I suspect there is a lot of cognitive dissonance involved. I remember having dinner with a developer who worked on pokie machines. He fully believed that there was nothing wrong with the machines and that people just needed to have self control. This is someone who's job involved programming the highly addictive things.

A lot of people simply don't care. I've met people who've worked for casinos and tobacco companies in management and decision making roles, and they are fully aware that they are trying to make people addicted and maximise profit on their habits.

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?

Isn’t consumer-internet hypergrowth built around the same properties? TikTok regularly has posts from teens describing staying up until dawn in the infinite scroll.

There are programmers right now creating websites, software and databases to dissemenate (heh) pornography.

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.

Counter-anecdote: I interned (many years ago) at Altria / Phillip Morris and found everyone I worked with to be very aware and conscious of the impact of their products. There was always a sense of finding that line between creating a good product that people enjoyed, and actively creating transparency and support around the risks created by that product.

the banality of evil prevails.

> I suspect there is a lot of cognitive dissonance involved

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!

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beedi

From a public health perspective, I think Juul/vape products would be extremely helpful in a place like India.

Relevant, add Indonesia and China. https://www.economist.com/asia/2019/08/01/indonesia-seeks-to...

Despicable industry across the board.

This piqued my interest. Can you please explain how? From what I understand, Juul/vape products don't contain tar which is supposedly the worst offender in a cigarette. Is that what you meant?

Yes. Tobacco is huge in India and a major public health issue.

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.

Also, vape products don't combust the liquid which should prevent inhaling of many different carcinogens.

Why is this "cognitive dissonance" and not someone simply having a different sense of morality than you? Is everyone with different moral values than you suffering from cognitive dissonance?

It might, but most people would agree that causing cancer intentionally is immoral. So cognitive dissonance is a valid assumption.

> I suspect there is a lot of cognitive dissonance involved.

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.

Maybe it's more of a philosophical internal vs external locus of control thing, but I don't find this one similar to tobacco. It's easy to use Dominos and Burger King "responsibly". I don't find anything unethical about their business and wouldn't feel bad working for them.

Tobacco I'm less sure about, since I don't really know of anyone who uses it "responsibly".

I think it might be different if your boss is telling you to design an advertisement to target 4-8 year olds with junk food ads.

Not for me, since I don't think it's unreasonable for a 4-8 year old to have Burger King. They just can't have it all the time, but it's a nice treat.

I don't see that as the same at all. They're providing a necessary service. People need to eat, they don't need to gamble or smoke.

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 worked for dominos and I sold pizza to adults

Is there anything wrong with building pokie machines? Should they not be available for people who are able to play them responsibly?

I believe it's up to the government to regulate these things and ensure fair business practice.

The old saying goes that if mankind were angels we would need no governments. So saying the govt. ought to do something is functionally saying something is wrong with making the machines.

Absolutely not, suggesting that the government should regulate gambling and responsible gaming has nothing to do with building the machines outright.

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.

The issue is that in this case they're specifically and willfully being engineered to foster irresponsible behavior.

>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.

> 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.

Sure. Let's make meth available to kids too while we're at it. Why expect social or moral responsibility from people at all?

To give a counter example, I think we can easily agree that government should regulate vehicles being driven on public roads and yet we don't mean to imply that there is something wrong with making vehicles to be driven on public roads.

We can say, however, that there is something wrong with making vehicles that are inherently unsafe when on public roads. That's more in line with making products to foster addiction or compel people to behave in ways that are against their best interests.

Brilliant and morally acceptable are definitely two different things

True, but average people with nefarious morals might look comparatively brilliant because the scope of total things they can and are willing to do is greater, whereas decent people would just self-select out of those activities.

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!"

True, but we shouldn't celebrate brilliance when it's applied to do morally reprehensible things, like the OP was doing (intended or not).

How could one possess "exceptional clarity and agility of intellect" and then not apply it to moral questions?

The Orthogonality Thesis[1][2] states that the ethics of a given mind is orthogonal to its intelligence.

[1] https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Orthogonality_thesis [2] https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/Orthogonality_An...

It's part of the mind either way, and a "brilliant person" isn't referring to just their intelligence. E.g. nobody with empathy would call even a highly intelligent doctor torturing and experimenting on prisoners "brilliant", without any qualifiers or caveats.

Moral questions require empathy. If you have no empathy, moral questions only interest you to the extent that they imply potential benefits for you.

Plus morality is highly subjective and beliefs on what is moral varies by individual.

Lacking empathy is a defect of the mind I would say, and clarity refers to the whole of it, just like health refers to all of it. A person who has healthy fingernails but has cancer isn't healthy, and a person that excels at specific technial problems, but isn't even bad, but completely absent, when it comes to other very basic ones, isn't brilliant.

> 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_reasoning

> These people are not brilliant. They are utterly deceitful.

these two things are not mutually exclusive. one implies intelligence/skill, the other implies honesty/sound ethical principles.

I think that's only true if a) "brilliant" is seen as a neutral term, and b) there's no relationship between intelligence and ethics. But I think both of those are false.

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.

Totally disagree. People like Mao, Stalin, Hitler, etc were brilliant men. They were evil, but they were brilliant. Ted Kazcynski and many other criminals are also considered brilliant.

I think they were intelligent, sure. But as I said, I think brilliant has a positive connotation, where intelligent is more neutral.

Mao, Stalin, and Hitler weren't brilliant at anything except being ambitious, amoral, and rather deluded. Their only real talents were a flair for populist rhetoric and a knack for brutally eliminating and repressing political opposition using methods that morally normal people recoil from.

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 looked at the synonyms and I have to disagree with your opinion. Can you elaborate on which synonyms gave you this impression?

When I search Google for "brilliant" it gives these: "gifted, talented, virtuoso, genius, accomplished, ingenious, masterly, inventive, creative; intelligent, bright, clever, smart, astute, acute, brainy, intellectual, profound; skillful, able, expert, adept, elite, superior, crack, choice, first-class, first-rate, excellent; educated, scholarly, learned, erudite, cerebral; precocious". It cites that to english.oxforddictionaries.com.

And maybe three of those could lean towards morality. Someone could be a gifted sniper, a talented warmonger, an evil genius, an accomplished pick pocket, a creative criminal, an educated Ponzi scheme operator, or a profound mass murderer.

My point is that it's not a socially neutral term. Those are almost all positive associations in the synonyms.

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.

Probably the synonyms in definition 3 here, like splendid, marvelous, wonderful, awesome? https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english-thesaur...

I'm seeing this sort of thing often these days. People absolutely insist on taking a moral stand on the flimsiest of situations. Not everything is a value judgement for Christ's sake, sometimes words just mean what they mean!

Brilliant is quite commonly used to mean "very good" or "excellent" in the UK, so it is not unreasonable to assume there is some value judgement implied.

Being “very good at marketing” also doesn’t mean “honest at marketing”.

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.

Marketing is pretty much dishonest by definition.

This isn't true, doing good product placement or publishing accurate test results is also marketing but is not dishonest.

Granted, modern marketing is rarely applied this way so in practice almost all marketing is dishonest, but that's not what "by definition" means.

I don't know what "good" product placement is, but selectively publishing accurate test results only if they support your cause is dishonest, yes. And if you have no demonstrated conflict of interest and commit to publishing your results regardless of what they say, then that is not "marketing" - it's "research".

Marketing is dishonest "by definition", because its purpose is to persuade, not inform.

Is persuasion dishonest by definition?

Good point. Not necessarily. But persuasion of something you do not yourself believe is dishonest, and persuasion masquerading as neutral information is dishonest.

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?

well, surely the definition is something like telling the market a product exists and/or creating that market.

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.

Not really. It’s just the memorable examples that are. An advert in your local paper saying “Handyman Bob, ${phonenumber}” is fine. However once you start to scale things the rewards for dishonesty become greater (as does your budget to pay for experienced professionals who understand which marketing tricks work).

It's not. There is a commercial for a hospital next to my house. On it is a photo of one of their best doctors (very well known and respected), saying "I work for this hospital because they enable my success". 100% honest. I wouldn't know he works at that hospital without that commercial and would never visit him without it. I am thankful.

That is actually a good example of deceptive marketing. It happens that you want to see this doctor, so you don't notice th problem: you now have an association in your mind between the reputation of the doctor you know and respect and the hospital itself. You have no idea if other doctors for other specialties are comparable in skill. You have no idea if the hospital charges exaggerated prices, how their services are in general etc - the commercial is simply meant to appeal to your positive emotions about this particular doctor. And they didn't even have to lie about anything to obtain the effect.

I don't live in a healthcare system where any of this matters. I live in a universal healthcare (insurance) country. I can go to any hospital and any doctor "for free" at any time. I don't care about their other doctors in the slightest, I have my list of trustable doctors and where they work based on personal merit. I always pre-check my doctors on the internet before I visit them. I don't even know the names of the hospitals I visit, to be honest (often it's just town name anyways). However most often the hospital nearest to me is the one I visit because the standard of care is good enough - now I will go a little (2 km) further to visit this one. I wouldn't go more than 5 km out of my way to visit a doctor (obvious exceptions apply).

I'm confused - you knew of this doctor, you knew you wanted to see him, but for some reason you couldn't use google to work out where he works?

Where I live (Czech Republic) we don't do healthcare like that. We often go to the one available at the hospital of our choice (often the nearest one) or the one our practician recommends. We don't travel long distances to visit doctors. Now that he works near me (less than 5 km out of my way), I will switch my hospital of choice - if I didn't know, I wouldn't.

Not at all, just don't assume that everyone lives in the USA

I diddn't assume causation was implied. Your interpreter reads "." with a value of " because" while mine read "." with a value of " however". If we assume a single meaning value of "." then our two different outcomes (because,however) are mutually exclusive. They are not, however, collectively exhaustive. It may have been interpreted litaraly, as punctuation without prusumption of exclusitivity.

>These people are not brilliant.

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.

Could tweaking the profit function result in a better alignment? For example, issue a fine for every confirmed sale that reached someone in the wrong age group. Upon the return of the unused product direct the proceeds of the fine back to the person that made the purchase.

Contribute the fine towards smoking cessation programs. A teenager doesn't need their money returned to them if they get caught buying tobacco products.

Need? No, I guess they don't. But if we want to incentive the teenagers to report, monetary incentives seems to work.

It would result in perverse incentives.

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.

Is that such a perverse incentive? It is roughly equivalent to the regulator hiring the teenager for $100 at the company's expense to check if the company is following the rules about not selling to teenagers, except the teenager only gets paid if the company violates the rules.

Why is that a perverse incentive? If the baseline is that it’s illegal to sell such things to kids, then this seems like a roundabout way to hire kids as a forcing mechanism to make companies really careful not to do this.

Look at their website. They actually think they have a mission to cure mankind from cigarettes.

They're on a mission to make money.

The marketing copy on the website is just fluff in support of that goal.

They're willing to sell you both the problem they're trying to fix and the fix for the problem they sold you. Talk about modern capitalism in a nutshell.

The company that produces "radar guns" for police to track motor vehicle speeds also produces the "radar detector" for civilians to be wary of police speed traps.

Is it any weirder than essentially every American turning a blind eye to climate change? Or even worse the ones who claim to care but do nothing to change their life and put in no effort towards changing society at large?

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.

“It’s for profit” is a knee-jerk, relatively thought-free answer.

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.

What motivations could those be, making as many people as possible addicted and sick?

The former are usually called drug dealers and the latter psychopaths.

Or maybe they genuinely believe that their products are safer than cigarettes and believe that they are helping people by giving them an alternative.

Given that cigarettes literally cause cancer, it's very hard to create a product that is not safer than that.