These people are not brilliant. They are utterly deceitful. To go along with this shit in this day and age is utterly contemptible. Imagine all the people and the planning and the brainstorming to come up with such a trick - how can any of them not feel really really bad and storm out of the room?
Oh yeah, profit.
I've asked them about the morality of it, and they're apathetic. It's not like some Wolf of Wall Street attitude where they enjoy ripping people off or making addicts, but just corporate apathy. The job pays well and they get to enjoy the finer things in life, so why should they care?
It probably requires a different breed of humanity to actively choose to get involved in any vice-related industry.
Or maybe I will do it too given enough incentive.. who knows.
Edit : Some more context
I find it fascinating what people do to get rid of the dissonance. In India, we have a heavily regulated tobacco industry. In a debate , I remember someone from a cigarette manufacturing company (who don't manufacture any other tobacco products) commenting that relative to beedi [1] and chew-able tobacco, cigarettes are better because they are less harmful and bring in more revenues to the government!
Despicable industry across the board.
The danger of Juul is really yet to be determined -- but odds are extremely high that the public damage is far less than tobacco. These recent reports of lung collapse in minors all results from crap low quality thc vaping products, not Juul or even ecigs.
This for sure. I had multiple friends work for Crispin Porter & Bogusky in the early 2010s. They're the main ad agency for companies like Burger King and Dominos. Great opportunity for them to begin their careers as designers, but at some point, all of them had to learn how to swallow selling diabetes to kids.
Tobacco I'm less sure about, since I don't really know of anyone who uses it "responsibly".
Burgers and Pizza aren't the healthiest food in the world, but they're not the worst either. A typical burger consists of bread, meat and salad. There's nothing inherently wrong with any of those things.
I believe it's up to the government to regulate these things and ensure fair business practice.
As I said, these machines should be available if you can use them responsibly, the government should dictate policy that gambling operators should adhere by to ensure that users don't take things overboard.
Blaming the engineer who built the machine makes for an easy scapegoat, of course, but if the issue isn't addressed on a societal scale, there will always be another engineer to replace him.
>Blaming the engineer who built the machine makes for an easy scapegoat, of course, but if the issue isn't addressed on a societal scale, there will always be another engineer to replace him.
We can still say theft is bad regardless of the legal enforcement around theft. Some things are just morally wrong.
I have to assume that your perspective is being coloured by personal experience. At this point, your argument is simply: "Building pokie machines is bad because I think it's bad". Sorry, but I disagree with that, as stated before, they should be available to those who can use them responsibly.
Additionally, and tragically, because they work in a field with a psychological cost, their market wages are higher to compensate, meeting a second metric simple folk use to judge merit/competency.
And so outsiders look in and say "brilliant", when really it's just a bunch of otherwise average performers, paid well, willing to do what others won't and open to a greater palette of possible actions because of it.
To quote BR from thank you for smoking: "We don't sell Tic Tacs for Christ's sake. We sell cigarettes! And they're cool and available and addictive. The job is almost done for us!"
[1] https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Orthogonality_thesis [2] https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/Orthogonality_An...
> morality is highly subjective
And the word "brilliant" is not? "Highly" is just padding: Morality is subjective, and so is everything else, ultimately. It's not a magically different kind of thing to think about, it's just one of the more basic ones.
these two things are not mutually exclusive. one implies intelligence/skill, the other implies honesty/sound ethical principles.
If you look at the the synonyms, it's clear that "brilliant" has strong positive connotations. And a lot of ethics are essentially recognizing that actions which might be rewarding in the short term are in the long term detrimental.
None was particularly effective as a military commander - which is something we should be grateful for, because if the Nazis had been ruled by someone with the military skills of Napoleon or Julius Caesar we'd all be fluent in German and xenophobia.
In fact they all did huge physical and psychological damage to their countries - something a genuinely brilliant political leader would have avoided.
I also think most of your phrases aren't things people would actually write, in that the adjective tone is dissonant with the noun. The one exception is evil genius, where I think the dissonance is the point.
I too would prefer it if every professional had the same moral compass you and I have; but that is a separate issue. Hence why people can be both successful and arguably immoral.
Granted, modern marketing is rarely applied this way so in practice almost all marketing is dishonest, but that's not what "by definition" means.
Marketing is dishonest "by definition", because its purpose is to persuade, not inform.
Really the question is - whose interest are you purporting to serve by communicating with me? Yours, or mine? And whose interest are you actually serving?
which I think is quite reasonable.
it's the stuff people do and call it marketing and advertising that is dishonest - trying to make people want something despite it not being in their best interest.
once upon a time, I think we trusted businesses because we saw most business was honest. and now much less so, since we see most business is dishonest now.
This reminds me of the following quote.
"After all, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named did great things — terrible, yes, but great."
-Ollivander
It seems our language has some aversion to recognizing desirable traits in undesirable people. Almost like recognizing the trait is seen as praising the trait and praising the trait is seen as praising the person.
Teenager willingly buys e-cig for $50, reports e-cig company for $150 fine, then returns the unused e-cig in exchange for the proceeds of the fine. Even without a refund, they just made $100.
The marketing copy on the website is just fluff in support of that goal.
To me it’s not weird at all. People can ignore an awful lot if it doesn’t affect them directly and immediately. It’s even easier if they benefit in some way.
There is a deeper answer, and the door to it is seeing that different people can have very different underlying beliefs and motivations, which are not necessarily morally better or worse, just different.
The former are usually called drug dealers and the latter psychopaths.
actually, many times you can prove these things. produce the contract showing that juul paid for one ad to run after the other and they are really screwed. Or prosecutors who have a spine could easily just record the number of instances of the ads running together vs. separately and use that as evidence they are not intended to be separate ads. (It might even be possible to subpoena radio stations for their records that would show this).
Generally, judges don't take kindly to the type of "brilliance" that would be going into court and claiming "But they are two separate ads, so we weren't being misleading" if Juul indeed arranged for them to run one after the other.
I see this claim constantly mentioned, how judges really dislike loopholes and such, yet at the same time it seems like lawyers specialize in doing just this. It feels like there are some 'gotchas' that work in court and others that do nothing except anger the court and lawyers are the only ones allowed to know which is which.
FWIW I hate people like that. If that's the best you can do with your creativity then you're no better than a scientist that works on chemical weapons.
Indeed. If people understood that with Phillip Morris or Facebook on their CVs they would be unemployable afterwards, they might think twice.
We have inate abilities to model reality in a way that helps us, not just in a cognitive dissonance way, but in strategic ways as well.
It's the classic "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.". It's wildly viewed as a skill, and in a lot of cultures marked as a sign of adulthood to be able to deceive yourself to overcome your primary reaction.
People whose morals are strong enough to suffer the harm and deal with the uncertainty of trying to find morally-responsible work aren't that common. And as soon as you have family responsibilities, the pressures increase.
The underlying problem is that compliant behaviours and attitudes are rewarded, sometimes generously, while dissident attitudes and behaviours are punished - often in ways that imply the dissident brought misfortune on themselves.
There's absolutely no mainstream reinforcement of the suggestion that many aspects of the culture this happens in are toxic and have a skewed moral foundation, and plenty of reinforcement of its opposite - that the culture is healthy, generous, open, and perhaps even the best of all possible cultures.
Yup - we might say that as a topic, it's been discussed throughout the ages. For example there are the findings of this guy Paul the Apostle (as summarized by an unknown transcriptionist sometime in the 1st or 2nd century):
For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.
-- 1 Timothy 6:10
Those don't need to be promoted, usually.
I know someone who works for one of the big betting companies here. He writes software that aids in direct targeting of problem gamblers based on their social profiles and anything else they can get their hands on.
Pushing drugs is bad but pushing gambling is totally legal.
Suffice to say I'm not a huge fan of said bloke, I think you're selling your soul to the devil, so to speak.
their employees? any source?
"They have some sociopaths working for them whose focus is purely on making a buck at the expense of consumer's lives"
They have some brilliant marketing people working for them.