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.
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.