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Comment by jtr_47 | Hacker News Reader

This is not a complex topic. It's very simple. Facebook and the various other messaging platforms sole purpose is to make money. End of story. They have no values no morals or ethics. They do what is necessary and within a legal framework (region dependent) that allows them to make money.

IF our USA government decides to designate Facebook, twitter etc. News Media outlets, then they will have to confirm to a different set of laws within our country and maybe others.

These companies are merely a 2.0 of USENET NEWS. and nothing more. They've monetize the users' of the system.

Peace

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>They have no values no morals or ethics.

This is really not quite true because the companies are not run by some faceless AI -- they're run by actual people who have to interact with other humans such as their friends and family, are concerned about being allowed into the country club and so on. So there is some back-pressure against total amorality, albeit not codified.

Ultimately, people will behave as per their incentives. As long as the push back and the negative publicity from it threatens a greater loss than the profits from thing they were about to do, they'll back off. Otherwise, I don't think they'll mind letting go of a few people (maybe even to make examples of them) and push ahead.

Exactly. Facebook's primary objective is to return as much value (money) to investors as possible. The way they treat the users of the system, their employees, local governments, etc. is all a reflection of that.

That's the fiduciary duty of every CEO: Duties of care, loyalty and disclosure. The loyalty is the most important one because it involves having the best interest of the shareholders in mind. This very simplified means "increase value".

If this is done taking into account all available information, no info is ignored, no info is hidden, then there is nothing more to say. The CEO has done their job.

There is no mandate for a business to be ethical, moral unless this is considered to be in the best interest of the shareholders. Is FB value going up or down if FB decides to be moral and ethical towards the users? That answers the question "why are only some companies moral".

Apple for example decided to take the high road and be the champion of user privacy because they failed to compete with FB, Google, and the likes in the battle for users' data. So adopting a "moral/ethical" position opposing others was the way to bring value to the company.

Companies are not people. Decisions are driven by profit whether in the short or long term.

One might reasonably think there should be mandates to be ethical, moral, etc. Society at large does not benefit from allowing companies to act as amoral predators. Which is what you describe above.

And we do codify some of those ethical and moral mandates in the form of laws and government regulations. Ultimately the only way to ensure that companies consistently behave well is to elect politicians who will force them to do so.

Why not add them to a company's charter? I guess it would scare away potential investors, but maybe other investors would be attracted by them.

I'm in the camp that doesn't believe a free society should be mandating individual morals.

Edit: leaving ethics out of this.

All laws are inherently mandates of ethics/morals.

Edit: to address the parent edit to remove “ethics” and distinguish “morals” for different treatment, the division of subjective preferences into “ethics” and “morals" (and “aesthetics”, for that matter) is fairly arbitrary and subjective in any case.

Good laws are conservative codifications of consensus morality. A just legal code forbids only what the vast majority would consider wrong regardless of the law.

When the law forbids what people don't consider wrong, it becomes tyranny.

> A just legal code forbids only what the vast majority would consider wrong regardless of the law.

I don't think that's entirely true; legal codes often specify things on which there is a strong preference for uniformity (or benefits which can only be gained by uniformity) but where the details of the uniform rules are not themselves a near-universal consensus independent of the law. I don't think this makes them bad legal codes. (Prohibiting driving on the left-hand side of a public roadway in the direction of travel, for instance.)

Monetary incentives, while very powerful and something that must be reckoned with, are not the only incentives that exist.

And Facebook doesn't have much beyond monetary incentives at this point. There is clearly no 'greater good' they are striving for and any interesting scaling technical work can be found at any of the other big tech companies.

For individuals yes. For the kind of aggregates we call public companies, no. The push there is towards profit, and humans are rewarded or replaced based on that.

I apologize for the late reply. The idea for this response came to me just now as I was absently-minded scrolling through old comments, and I wanted to try expressing it. Don't feel obligated to respond.

I think we agree that individual humans are driven by a diverse set of incentives and motivations, some of which cause the pursuit financial gain, but many of which do not.

It seems that you are saying that a public company is an entity that purely seeks financial gain (at least, as its meta-objective -- e.g. it may take actions that it believes will increase profits in a rather indirect way, with direct monetary loss initially), and that non-monetary incentives are not a meaningful factor. Please correct me if I don't have that right.

Public companies are made up of people, so if your above argument is to hold, it requires that the non-monetary incentives driving those individuals are _utterly and completely_ suppressed, at least for any actions and decisions related to their work.

I can believe that the non-monetary incentives are _heavily_ suppressed by the company, but I don't think this suppression is so utterly effective such that those incentives should be entirely disregarded. I'm not sure how much weight we should place on these other factors, but it certainly seems that it usually won't be 0.

Individually, maybe. But the organization having morals? It's hard to tell what that would even look like.

I'm talking about only individuals. Ultimately they have to go golfing somewhere, with someone. Unless they build their own golf course. Oh wait...

Most of the people they golf with could not care less if they suppress rights here and there. They either applaud it, or have themselves gotten rich doing similar shit...

Agreed, they can live inside a sociopath bubble. I doubt Sheryl Sandberg does though.

Sure, but humans have immense ability to rationalize their own behavior. I highly doubt this is a pressure comparable to profit seeking.

Furthermore, SV is a bubble, and FB is one too. Why would you think there would be pressure from outside the bubble if they only hire people who are enthusiastic about FB to begin with? The people playing golf probably share a world view from the get go.

This effect works for a small or even large business, but for a multinational super-corp? Forget it, these companies are machines designed to abstract decisions away to numbers and dissolve actual responsibility.

We should not expect corporations to choose to act morally. We should regulate them so they don't have the choice.

If I have 10 people and 5 moral dilemmas but only 2 or 3 people care about each dilemma, then it is very likely the group will fail on all 5 dilemmas due to lack of collective action. This problem scales well to more people and problems.

Corporations generally do not act morally because the number of people willing to halt the company to maintain them is well below the majority. However, they are generally all aligned to further the bottom line of the business.

If ten people cannot even get majority agree on any one of five different moral issues, then those issues are not universal. At worst, they are not evem issues but someones pet peeve.

I did not say that they couldn't agree, but they they aren't motivated to provoke action uniformly.

If your manager says 'Do X.', where X is a mild violation of some one's privacy or some such, can you get the majority of your coworkers to collaborate and refuse your manager? Or will most go on with their lives because they don't care enough about that particular pet cause or 'it isn't that bad'.

There's no need for the majority to do something. Look at Google and military AI. A vocal minority with the implicit backing of the majority was quite effective.

Even if that's a very non clear cut issue. Now the DoD will contract someone else, and the resulting system will be probably worse, leading to loss of more human lives. (Though that could help with the lower utilization of these systems, which might help scale back military action. Or not...)

Increasingly some departments decision making processes are actually being run by some faceless AI. Even worse, the humans pretend the problems they created will go away if they just sprinkle some magic AI fairy dust on it.

Either way it's a completely unacceptable dodge, especially for Facebook and Google.

> they're run by actual people who have to interact with other humans such as their friends and family

Who need to continue to recruit people who do have actual values. It's still a play for them

I disagree. These businesses are run by an AI, but one with many faces, which makes the consequences of their decisions very similar if not identical to that of a "faceless AI".

It's not run by an electronic AI by any means, but it is as if each and every employee is an instance of the "Chinese room" [0]. Each individual in the system is focused on a set of local objectives, may or may not have their own individual biases, and have varying capacities when it comes to predicting the future and reflecting on the past. The leadership have de jure full granular control, but not de facto full granular control and can only really make big changes or none at all. The net result of these interactions are what the users see on the outside.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

You do know what the “A” in AI stands for? I’m not disagreeing with your central point, although I think given how well the incentives of the leadership are with most outcomes debates about their degree of control are not really important. At the end of the day though, if you’re calling people or a system made up people an AI, you’re bending the term past the breaking point in a way I feel obscures and distracts from your actual point.

That's a fair point. What would be the correct term? A user of a website or a customer of sufficiently-large business not dealing with only one single human being, but a multitude of them behind a few human and computer agents. The user or customer could judge the system or organization's decision-making ability based on the difference between the expected and actual outcome with respect to the "humanness" the outcome.

Group Intelligence? Honestly I’m not sure, I just know that it isn’t artificial in the sense of AI, sorry.

They run by lots of little people each working their small part of the picture. This creates a machine that will grind up people and spit them out in ways the little people would never themselves agree to do. If you get the attention of someone who can temporarily halt the entire process you can get humane treatment (such as people who post complaints here or on twitter that gets far more done than any amount of going through customer service), but most people don't have that luxury.

How far will this system support totally amoral actions? One just has to consider cases such as Nestle and their baby formula to see it will allow immoral actions up to and including causing the death of children.

They are run by actual people who -must claim fiduciary duty to shareholders - Can delegate decisionmaking - Can obfuscate facts or decision factors - Are part of a country club that is full of other people of a similar mindset - Are insulated to the effects of their decisionmaking by wealth and privilege

White collar crimes or misjudgements in the corporate world are barely, if ever, punished, at least in the us.

> must claim fiduciary duty to shareholders

This isn't true, and I can't tell if this view has been promulgated by decision makers who want to hide behind it or the shareholders to whom the mythical duty is owed. Probably both I guess?

"modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else"

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/13-354.html

The company people can only do what they are supposed to do. They have less control over things than you think. If there's one person that actually sets morals or ethics, it'd be Mark Zuckerberg, since he has control over the stock as well.

    > they're run by actual people who have to 
    > interact with other humans such as their 
    > friends and family

Human beings are very talented at rationalizing all manner of terrible decisions. It's no problem enacting shameful policies. Just dream up a narrative where "it turns out, this is actually a good thing for customers!" Then fool yourself into believing it, and you won't lose sleep at night.

This. Let's not pretend corporations are people, though they have the same rights (if not more) than a regular citizen. Their sole objective is to make money first.

If we want to fix the system, let's start by taking a hard look at corporations and stripping down their privileges.

> Facebook and the various other messaging platforms sole purpose is to make money. End of story. They have no values no morals or ethics. They do what is necessary and within a legal framework (region dependent) that allows them to make money.

If Facebook has no values, morals, or ethics (besides greed), then appropriate legislation needs to be passed to impose some on it.

One purpose of the legal system is to impose moral and ethical norms of behavior on people and organizations who won't follow them voluntarily.

Nobody expects any corporation to not make money. The profit motive is the cornerstone of commerce.

The question is how Facebook makes money. You can structure your product differently, take a different approach to legal squabbles, craft company policies to achieve various sub-aims that are still aimed at making money, but also shoot for other goals.

Say you want to start a clinic. Any clinic has to meet its expenses and turn a profit for shareholders. But apart from that you can have different aims. Starting one in Hollywood is a different endeavor than starting it in Detroit. You can make money and turn over shares of profit to your investors. But the overall strategy can still provide for higher-minded goals apart from that.

> Facebook and the various other messaging platforms sole purpose is to make money. End of story. They have no values no morals or ethics.

Explain why Google got out of the military AI business, then. I would guess the response is "employee revolt is bad for business and would therefore lose money." This is the corporate version of saying "people are motivated by their self-interest." You're not wrong, per se, but you have to perform so much mental gymnastics to map behavior to this theory that it ceases to be useful at explaining behavior.

The "companies exist to make money" trope always earns a hard eye roll from me.

>> Facebook and the various other messaging platforms

> Explain why Google

Google contains a messaging platform but is not a messaging platform in and of itself.

Google's main goal is to make money. Some of their employees didn't like this and make a fuss about it, then people noticed and felt the same way. Google noticed that people were upset with what they were doing, and they know that negative public perception can mean making less money, so they stopped.

How is that mental gymnastics? And if Google doesn't exist to make money, why did they get into the military AI business in the first place?

Maybe Google execs wanted to use their technology to defend the world against extremist terrorists?

>The "companies exist to make money" trope always earns a hard eye roll from me.

Then...what...do they exist for?

"We want to cure cancer, and in order to do that we need money to fund research, so we need to charge you money for the pills we make". So, you exist to make money. "We want to exert power and influence over the government, so we raise money from donors to buy that influence and lobby the government". So you exist to make money. Etc, etc.

HOW you make money as a corporation doesn't change the fact that if you're a company, and not a non-profit or a charity (which are sometimes also just non-taxed companies) you're trying to make money. It's a huge part of the process, and the only thing you can uniformly say the company does.

Now people, that's a different story. People are singular and have their own goals. They may not be there just to make money. A company is made of many people, sometimes with conflicting goals. So to say that the company is trying to do X, when 30% of its employees are actively trying to do Y seems rather disingenuous.

>Explain why Google got out of the military AI business, then.

Well, explain why Amazon, and tons of other companies, stayed.

For Google it's simple: they wait for the shitstorm to pass, and they'll try some other approaches to get to the same result (selling AI to the military).

> legal framework

Arguably both legal and cultural. More and more employees are willing to pressure their employers before it makes it to being a legal issue.

> IF our USA government decides to designate Facebook, twitter etc. News Media outlets, then they will have to confirm to a different set of laws...

I'd rather the freedom of the press, whatever that implies, not depend on the government deciding who counts as "the press". Media outlets are not heavily regulated in the U.S. for this reason, among others.

Besides, media outlets exist, first and foremost, to pay the bills. They're not immune to bias or corruption either.

More like a terrible walled garden clone with bells and whistles.

Usenet is federated, open access, and non-commercial.

They are trapped by their own creation and have dug themselves into such deep holes that listening to what they say is irrelevant. Its like listening to an alcohol or tobacco exec talking about values.

The empire expansion and defense phase is done. Now we wait for their best people to leave, for the mediocre to take over catalysing more and more Trump, Brexit style events until people have had enough.

So then the problem is that they're expected to go before congress and answer these kinds of questions and be all rah-rah Apple Pie?

"Every system is perfectly designed to get the results that it gets."

So this has been down voted twice, but with no further comments.

I find the statement to be a rather interesting piece of logical jujitsu that I use often - if you believe it not to be applicable in this case (or possibly at all) would you care to explain why? I would be interested in hearing your opinions.

I didn't downvote or upvote, but one objection might be that design implies a union of intention and ability. Intention has two prerequisites of its own, desire ("I want this particular outcome") and foresight ("Doing X will lead to this outcome.")

Few people desire to fail at their designs, but shortcomings in foresight, ability, or both may make those designs imperfect, leading to overall failure.

I think we're arguing the same thing -

The designers intention was to design a system that does x

In reality, due to foresight, ability, etc, they have designed a system that does y

Because their system sits inside other systems, it is transformed (think of your 1.0 to your 1.1 to your 2.2 to your html5). External design influences sand off and transform what they designed (i.e. google, the unwilling ad company)

Every system is perfectly achieving what it is designed to do by all of these designers. Reverse engineer it's outputs and you will understand it - although you will have to figure out all of its designers. In a capitalist society, however, finding the biggest designer is easy - Follow the money.

It's a bit of a truism, but I still find it to be a very useful tool. We're not talking about the code of Facebook here, after all, were talking about the social output.

Design requires intent. Systems are rarely intended to get the exact result they end up creating.

Perhaps 'adapted' rather than 'designed' would make this statement more likely true. But then, there may be some other system that is somehow more perfectly adapted that achieves the same result.

I think in the end this isn't a useful thought.

Thanks for responding, I respectfully disagree.

The statement is saying if we look at the outputs of a system, it is producing exactly what it has been coded to do, intentionally or unintentionally. Facebook is producing exactly what it is designed to, not by a single overarching design but by hundreds or thousands of humans who have had input in to it. When the programs you mention don't get the results they were expecting, its either because of bugs in them, or because the programmers didn't understand why the output would be.

The program, however, is doing exactly what it is designed to do.

Facebook is attempting to monetize the signals between humans, like a robber baron AT&T trying to sit between every phone line extracting coin. It will continue to do so as long as that continues to turn profit and excellerate its worth on the stock market.

Anything else is coincidental.

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