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A comment on A lot of “idiotic” things have reasonable explanations (2011). Parent comment

Re:A lot of “idiotic” things have reasonable explanations (2... by red_admiral on Wednesday May 27, 2020 @08:28AM (#23322173)
To take a recent example: when a company like TripleByte launches a new product - namely that key parts of all profiles will suddenly be public - they might have thought about this with different teams for a long time too, but commenters on the internet said they were wrong and eventually they admitted that they made a stupid mistake.

Netflix's plan paid off. TripleByte's didn't.

Apples and Oranges, I know, but how do you tell the two apart without hindsight?

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Re:A lot of “idiotic” things have reasonable explanations (2... by Veen on Wednesday May 27, 2020 @09:58AM (#23323296)
It's easy to tell them apart because ethical and instrumental reasoning have distinct value systems.

It is irrelevant that Triplebyte's public profiles may have been instrumentally valuable for the company in the long run. No one arguing against them cared about that. But they did care about the ethical implications of that decision -- it was wrong even if it turned out to be good for Triplebyte, which it didn't because their plan was so brazenly unethical that they got a spanking.

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