If you start with such black-and-white assumptions, you will never be able to actually empathize with those people. Nothing is that simple when you're close enough to see the details.
Things good for the company should be and frequently are good for the people using the product. The same thing can also harm the same people, or a different set of people, or the company, in a way that's impossible to disentangle from the good.
There's a whole back and forth about Facebook and political divisions. It starts with someone assuming that tech companies put people in bubbles and echochambers, assuming they'll only be engaged with stuff they agree with. Then you run the numbers, and realize that people are far more isolated from opposing opinions in real life than they are on the internet, you interact with more people online, and they censor themselves less. But at the same time, you can change your mind about echochambers, and decide that this is a bad thing, being exposed to different opinions makes you more entrenched in what you actually believe.
It's never as simple as "this is bad for everyone except us but at least we're getting rich". Everything has more nuance than that when you experience it up close
> It's never as simple as "this is bad for everyone except us but at least we're getting rich". Everything has more nuance than that when you experience it up close
This too needs more nuance. These points even apply to outright crime. Legal prohibitions should sometimes be expanded in the public interest, because sometimes it essentially is the case that something is bad for everyone except some small group.
This is reflected in the way data-protection laws now exist in many countries, for instance.
https://research.fb.com/blog/2015/05/exposure-to-diverse-inf...
> Online I am connected to those whom I socialize with or am otherwise professionally connected to. In the “real world” this constraint is largely absent.
This seems entirely backwards to me? Maybe you talk more with strangers IRL than online, but I doubt it. I only have n=1 (me), but we are talking right now. Who knows where we live in relation to each other?
So much of politics is split between urban and rural environments. Those groups are defined by where they live, so I expect very few conversations in person between the two, especially about politics.
Is that hard to disagree with? I didn’t even know atheism was a thing until I was on the Internet. No one in my community was an atheist and the media we were provided didn’t reference it much.
Personal anecdotes aside, we're mostly terrible at dealing with new ideas when they conflict with stuff we already know or is close to our identity. Remove the human element of the connection and we're even more likely to dismiss said conflicting ideas outright as stupid (I'll try link to that research). It's not hard to imagine how that might lead to strong yet poorly justified social division.
In the real world you are connected to people living and travelling around you, and that is not necessarily an unbiased set of people. It can be quite far from the average random group. You're still in a bubble.
The same thing can also harm the same people, or a different set of people, or the company, in a way that's impossible to disentangle from the good.
It might be impossible to 100% disentangle. But it is nonsense to suggest it could ever be impossible to >0% disentangle. And they have a moral obligation to prioritize disentangling them, to maximize the good and minimize the harm, and to structurally incentivize themselves to succeed at that.
But your attitude creates the exact opposite incentive: the more entangled the good with the harm, the more defensible it is for them to passively enrich themselves thru their inaction.
Don't fall for it. Demand more.
Demand structural changes that incentivize real fixes, for example, pledging that ad revenue from hate content and fake news be returned to the advertiser and the same amount also donated; or pledging that feelings of community vs feelings of divisiveness affect executive or company-wide bonuses. These particular ideas might be stupid, but don't let them get away with not even trying.
I think there's a misalignment here. In traditional business what you said may be generally true (with some striking counterexamples like cigarette companies). In internet advertising things good for the company should be and frequently are good for the company's customers. Facebook's users are not its customers, and Facebook is generally incentivized to keep users on the site and consuming content (and advertising) by any means necessary - regardless of the long-term harm it might cause the users.
IMO the feeling is not really that different from making choices as a consumer ("was this shirt made by child labor?", "was the animal this meat comes from treated humanely?", etc). People tend to turn a blind eye to those questions unless something comes up that hits close to home.
To be clear, I'm not saying that's justifiable or a good mindset to have, just what I think happens.
Shirt consumers don't have much of a choice. They can only buy what's for sale (and in their price range). And then, how can they be sure if a shirt was or wasn't made by child labor? How would an individual consumer's behavior lead to ending child labor?
According to the article, Facebook execs understood what the product was doing, and, while they have the ability to stop it, don't. Maybe I understand what you're saying if we're talking engineers/middle managers, but that's a boring conversation. The buck has to stop somewhere.
There's plenty of choice. It's not about choice, it's about what's on your mind, and what you put on your mind. If you want to look cool, you put the working conditions concern off of your mind. If you want to make money, you put the division concern off of your mind.
The buck stops at every stop.
edit: did a quick google, first result on a plain white t-shirt that's fair trade is $25, first result on 'fashionable' plain white t-shirt (by balr or supreme) is $60...
In this case, the vast majority of people don't know if a shirt was made with child labor or not. If this information was clearly communicated to every consumer I'm sure you'd see consumer behavior change to some degree.
A VP or even the CEO is beholden to shareholders, their employees, their advertisers, their own ethics, their users, various government regulations (and government interests that are not laws but what they prefer). So almost everything they do is a tradeoff.
Facebook spent almost $17MM in lobbying efforts last year [1]. I wonder why governments doesn't exactly have an eagle eye on this...
The rank and file employees at Facebook have no say about this. Tim Bray leaving Amazon to no ill effect shows this.
We're talking about Facebook exploiting the human brain to increase time on the platform. The users have little to say about this, and as long as the users are there, advertisers have nothing to say to Facebook.
So that leaves Facebook answering to their own ethics. Yes. that's the problem.
0 - https://www.investopedia.com/articles/insights/082216/top-9-...
1 - https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary...
This is where governments come in. Companies should behave ethically, but ultimately we shouldn't just leave it up to them. That's why societies have laws. What we really need to do is use regulation and penalties to force Facebook into ethical behaviour.
Of course, this isn't going to happen because there's no political will to do so, generally due to "free speech" or "free market" objections.
If you always go with the populist vote, like when users rioted about the news feed when it was first introduced, https://techcrunch.com/2006/09/06/facebook-users-revolt-face... then you may be sacrificing the long-term viability of your company. This harms employees, investors, and eventually the public. Are you saying that's not even a consideration at all?
We're not talking about "Facebook exploiting the human brain to increase time on the platform". You brought up Target and shirts. So we're talking about who has more agency, users or executives, in a general manner. That consumers generally only need to concern themselves with their own ethics, versus the complex entanglement of ethics at a company, gives users more agency to make choices reflecting their ethics.
If you are saying at walmart or another big place they only have 4 brands in your price range and how can you tell which ones involve child labor. You could research if you cared.. by not buying a brand you reduce your risk by 99%.
Several of my friends buy clothes from a few vetted brands because of exactly this issue.
Then I have another friend who was huge cruise ships fan. He encouraged me to go on my first cruise too. But then there was a report about mistreatment of cruiseship employees, and he is totally against cruiseships now. His actions probably won't change anything alone but if enough consumers start to act like him, a change may happen.
They might not understand where they went wrong and think they need to lower prices or something. Of course, that just leads to more pressure on working conditions.
If he spends that money locally it helps the community.
Cruise ship will treat employees worse to make up the shortfall in cash. The Cruise ships industry needs a tell all netflix movie to change things.
I've also gotten more into fasting and eating less, but so far, no involuntary fasting has occurred.
I've also become more social, so sometimes others share their food with me, even in these difficult times. Yes, they bought it with money, and fed the eco-shaver, but I think it's still less than if I'd done it myself.
Occasionally, I go to restaurants towards closing time, and ask if they have any leftovers they are throwing away.
A great book on all this I read on this is called "The Scavengers' Manifesto". I learned a lot from meeting others on the street and looking through the trash.
I've done a bit of foraging when in wilder areas, and I've seen places where people grow most of their food themselves, in small communities. I think this is the future.
I think the issue is that in the long term it dilutes FB. I know many people who don't post on FB, preferring Instagram etc... I know these are still FB platforms but it's a big shift. So FB will eventually become Usenet and effectively non-functional.
There's some type of social network that's between Instagram and FB that doesn't exist yet.
No, but it's not always clear what the ethical choice is. In philosophy, this is known as pluralism [1] -- the fact that different people have irreconcilable ethical views, with no way to find any "truth".
That might seem like a lot of justificatory mumbo-jumbo, but there are genuine ethical arguments on all sides. For example, did you know that in the postwar 1950's, the lack of polarization and divisiveness in American society was seen by many as a major problem, because it didn't provide enough voter choice between the two parties? [2]
There are also plenty of ethical arguments that giving people what's "good for them", rather than what they want (click on) would run counter to their personal autonomy, and therefore against their freedom. This is what critics of paternalism believe. [3]
Then there's the neoliberal argument that markets always work best (absent market failure). That most of human progress over the past couple of centuries has resulted from companies doing what's most profitable, despite how non-intuitive that is. In that sense, Facebook doing what makes the most money is ethically right.
I'm not saying I agree with any of these -- in fact, I don't.
But I am saying that supposing there's some kind of obvious right ethical answer, and implying bad faith towards people at Facebook that they're somehow making decisions they genuinely believe to be wrong but making anyways, is not accurate.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralism_(political_philosoph...
[2] https://newrepublic.com/article/157599/were-not-polarized-en...
There was not a lack of polarization and divisiveness in American society.
The divides in American society and politics didn't map well to the two major political parties because there was a major political realignment in progress and the parties hadn't yet aligned with the divides in society.
The problem was the divide between the major parties not being sharp on the issues where there were, in fact, sharp, polarizing divides in society, preventing members of the public from effectuating their preferences on salient issues by voting.
Two things happened in the 60s and early 70s: the Goldwater faction largely took power in the Republican Party, and because the Democratic Party embraced civil rights, the Dixiecrats first flirted with independence (George Wallace's campaign) and then gradually switched parties, so now we have the oddity that there are people who fly Confederate flags but are registered members of the party of Lincoln. Many people who would have been Republicans in the old days are now the moderate/neoliberal faction in the Democratic Party.
So we still have four parties, they were just reshuffled. Now the tension in the Democratic Party is between the old FDR/LBJ new deal supporters, and their younger socialist allies, and the more pro-business neoliberals. On the Republican side it's between the business side (they don't care much about ideology, they just want to make money) and the hard-core conservatives.
No, I'm saying that the description that polarization was absent is wrong.
I'm also saying alignment of the axis of differentiation between the major parties in a two-party system and the salient divides in society makes it easier for people to make meaningful choices, and feel they are doing so, by voting.
When there are sharp polarizing social/political divides, as there were over many issues in the 1950s, and they are not reflected in the divides between the parties (as they often weren't in the 1950s), then the government cannot represent the people because the people cannot express their preferences on important issues by voting.
For example, pluralism doesn't state there is no way to "find truth", but that in light of multiple views, to have good faith arguments, avoid extremism, and engage in dialog to find common ground.
> but there are genuine ethical arguments on all sides.
These ethical arguments, however genuine they may be, are not equal however, otherwise, you would be falling victim to making the false balance fallacy, commonly observed in media outlets, or the "both sides" argument we have so unlovingly become aware of in recent times. The False balance fallacy essentially tosses out gravity, impact, and context.
> That most of human progress over the past couple of centuries has resulted from companies doing what's most profitable, despite how non-intuitive that is.
Despite the over-simplicity of framing it as companies simply doing what is most profitable, this is, in fact, extremely intuitive, and has been studied, measured, and observed. I am curious what you find unintuitive about it?
> But I am saying that supposing there's some kind of obvious right ethical answer, and implying bad faith towards people at Facebook that they're somehow making decisions they genuinely believe to be wrong but making anyways, is not accurate.
This view may be true in a vacuum, but it is irrelevant. We live in American society, and there is an American ethical framework in which Facebook's actions can be viewed as unethical. Other countries that have this similar issue have their own ethical frameworks in which to deem Facebook's actions ethical/unethical.
To the contrary, that is literally what pluralism as a philosophical concept says. You can read up on Isaiah Berlin's "value pluralism" [1], for example.
> These ethical arguments, however genuine they may be, are not equal however
On what basis? Again, the entire premise of pluralism provides no method for comparison.
> this is, in fact, extremely intuitive
Many would disagree. You might enjoy reading [2], which explains just how hard it is for citizens to understand it, from the point of view of an economics professor.
> and there is an American ethical framework
Except there isn't, that's the point. For example, Republicans and Democrats obviously believe in deeply divergent ethical frameworks. And there's far more diversity beyond that. Plus there's no way to say that any American ethical framework would even be right -- what if it were wrong and needed correction?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_pluralism
[2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=999680
> A better understanding of voter irrationality advises us to rely less on democracy and more on the market.
To my mind this immediately brings up the question of why people who are irrational voters would be expected to be rational economic actors.
- - - -
...Ah! I just looked at it again and saw the sub-heading: "Cato Institute Policy Analysis Series No. 594"
PLONK!
Well, there are lots of different ideas lumped together as “pluralism”, but most of them not only hold that there is no way to find truth on the issues to which they apply, but that there is no “truth” to be found.
> We live in American society,
Some of us do, some of us don't.
> and there is an American ethical framework in which Facebook's actions can be viewed as unethical.
Sure, but there are many, mutual contradictory and, often mutually hostile American ethical frameworks, so that’s true of virtually every actor’s actions, and virtually every alternative to those actions.
I'm curious what you mean by this, because I'd expect the American values of independence and free expression to be counter to wanting Facebook to actively supress divisive discourse. (Yes, I know the first amendment only applies to the government; the point is the spirit of the "American ethical framework")
At many other times, the concentration of wealth, and therefore power, was identified as a problem and actively mitigated. For example, the founding fathers of the USA were quite anti corporate and actions like the Boston Tea Party were explicitly so.
They didn’t want concentration of political power but they had the economic power. Interestingly the political power endangers them because it has the power to take away their economic power. That’s the real battle still going on today.
It was a selfish play not a principled one. For example, slavery was written into the constitution. How the hell does that happen when all men (and no women) were supposedly equal? Slavery was enshrined as an economic and then a political right (2/3 vote).
Not all of them were for slavery but that was the end result of the document/of the competing forces at play. It institutionalized slavery in the new nation.
Wikipedia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of...
“According to those scholars who saw the root of Jefferson's thought in Locke's doctrine, Jefferson replaced "estate" with "the pursuit of happiness", although this does not mean that Jefferson meant the "pursuit of happiness" to refer primarily or exclusively to property.”
What has gradually happened is that personhood has been gradually extended to more and more entities (sometimes non human).
So this notion that colonists were against economic power is just wrong. Others may have held the notion but not as the colonists if you go by the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
It isn’t well recognized. It’s just a debate/fight people have been having for awhile.
I mean, it's one thing if we're talking about something like an airbag, where harm can result from normal usage because of a design flaw. It's another thing to talk about the Ford Pinto -- where harm could happen due to accidental misusage.
Does Facebook encourage division? Do ice cream ads encourage obesity? Or alcohol ads encourage drunk driving? (I get that Facebook's "engagement algorithms" are designed to maximize profit, and has a side effect of showing you things that are upsetting and frustrating... but that isn't their design. I'm no fan of "the algorithm", and don't think they should use it, but I think they should be free to.)
In this instance, I don't think it's fair to say Facebook has a "harmful effect". The abuse, misuse, and addiction to Facebook can be harmful, for sure... but that's not Facebook's fault. That's the end user's fault.
Should Facebook come with a warning label, like cigarettes? I don't think so. (I also don't think cigarettes should be mandated to come with images of people dying of lung cancer when alcohol can be sold without images of people with liver disease... but I digress.)
Everyone wants to "mitigate harm". But you need to be able to separate "harm due to malfunction", "harm due to accidents", and "harm due to abuse". This seems to be firmly in the third category, which is the least concrete and most "squishy" category.
Especially squishy, when "harm" is considered to be people saying and/or thinking the wrong things.
Yeah, it wasn't me who posted this reply, it was the cells in my body. It's their fault... I think complex systems create effects that go beyond the individual parts. Facebook is running and profiting from such an 'effect' on society.
Their right to freely express their creativity by making the feed how they wish should be balanced with the large scale (negative) effects that appear in the system.
The Ugly
We talk about the good and the bad of our work often. I want to talk about the ugly.
We connect people.
That can be good if they make it positive. Maybe someone finds love. Maybe it even saves the life of someone on the brink of suicide.
So we connect more people
That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools.
And still we connect people.
The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good. It is perhaps the only area where the metrics do tell the true story as far as we are concerned.
That isn’t something we are doing for ourselves. Or for our stock price (ha!). It is literally just what we do. We connect people. Period.
That’s why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of the work we do to bring more communication in. The work we will likely have to do in China some day. All of it.
The natural state of the world is not connected. It is not unified. It is fragmented by borders, languages, and increasingly by different products. The best products don’t win. The ones everyone use win.
I know a lot of people don’t want to hear this. Most of us have the luxury of working in the warm glow of building products consumers love. But make no mistake, growth tactics are how we got here. If you joined the company because it is doing great work, that’s why we get to do that great work. We do have great products but we still wouldn’t be half our size without pushing the envelope on growth. Nothing makes Facebook as valuable as having your friends on it, and no product decisions have gotten as many friends on as the ones made in growth. Not photo tagging. Not news feed. Not messenger. Nothing.
In almost all of our work, we have to answer hard questions about what we believe. We have to justify the metrics and make sure they aren’t losing out on a bigger picture. But connecting people. That’s our imperative. Because that’s what we do. We connect people.
Shortly after the leak Bosworth distanced himself from the post. https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/29/17178086/facebook-growth-...
I say this from first-hand experience. I discovered that people I called friends were racist. I now consider those friends merely acquaintances, and I have since deleted my account. Better to just be ignorant of people's ignorance when I can't do anything about it.
If it didn't kill people that we love we'd marvel at its capability.
Is Facebook a 'cancer'? I think it's more of a cultural radiological device that exposes the cancer that's already there.
Is this certain? The effects of useful features on growth are longer term and harder to measure than, for example, placing and styling friend suggestions in a way to confuse users into thinking they're friend requests.
Where does he bring up the subject of Facebook connecting people to the level of addiction? With the only goal of maximizing screen time (and dopamine) to sell more ads? It's not "connecting people", it's "addicting people".
It is as if a 3rd world foodbank for Africa was bragging that they feed the world so well that 90% of Africa is now overweight, but that's good because they continue to "feed people".
Right, so what assumptions are leading to the conclusion that this situation can only be caused by everyone being ethically challenged? Are ethics shared and absolute enough for the answer to this question to be easy or black & white? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism
> Luckily I’ve never had to face such a dilemma
Are you certain about that? I realize you’re talking specifically about C-level execs debating something in a board room, but consider the ways that we all face lesser versions of the same dilemma. For example, do you ever consume and/or pay money for things that are generally harmful to society? Environmental concerns are easy to pick on since more or less everything we buy has negative environmental effects... ever bought a car? flown on an airplane? Smoked a cigarette or enjoyed a backyard fire pit? Bought anything unnecessarily wrapped in plastic? It’s really hard to make the less harmful choice, and a lot of people don’t care at all, so by and large as a society we put up with the harm in favor of convenience. As consumers, we are at least half of the equation that is leading to socially harmful products existing. If we didn’t consume it, the company meetings wouldn’t have anything to debate.
The mails from the case are good to understand the internal discussions: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jan/10/737-max-sca...
I really don't understand your point, unless you're implying that there was a meeting where Boeing planned to kill those people. I am not an aviation expert, but what happened with the MAX seems to be a product of the certification process, urgent business needs, systems engineering issues, and bad internal communications at Boeing.
I haven't seen any evidence that someone specifically predicted the chain of events which would unfold on those flights, and clearly communicated the issue, then had executive(s) respond that it was 'worth the money'.
As an aside, I have seen quotes about the 787, which were similar to those in your linked article (mostly with respect to production quality issues), yet the 787 has not had similar accidents. One problem with working on such huge projects is that the line engineers do not understand that managers are constantly hearing alarmist 'warnings' which don't pan out. If 1% of Boeing staff give false alarms in a year, that means there are 1600 false alarms.
People understand the consequences of what they say. I doubt that most people will say that statements out loud, even when they know that are true.
But, people knew and money was involved.
* February 2018
“I don’t know how to refer to the very very few of us on the program who are interested only in truth…”
“Would you put your family on a MAX simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn’t.”
“No.”
* August 2015
“I just Jedi mind tricked this fools. I should be given $1000 every time I take one of these calls. I save this company a sick amount of $$$$.”
Those quotes would be much more convincing if those employees put every prediction they ever made on the record, not just the ones that turned out to be sort-of right in hindsight.
From manager's perspective, you can't listen to everyone complaining about being rushed, understaffed, and underfunded (, because everyone looking to cover their butts in a bureaucracy does all three). On the other hand, you have to be on the lookout for credible issues.
Bifurcating would have been saying that everyone is either a superforecaster or an alarmist, and I never said that.
You may not agree with me, but that doesn't mean that I fell into a logical fallacy.
This conversation doesn't seem like it's going to go anywhere productive.
Nobody planned to kill the astronauts on the Challenger. Such a systemic failure to anticipate and manage risk correctly is a team effort and heavily incentive-driven. Putting incentives in place that reward risk-taking increases the odds someone will die.
The common understanding seems to be that the managers decided to launch when the booster temperature was cold (though not necessarily out of limits), and some were warning that it may cause some unforeseen issues.
My read is that each limit in the operations manual should have been backed by a test to failure, or at least a simulation of what would occur if the vehicle was operated outside the limits. Such a process allows the operators to clearly understand what can go wrong, and why the limits are set where they are. This is what they did on the SSMEs, but not on the boosters (because they thought the boosters were fairly simple).[0]
[0] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-...
I have been in software industry for 15 years and this happens all the time, being forced to release unfinished features, asked to ignore security, backups, etc. I would imagine same thing happens in other industries.
From my non-aviation perspective, it looks like they basically pieced together a bunch of complex systems, with each team making a number of (different) assumptions about each system. The systems themselves were influenced by FAA requirements to maintain the old certificate, which meant that certain desirable changes were impossible, so workarounds were devised. The problems were due to misunderstandings about how the systems would work when assembled, and these issues were not discovered and/or communicated. It really seems like a systems engineering problem, aggravated by a number of external influences (including business reasons and certification).
It is supposedly costly in time and money to acquire a new rating but it has been done obviously.
The airlines wanted a single pool of interchangeable pilots flying in name interchangeable planes (their existing 737s and the 737 MAX). Supposedly one of the airlines threatened to take new business to Airbus and had penalties written into the contract to make the 737 MAX fly under the existing certificate.
So it wasn’t the old certificate driving these issues, it was Boeing and it’s customers wanting to maintain the old certificate that drove the issues. That is a very large difference.
The FAA may be in the right or in the wrong, but it has made certifying new designs almost prohibitively expensive and time-consuming; for evidence of this, simply look at the Cessna 172 (still in production on a 60-year old certificate), and what happened when Bombardier tried to put a new airliner into production.
You're definitely right that the airlines wanted interchangeable type ratings for crew, but the issue slightly more complicated than you're painting it.
I never argued the old certificate forced the issues, the certification system just strongly incentivized 'upgrading' the 737. This was one of many causes.
“Frankly right now all my internal warning bells are going off,” said the email. “And for the first time in my life, I’m sorry to say that I’m hesitant about putting my family on a Boeing airplane.” [1]
[1]https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/30/boeing-engineer-raised-conce...
>>"I haven't seen any evidence that someone specifically predicted the chain of events which would unfold on those flights, and clearly communicated the issue, then had executive(s) respond that it was 'worth the money'."
In large projects like the MAX, there are always people raising concerns.
Does that mean that people raising concerns can be ignored, or does that mean that most large projects only get by with luck?
One of the best examples of this is Dave Lewis, who lead the design of the F-4 Phantom II, one of the most successful fighter aircraft of all time. He directed the structural design team to design for 80% of the required ultimate load, because he knew that everyone was conservative in their numbers; then the design was tested. The structure ended up lighter than comparable aircraft, and the Phantom II had phenomenal performance.
It also helps if the managers are good at making predictions of their own; Tetlock has written two great books about this, including: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superforecasting:_The_Art_and_...
Well, the tobacco industry is still alive and well, and those companies literally peddle death.
Parachutes kill people? I thought they do the opposite. Maybe firearms or alcohol make better examples.
Executives have a "duty" to increase "shareholder value". It's not that they necessarily wanted to do X, but their hands were tied because the "data" clearly showed that X was best for shareholders. Plus, if X was so bad, it's really the government's fault for not making it explicitly illegal.
Shareholders aren't individuals either, they're mostly mutual funds, pension funds, ETFs, etc... that makes algorithmic investment decisions. They didn't ask for X, but the funds they invested in will react to not getting X.
What percentage of people in these meetings are so wealthy they can risk everything over morally gray area decisions like this? Further how many can get away with it repeatedly should they choose to fight a battle like this?
I've found that when people use "wolf pack" (or "caveman times") explanations, what they're actually doing is using social models that (surprise!) reflect the culture that created them: humans in the twentieth century.
I've quit jobs rather than doing sketchy things. For people in these industries, there's always a next job.
So, its more a "stay and fight" or "get rolled over and threaten/quit" decision. I'm betting most people just weigh the monthly mortgage payment against that and they raise the issue, but it doesn't get pushed beyond the discussion phase. If this goes on long enough, they switch jobs, or they become that person that just keeps their head down and do what they are told.
You don't have to be the just-following-orders guy, is what I'm saying. Somebody else might--that doesn't have to be you, and shouldn't be.
Why not? Ockham's Razor says to accept the most parsimonious explanation, and I think that's it.
I mean look at little kids: they're amoral monsters. If they weren't so cute our species would have gone extinct ages ago.
Look at our methods to train ourselves to be better people: religions cause wars while "Wolf of Wallstreet" is a big hit. ($392 million worldwide.)
Look at our leaders.
https://www.laweekly.com/an-open-letter-to-the-makers-of-the...
> Your film is a reckless attempt at continuing to pretend that these sorts of schemes are entertaining, even as the country is reeling from yet another round of Wall Street scandals. We want to get lost in what? These phony financiers' fun sexcapades and coke binges? Come on, we know the truth. This kind of behavior brought America to its knees.
My point is that we did find it entertaining to the tune of $0.4B, and that doesn't bode well for our general level of moral development.
> THE PERFECT IRONY THAT ‘THE WOLF OF WALL STREET’ FILM WAS ALSO A REAL-LIFE SCAM
(caps in original)
> How Leo got caught up in a money-laundering scheme that screwed the Malaysian people out of billions.
The very poor and very rich are often placed in front of ethically interesting bargains, such as a trade of life for money, whereas Hacker News has trouble even daring to ballpark the dollar value to life -- a middle class aesthetic where one has neither the resources nor the desperation to trade in flesh.
I knew someone who ran a FB group that devolved into conspiracy theories and absurd levels of anger to the point that members of the group were lashing out at local politicians.
The group owner liked the power and influence so rationalized it as "increasing public engagement in politics." This person is otherwise a vegetarian who fosters animals and works in the medical field.
The difficult ethical discussion probably never happens. The decisions being made in those meetings are usually seen as small/inconsequential. The problems caused by those "small" decisions are ignored. Eventually those problems become normalized allowing another "small" decision to be made. Humans seem to be very bad at recognizing how a set of "small" decisions eventually add up to major - sometimes shocking[1] - consequences that nobody would have approved if asked directly. Most of the time, nobody realizes just how deviant their situation had become.
For a good explanation of the mechanism underlying the normalization of deviance (as an abstract model), I strongly recommend this[2] short talk by Richard Cook.
[1] https://blog.aopa.org/aopa/2015/12/07/the-normalization-of-d...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGLYEDpNu60 ("Resilience In Complex Adaptive Systems")
The people in control were the only ones pushing for the unethical actions, but most others were a lot more quiet than I was and several stuck around until the bitter end.
Seems likely that social media as an industry selects more strongly for unethical executives, presumably because online advertising is the only effective way to monetize social media and it is more or less fundamentally unethical. I imagine the same effect can be observed among tobacco and fossil energy executives--these are industries where there is no ethical monetization strategy, at least not one that is in the same competitive ballpark as the unethical strategy.
But a bike blog putting ads for bike saddles on the bottom of their page to pay for their server costs and writing staff? Hard to see how that's unethical unless you think selling anything is unethical.
No, I meant "online advertising as an industry". It's unethical to the extent that it depends on stealing user data, which presumably is the overwhelming majority of the industry by value (i.e., I'm assuming your privacy-respecting bike saddles ads don't account for even 1% of the industry's value).
More so than the fossil fuel industry? Big tobacco? Or the pharmaceutical industry? Wallstreet? Clothing/apparel manufacturers?
I already addressed this in my second sentence:
> I imagine the same effect can be observed among tobacco and fossil energy executives
No, that wasn't meant to be an exhaustive list of unethical industries.
That showed me what kind of company it was. The decision went directly against one of the company’s supposed core values. This was not a small company. Don’t work there anymore.
In one case, people had different ideas of what's more ethical/user friendly, since we can't resolve those disagreements with more arguing, we go with metrics, and metrics have no morality.
In another case, everyone agreed that it was slightly shady, but it was a highly competitive market and we have to do it to stay alive.
On the bright side, if a company ventures too deep into bad practices, it will eventually lose trust of the public. Which is why the capitalistic world hasn't descended into complete madness portrayed in dystopian sci/fi films.
In my case, I told my manager about a system design problem that would cause a daily annoyance to 100k people, forcing them to input their passwords more often than necessary. He said, "they'll accept it." I said, "I quit."
Movie executives discuss (do they even?) the ramifications of their movies which glorify ills? Do they censor violence, suicide, etc?
"Some 700,000 members of the Rohingya community had recently fled the country amid a military crackdown and ethnic violence. In March, a United Nations investigator said Facebook was used to incite violence and hatred against the Muslim minority group. The platform, she said, had “turned into a beast.”" https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/myanmar-...
I’m not saying FB is not culpable, but I’m saying if they are, then so are others.
Having an agenda is normal and is good. Everybody that plans for the future has an agenda. What is wrong is to have a "hidden agenda".
A "hidden agenda" is wrong because is a form of manipulation. When an organization has a "hidden agenda" means that they are lying to achieve a goal that they are hiding.
If a movie agenda is to "create awareness of human trafficking", and it shows how "human trafficking" impacts peoples lives, that is not "hidden" and it is actually an agenda that most people supports.
So, to have an agenda is intelligent, needed, common, awesome behavior. Stones have no-agenda, rocks have no agenda. To have a "hidden agenda" is what should be criticized.
Why will anyone think that to have an agenda is bad?
Deep breath.
As an industry, we are often doing things that are perceived to be evil. I've noticed the following:
1. Some of that interpretation is just wrong. People from the outside tend to have a poor understanding of what we do (providers, centers, insurers) and draw conclusions based on highly imperfect information. This is compounded by the fact that journalists have a terrible comprehension of what we do and an incentive to dramatize and oversimplify it - resulting in people reading the news and walking away misinformed and wrongly feeling like they're now educated on the topic. This happens a lot.
2. We sometimes do things, or want to do things, that have potential harms and potential benefits - e.g., in health insurance, I'd love to have had the ability to twist people's arms into coming to get a flu shot. It would have been a huge net benefit to their health. It would have been a net reduction in our costs. It would have been great! If we'd had the ability to ignore patient autonomy and force it, or carrot-and-stick it, we probably would have. We would not have conceptualized it as "ignoring patient preference," we would have conceptualized it as "preventing a bunch of preventable hospitalizations and deaths and, for the elderly, permanent consequences of hospitalizations." And that would have been true! And would have allowed us to not think about the trade-off so much. It's not lying to yourself: it's looking at the grey, round-edged parts of a cost-benefit analysis and subjectively leaning it in your direction. My motivation there isn't even about the money - the money just gets it on the radar as something my employer would be willing to prioritize.
3. Resource scarcity. I only have so many resources to allocate. One may benefit a patient X; another may benefit them 10X. If X benefits my organization and the 10x choice doesn't, I'll probably choose X. By itself I'm not choosing to do harm - I'm choosing a win/win. Enough decisions like that, in enough contexts, probably do give rise to net harm. But the choice isn't to do harm.
4. Not every battle can be a "will I burn my career over this?" battle. If I'd ever been faced with a choice that I thought was harm > benefit to patients, I would have burnt the house down over it. But I haven't. I've been faced with lots of little grey questions with uncertain costs and uncertain benefits where there was, in fact, benefit, and usually not just to us but to the patients too. I imagine that's where most organizations go awry: a thousand decisions like this, shaking out under the pervasive organizational need for profit. Like a million million particles of sand moved by the tide, settling out into an overall pattern due to gravity. I think the badness is generally an emergent pattern, not a single person choosing to do evil, or choosing themselves over causing harm to many. I've never been in that position, ever, so either my career is highly anomalous, or that's just not how those choices present themselves in real life. I suspect it's the latter. (Or, I guess, my being amoral is a valid third possibility.)
Those with such issues either quit or work in non controversial parts of the org.
An example: I am not a Marxist. But I think the Marxist question of "surplus value" as an ethical question is relevant and interesting. I pointed it out on HN a few times. Again, without being a Marxist, just intellectually curious. Nobody ever asks me if I am really a Marxist. I get downvoted pretty severely when I point it out. I get an impression that they smell a whiff of the opposing sports team and turn negative.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackmccullough/2019/12/09/the-p...
I'm really, really tired of hearing about the "sociopath CEO" numbers. They're not real.
They had microphones in the audience. I walked up and directly asked for the "data" they claimed to have showing no impact will be had. They claimed and I quote "we have no hardcore data" (audience was laughing at the word choice given the topic). I said that "well, then how can you claim to be making a data-driven decision?" Drummond answered that "we know this is right and we are sure." The town hall was a waste of time. Nothing we said was heard and all they did was recite lines at us from the stage that made it look like either they did not understand what we had to say, or they were trying very hard to appear to not understand. Both sides were talking, but nothing we said seemed to change their mind, They came there to deliver a policy, not to collect feedback on it, despite claiming this was a meeting to discuss it. That was clear.
We did not give up. Google's TGIF was the next day. A number of people came there early and lined up and the microphones, ready to bring this up again and again. In front of the whole company and the CEO as well (Larry and Sergey were not at the town hall and claimed to have not heard of the policy until "the ruckus started").
I guess they saw the large line of people and relented. Before the scheduled TGIF began they announced they will reverse the policy.
This was a rare victory, for this sort of a situation. I am willing to bet that there are lots of good people at facebook who also fought as hard or harder against this. They just probably lost. Having seen how this plays out internally, I am not surprised, just sad.
To anyone at FB who fought against this, I send you my thanks!
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/23/google-bans-sexually-expli...
If the customers are willing to pay a huge markup on a product, who are you to tell them wiser?
- youdontchargeenough11 (probably)
This is more like a pharma company or Monsanto knowing that their product kills, but ignore or hide the data and keep selling the product.
And yet, here we are.
I could go down the rabbit hole of chasing down all those contracts and would probably find that many of the products my company makes get sold to groups and causes that I don't support. But in the end; I've gotta eat.
Do I want to throw away my career which is 99% unrelated to the SJW cause I support just because 5% of our products eventually get used against that cause. What about the 95% of our products which go to worthy causes?
I'll say it again... I just gotta eat, man. What's good for the gander is probably good for the goose too.
Look, do what you want, it's your life. I spent a decade working in defense and now I don't. Some times were uncomfortable. I hope you keep your eyes open when making decisions to avoid some of the discomfort I've felt in the work I've done.
I agree that it's often a moral grey zone but in this case it's pretty clear. If you're an engineer there's plenty of other companies to choose from.
Keeping America on the forefront of technology has its benefits. If we don't invest in cornering these technologies; our adversaries will.
Unfortunately it's the same technology that has kept us in the middle east that's also been a forceful deterrent which safeguards all Americans.
"The students of the Harvard University write that I should leave the criminal Dow Chemical Company.
I'm a chemist. What should I do?
If I develop a substance, someone can come and make something out of it. It could be good for humanity, or it could be bad for humanity.
Besides napalm, Dow Chemical manufactures 800 other products.
The insecticides that we manufacture help mankind.
The herbicides that we manufacture scorch this harvest and cause him harm."
I have used that excuse myself. I'm trying to get better at not using it.
The discussions are very simple: Course of action A makes us X$, course of action B makes us XXX$. Therefore course of action B is taken. There is no consideration of other effects besides, perhaps, a quantization of risks. Risk of losing the 'good guys' facade, counterbalanced by PR expenses, or risk of being sued, counterbalanced by legal expenses.
I cannot believe that everyone is ethicality challenged, only perhaps the people in control. So what goes through that minds of people who don't agree with such decisions. Do they keep quiet, just worry about the payroll, convince themselves that what the management is selling is a good argument for such product/service....
Luckily I've never had to face such a dilemma, but can't be envious of those who have faced and come out of it by losing either their morals or jobs.