these policies, money they use to hire people and pay them enough not to work at other companies that also pay a lot, and this money has been used to drive up housing prices and rent for their employees' convenience (nobody overbids for fun). Thus this infrastructure of data scams affects the ability of teachers to live near the schools in which they teach, police to live among those they patrol, and low wage workers to not have to commute 2+ hours each way.[5] I don't know if working at FB inures you to these examples, but it seems clear that FB leadership does not display the maturity that I personally would like to see in those who have the ability to make these decisions. Zuck didn't personally raise rents, but he built machinery that did so. But hey, it aiin't his fault his exploding knife-gun hurt someone, he painted it pink!
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conatus
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karma_in_Jainism
3. https://www.wired.com/story/nonprofits-facebook-get-hacked-n...
4. https://www.simpsonsarchive.com/episodes/3F22.html
5. https://www.curbed.com/2018/3/6/17082570/affordable-housing-...
To give the benefit of the doubt I'm not sure if OP was objecting to the first step of placing a person or company along a good-bad continuum or the second step of reducing that continuum to a binary label.
In either case though, no amount of complexity makes it unreasonable to consider whether a company like Facebook is a net positive or negative force on society -- which is a binary decision that requires reduction.
First, because we can never know everything that is going on outside of investigations like this one and public statements by FB.
Second, language is a lossy codec for thought, so the investigations and public statements by FB are themselves reductive. It's turtles all the way down.
This applies to both examples then: thinking FB is good or bad, and being required to eliminate reduction in order to make that decision.
The issue here is that writing a good account on Napoleon is very difficult. His enemies disseminated nonsense about him, and he was very careful about his public image even as a very young man.
I could get into the history: but Napoleon was fighting feudal leaders who aimed to restore the monarchy in France. They declared war on him many more times than he on them. The Napoleonic Code is one of the most influential documents in history and through it and Napoleon's influence helped spread the ideals of the French Revolution throughout Europe. Of course there are many negative things to say about Napoleon, but he is a very interesting person who deserves a look.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/we-better-off-napoleo...
>>I've seen the Are you Safe feature reduce so much stress during disasters.
Not exactly charity, it gets people to use FB more.
FB's problem (for the world) is that it is big and as such it can be used to manipulate opinions or mess with people's psychology. Either by others or by FB for $$$. Same would happen if Fox News or CNN were watched by a billion plus people. They would have the power to move certain people to a different direction. Google is another one, a little bias on search /news results and maybe millions of votes would move one way or another.
People are complex. They are more complex than an action, or even a group of actions. To take a person and alias them into being "good" or "bad" based on an action or a series of actions is to explicitly dehumanize them for the sake of making the world simpler. It is a poor model, and in a Dale-Carnegie-way it leads to poor outcomes, as you close the dialog with that person that allows you to change opinions and outcomes. It is the same with groups or companies: some parts of groups do good from some vantage point, some do bad.
I found myself inspired by a lot of what Facebook did. I loved working inside Infrastructure there, I was amazed by what people were innovating on every day. Projects like charitable causes have raised a lot for charity. I've seen the Are you Safe feature reduce so much stress during disasters. I keep meaningful dialogs going with friends I don't get to see often on FB and Instagram. It makes me really happy to see my friends thriving.
One of Napoleon's great gifts was in compartmentalizing pieces of his life. His tumultuous and frankly soul-crushing personal life (which affected him deeply) with Josephine never got in the way of his military victories. I wonder if that's a good model, up-to-a-point for people and groups. With people, by compartmentalizing some unsavory perspective someone has, you have the ability to change it later on through discussion.
... in groups: if everyone good leaves organizations because they're "bad," well, those organizations will just be filled with the worst of us soon enough.