Comment by FussyZeus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FussyZeus | Hacker News Reader

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The thing is Hanlon's razor can't really be applied to a corporation. A corporation is inherently an immoral actor; it doesn't act maliciously, or at least it shouldn't. It acts rationally. The key note being that it's rationale therefore need not be ethical or moral at all.

I don't think corporations are stupid at all, they're the collected intelligence of thousands of people being used with the moral and ethical consequences abstracted away to where they can act in horrifying ways and not feel any remorse. This is why probably the hundred or so people involved in denying a cancer patient's claim for insurance payment don't feel bad; none of them made the decision, it's just a process.

So, with that in mind, I don't think Hanlon applies here, if you want a razor, use Occam's. And the theory here that requires the least assumptions is that corporations would sell their own mother if it made them one red cent, so when I hear "priceline changed it from $129 to $149" my prevailing assumption is the low price was to get you in the door, and they've found that a price increase of $20 at the point of sale isn't enough to deter customers. They're probably A/B testing a number of increases to see just how much they can squeeze from people.

This reminds me a lot of Charles Stross' talk at 34C3, where he described corporations and competition between them as "human-powered AIs" that maximize profit as their only goal, similar to how a neural network only blindly minimizes a loss function.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmIgJ64z6Y4

A corporate is literally, legally, a "person", but not a "natural person". AI "unnatural person". And since it's "incorporated", it has a body too :-)

Since a person has a body and an intelligence it's also a non-natural aka "artificial" intelligence.

Maximizing profit is not a simple, one-dimensional, short-sighted thing necessarily. It can involve building a brand, which means getting people to trust the organization as if it were a moral person. And once the brand is built, new management can come in and exploit it, breaking down that trust.

So I think that it's obvious that the sort of behavior people are wont to declare is the norm these days has a large cyclical element, and perhaps a secular one as well, but it's not as simple as a universal race to the bottom or we never would have developed the society we have in the first place.

Your last statement hangs development of society on the growth and ubiquity of corporations, which frankly is absurd to an offensive degree.

There is a long and disgraceful history of corporations opposing damn near everything and anything that would even remotely upset the status quo that they're used to. Everything from women's rights to equal wages among races to ending child labor to the right to unionize, all the way to health and safety laws, the 40 hour work week, and even basic labor rights like whistle-blowing all receive the same frantic and "THIS IS THE END TIMES IF THIS HAPPENS!" treatment from the corporations and their lobbies.

And it's been wrong every. Single. Time. Somehow, some way, the businesses adapted to giving their workers basic human decency, fair wages, etc. and it was never once at the behest of benevolent corporate overlords but in fact was always at the direct demand of regulatory oversight.

If anything, society has developed by fighting, tooth and nail, at every turn, the wailing and howling corporate opposition to anything even remotely not immediately profitable.

I disagree with your first sentence. But apart from that, the term "corporation" does not necessarily only mean large for profit joint stock corporations in the US, of the sort that are typically demonized. For instance, worker cooperatives or credit unions can be types of corporation. Or, "the oldest corporation in the Western Hemisphere is the Harvard Corporation, known formally as the President and Fellows of Harvard College"

So, I think you have a rather facile understanding of what you are talking about.

> the term "corporation" does not necessarily only mean large for profit joint stock corporations in the US

I like how you couldn't even attempt to define what I was talking about so you could condescend to me about not understanding it without basically restating the exact way I was using the word. Well done.

When people think "corporation" they think exactly that, large for profit stock corporations. Yes, credit unions are technically corporations. Hell, even LLC is a kind of corporation. You're arguing dictionary versus contextual usage, for reasons I can't quite put together.

And "typically demonized?" How much of modern colonialism and the exploitation of the developing world can be laid directly, unambiguously, at the feet of corporations?

If something is a fundamental part of society, then it's necessarily linked to essentially everything bad in society.

And if something is linked to power and wealth, it's linked to everything bad that people can do with power and wealth, which is everything.

You casually use the term "developing world", but I think that term implies those countries have the goal of becoming more like the US and Europe, and that that's a good thing. Do they need more wealthy and powerful corporations of their own, or is there another path?

A corporation is an amazing system that allows small amounts of evil to effectively sum up to large ones.

Funny, I made this very same statement in a recent, unrelated post. In fact, I think corporations, at least in some cases, rely on the expectation that they won't fuck the customer over and are given the benefit of the doubt. That's especially prevalent with older generations that seem to trust what people say a bit more, at least from my observation.

"A corporation is inherently an immoral actor"

This is not true.

And FYI big corporations are also stupid in many ways.

I'd argue they've operationalized some core things, everything else is wishy washy at best.

"Amoral" is more accurate.

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