> we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent
This change seems to go directly against their belief that it's crucial for search engines to be transparent. After the change, it's way less transparent, or "easy to perceive or detect", that an ad is an ad.
I used to place a high value on how long people had been on the team, but the two extremely stable places I subsequently worked at were a shitshow, because there just weren't enough outsiders to argue them out of their circular reasoning.
At the boardroom level, the situation we warn about is "surrounding yourself with yes-men". I don't think Page & Brin remember where they came from. And they probably forgot long before they started trying to convert a 767 to be their corporate jet, which was already more than 10 years ago.
( https://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/07/google_bed_plane/ )
> In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want.
a moral is not something that IS "good", its something ABOUT "good". saying someone is moral is calling someone principled - it says nothing about whether their principles (morals) are good or bad.
we need to discuss morals because they are axiomatic and foundational. if you take a strict moral view that doing harm of any kind is always wrong, you will never be able to discuss anything with someone who believes in the needs of the many over the needs of the few.
saying "moral people always recognize evil" is dangerously blind, circular reasoning, and the mechanism of several atrocities in history.
The world is a complex place and humans are complex beings. Nobody considers themselves the bad guy in their own story, that is, unless they feel they've been labeled the bad guy and they act to fulfill that label.
Painting people and actions as inherently evil, to me, is to overly simplify the person or misunderstand their motive and it prevents us from learning from their misdoings.
Almost everyone agrees that killing children is immoral. People in favor of abortion stick to a definition in which abortion is not killing children.
Whether that definition is right or wrong is what is at the center of the debate.
Almost isn't everyone, meaning it is still subjective for some.
>People in favor of abortion stick to a definition in which abortion is not killing children.
That shows that even the notion of 'children' is subjective.
>Whether that definition is right or wrong is what is at the center of the debate.
For some, not for others. There are many arguments on both sides and some depend upon this while others do not care about the distinction.
But we can use other examples. Take murder. There is subjective disagreement on what counts as murder and when certain forms of murder are wrong. Laws concretely differ between what is acceptable self defense and what is considered murder, and these differences mirror the moral differences people have that gave rise to these laws.
Many times you'll find people who will agree some word is wrong, but then disagree on what is covered under that word. If we both agree X is wrong, but then have totally different views on what constitute X, do we really both agree that X is wrong or do we have fundamental disagreement?
Swapping to something more technical, if we both agree commenting code is good, but you think comments are those blobs of text with syntax telling the compiler to ignore it while I think comments are super long method and variable names and don't count those blobs of text with syntax telling the compiler to ignore them as comments, then do we really agree that commenting code is important?
The only thing left then is, what do we want? It becomes a question of what do I want, and who can I view as allies in achieving my goals.
I want a search tool that serves my needs, not the needs of advertisers. I want privacy and I don't want distractions. So Google is not on my side, they are my opponent in this game[1]. And I suspect if the average user understood the implications of Google serving advertisers and not them, they'd be on my side, and not on Google's side.
In this framework, good and evil are just shorthand for shared goals. When someone says "Google is evil" they are saying "Google doesn't share our goals," and when they say "Google is good" they are saying "Google shares our goals". Of course, within this framework, the speaker is assuming that the listener has the same goals as the speaker, which is likely not a rational assumption.
But that assumption makes sense, because the goal here isn't actually to communicate, it's to persuade, and there's a good chance that when the listener hears "Google is evil" they will come up with their own goals that Google doesn't align with, and create an alliance with the speaker based on those goals even if they don't actually align with the speakers goals. In short: good and evil are sophist rhetoric, designed to persuade through soft power[2] rather than communicate meaning.
Of course, saying good and evil are subjective is also sophist rhetoric, because you aren't actually communicating about shared goals, you're just trying to undercut the argument that "Google is good" or "Google is evil".
I'll be careful to add that calling something "sophist rhetoric" isn't equivalent to calling it "evil" at any level, because we're operating in the framework where good and evil don't exist, so sophist rhetoric can't be evil. So if you're trying to persuade, there's no reason to think that sophist rhetoric is somehow beneath you.
But since I think people actually share my goals, playing the good and evil game is a poor choice for me, so I reject the whole framework of good and evil here. Anyone who uses these words, even to say they're subjective, is trying to sell you snake oil, because if they were actually being honest they would talk about how the thing they are arguing about aligns with your goals, because that's always a stronger argument.
So I'd suggest that if you actually believe good and evil are subjective, you make your argument based on what you think isn't subjective. Otherwise we can just discard your opinion as non-informative sophist rhetoric.
On the other hand, since most people actually do have goals they would consider to be part of a moral code, and we can objectively describe what most people would call good or evil, good and evil work just fine as shorthand, sophist rhetoric aside. If, for example, we can agree that we want to be able to differentiate between ads and search results, then we can agree to call that feature "good" and we can agree to call not having that feature "evil". If you don't agree to that terminology, it's because you don't share our goals, so why should we care? Go away, advertiser, we don't want you here. ;)
This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
[1] Using "game" in a game-theoretical sense here.
How did you make that giant leap? Subjective doesn’t mean irrelevant, it means everyone has their own opinion on it which makes it quite relevant.
Your tangent was difficult to follow on the sole basis that Google is no different than any other entity. The US government is evil because we don’t share the same goals. Vegans are evil because we don’t share the same goals. Football players are evil because we don’t share the same goals. I can go on but you should get the picture by now.
At the end of the day, you should understand that businesses exist solely to make money. If they didn’t make money, they wouldn’t have investors. Without investors, most businesses would not exist. Without those businesses, we would be objectively worse off.
Relevant to what? If objective and subjective ideas are both relevant, why even bother pointing out that it's subjective?
Subjective ideas aren't admissable as evidence in most debates. Whether or not you intended it, when people go through the effort to say an idea is subjective, it's usually because they're trying to cut down the validity of that idea. So if that wasn't your intent, maybe you should have been more clear.
> Your tangent was difficult to follow on the sole basis that Google is no different than any other entity. The US government is evil because we don’t share the same goals. Vegans are evil because we don’t share the same goals. Football players are evil because we don’t share the same goals. I can go on but you should get the picture by now.
No, actually I don't get the picture. Yes, anyone can label anyone evil.
> At the end of the day, you should understand that businesses exist solely to make money. If they didn’t make money, they wouldn’t have investors. Without investors, most businesses would not exist. Without those businesses, we would be objectively worse off.
Actually, that's not objective, that's subjective. I don't agree that the world is better by having a huge amount of private data centralized under Google's control.
(Incidentally, see how saying that's subjective sounds a whole lot like saying it's irrelevant?)
> > > They cared not to be evil back then. Now they say they do the right thing, and “right” is subjective.
Yes, it's 'evil' when you're a poor disruptive startup trying to change how ads work, it's 'not evil' when you're a behemoth incumbent trying to maximise revenues.
The never did, that was just marketing nonsense we all naively swallowed.
> "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. ...we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. "
(http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html)
At the time they thought this was a bad thing...