Google will always do evil | Hacker News Reader

Google will always do evil

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35 pointsgnanesh25 comments

I’ve always loved David Mitchell’s take on Google’s motto:

“There’s something fishy about Google’s motto, “Don’t Be Evil.” I’m not saying it’s controversial but it makes you think, “Why bring that up? Why have you suddenly put the subject of being evil on the agenda?” It’s suspicious in the same way as Ukip constantly pointing out how racist they’re not”

Because Microsoft were (are) evil, and they tried to market themselves as being different.

They are not.

But going out of your way to say you are definitely not evil just makes you come across like this:

< https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_YmDcCpD1gc >

So in a sense, if you get past an age of naivety and if you don’t want a Google job purely for self-interested gain, then Google’s approach has always fallen on deaf ears. I guess their recent actions have just made it more obvious in the mainstream.

Going out of your way to say it?

People act as if it's always been a tagline below the corporate logo on every Google webpage and communication.

From what I've read, it was a half-joking contribution from Paul Buchheit in the early days, when they were brainstorming about what the company ethos could be. It apparently caught on internally with staff.

I'm personally glad that it's been dropped, because it's overblown and it feels like the whole thing has been tedious forever.

Any large and highly profitable company will be doing something 'evil' in the estimation of someone who's looking for it.

You’re suggesting that a big multinational corp just leaves phrases in its public-facing motto, or in heavily vetted handbook materials, by accident, or as a joke, or on a whim?

In my experience, absolutely nothing gets into a handbook or a code of conduct unless you go waaay out of your way to put it there, through legal & compliance, HR, senior leadership teams, etc.

There’s zero chance Google treats this like a cheeky wink.

Proposed UKIP motto: “At least we’re not BNP!”

While I'm no fan of Google, the premise of this article annoys me. Good and Evil are such a simple concept and have no place in reality. Good and Evil are always subjective to the viewport. I don't disagree with the facts of the article, just that its cast in the simplistic light of "Evil" for dramatic effect.

Maybe Google removed the Don't Be Evil because of articles like this pushing a Good vs. Evil narrative.

I don’t agree. While Good and Evil are certainly relative, normative social constructs, in any given place and time there are a lot of behaviors that are widely accepted as “good” or as “evil” — and most of them (e.g. don’t commit cold-blooded murder) are not even near any gray area and are fairly universal and serve important, widely valued pragmatic interests.

It seems overly pedantic to me to act like just because deep, technical moral philosophy can be quite tricky, it means we should abandon big, first-order, obviously pragmatic notions of good and evil.

> In any given place and time there are a lot of behaviors that are widely accepted as “good” or as “evil".

Philosophically that's a loaded topic, and gets to the subject of "objective morality". I could bore you with arguments I suppose, but the key is, that's not a given -- even on the "big, first-order" good and evil definitions.

But what's worse is when you're judging and using those judgments for your argument, when you could just be supplying facts and letting us come to our own conclusions.

E.g.:

A: Nuclear weapons are very, very evil.

B: The US used Nuclear weapons to end a long, protracted, brutal, and deadly war.

A is a judgement, which I may or may not agree with. B is a fact, which also seems to diminish the power of A.

> Philosophically that's a loaded topic...

I don't agree. I think the existence of widely accepted notions of "good" and "evil" is actually an empirical claim. It says nothing about whether society is right, just whether you could list off some claims and get an unambiguous majority to agree with statements like "Murder is evil".

Also, nuclear weapons seems exactly like choosing a topic already known to be in a gray, contentious zone but then acting like it's a high leverage and useful example for widely held beliefs about morality. We tend to sensationalize and focus so much on these gray zone topics, that we forget just how huge the space of basically agreed moral principles is.

There certainly are great moral philosophy problems. I remember when I first read Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons and thought about "The Repugnant Conclusion" it was eye opening. It would definitely be useful for people choosing large-scale policies or facing real problems of humanitarian crisis or population ethics.

But on a day to day basis, it's childish and useless to point at that kind of academic moral philosophy and argue that we should just treat "good" and "evil" as relative fictions. No way. There's big, obvious, widely shared views that define what our linguistic constructs of "good" and "evil" generally mean in a day to day context, and serve super useful, pragmatic functions in the operations of society.

> I think the existence of widely accepted notions of "good" and "evil" is actually an empirical claim.

Quit moving the goalposts. Objective morality is not the same as whether lexical definitions of "good" and "evil" exist in all the world's languages.

My real point which you left out is that judgements about such things should really be left to the reader. Saying such things like "x is evil" really doesn't help the conversation.

> Quit moving the goalposts. Objective morality is not the same as whether lexical definitions of "good" and "evil" exist in all the world's languages.

What are you talking about? I was only ever talking about the lexical part, which was what the original parent of these comments was talking about (e.g. removing the lexical part just because the objective part doesn't exist in complex moral philosophy terms). No goalpost moving (I'm really not sure what you're talking about with that.)

> My real point which you left out is that judgements about such things should really be left to the reader. Saying such things like "x is evil" really doesn't help the conversation.

What? Again I am not seeing a connection either to your earlier comment or my original point. But regardless, I disagree with the claim that "Saying such things like "x is evil" really doesn't help the conversation".

It absolutely does help when there is a commonly understood lexical (as you call it) notion of evil that's widely accepted.

As I quoted:

> In any given place and time there are a lot of behaviors that are widely accepted as “good” or as “evil".

That's objective morality.

No, it’s not. It’s just a set of widely accepted heuristics.

Geniune question is anyone at liberty to comment on Google culture? Google has always been a sort of grass is always greener aspirational employer to me but lately I have to admit externally they don’t look as good.

No company should have the choice between being evil or not.

That would require a law system that perfectly captures all ways of being evil. In reality, the law can only play catch up at best. In campaign donation reality even this will not happen.

A minimal of fair labor practices for imported goods, enforcing secure data practices, and things like mandatory arbitration aren't too much to ask though. It's not rocket science.

Exactly, market forces and the legal requirement to increase shareholder value on a quarterly basis ensures they are all in a race to be as evil as possible.

The motto "don't be evil" forces every brain hearing it to process "be evil". This is made particularly ponient by research showing that people don't process negation well. This is why the transition, ignored by the article, to a positive statement of the desired outcome was adopted. Regardless of whether Google attains the behavior it lasts out for itself, this is probably a good change.

Similarly the whole “Love Trumps Hate” thing was probably a poor choice, considering it literally starts with “Love Trump”

I think that over time, big corporations like Google and Facebook tend to attract increasingly evil (greedy, financially motivated) people - It creates an environment where non-evil people feel uncomfortable and it causes them leave the company at a higher rate which makes the problem worse. Even the people at the top slowly become more evil (via osmosis) without realising it.

Was this really just last month? I feel like I participated in outrage over the removal of "don't be evil" last year or the year before.

And it's not like it ever meant anything. I agree terrible companies are terrible... but there hasn't been a turning point recently or ever.

There are articles on the internet going back many years claiming that they've quietly removed it. Perhaps they remove it occasionally to generate buzz or as part of some kind of A/B testing?

As I write this, it is currently included: https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct.html

i like the idea of A/B testing that particular statement

i mean, what were the alternatives? did they test against "Be evil" or "Don't be good?" or "Remove the headphone jack" or something?

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