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Comment by MaximumYComb | Hacker News Reader

I suspect there is a lot of cognitive dissonance involved. I remember having dinner with a developer who worked on pokie machines. He fully believed that there was nothing wrong with the machines and that people just needed to have self control. This is someone who's job involved programming the highly addictive things.

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A lot of people simply don't care. I've met people who've worked for casinos and tobacco companies in management and decision making roles, and they are fully aware that they are trying to make people addicted and maximise profit on their habits.

I've asked them about the morality of it, and they're apathetic. It's not like some Wolf of Wall Street attitude where they enjoy ripping people off or making addicts, but just corporate apathy. The job pays well and they get to enjoy the finer things in life, so why should they care?

Isn’t consumer-internet hypergrowth built around the same properties? TikTok regularly has posts from teens describing staying up until dawn in the infinite scroll.

There are programmers right now creating websites, software and databases to dissemenate (heh) pornography.

It probably requires a different breed of humanity to actively choose to get involved in any vice-related industry.

Or maybe I will do it too given enough incentive.. who knows.

Counter-anecdote: I interned (many years ago) at Altria / Phillip Morris and found everyone I worked with to be very aware and conscious of the impact of their products. There was always a sense of finding that line between creating a good product that people enjoyed, and actively creating transparency and support around the risks created by that product.

the banality of evil prevails.

> I suspect there is a lot of cognitive dissonance involved

Edit : Some more context

I find it fascinating what people do to get rid of the dissonance. In India, we have a heavily regulated tobacco industry. In a debate , I remember someone from a cigarette manufacturing company (who don't manufacture any other tobacco products) commenting that relative to beedi [1] and chew-able tobacco, cigarettes are better because they are less harmful and bring in more revenues to the government!

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beedi

From a public health perspective, I think Juul/vape products would be extremely helpful in a place like India.

Relevant, add Indonesia and China. https://www.economist.com/asia/2019/08/01/indonesia-seeks-to...

Despicable industry across the board.

This piqued my interest. Can you please explain how? From what I understand, Juul/vape products don't contain tar which is supposedly the worst offender in a cigarette. Is that what you meant?

Yes. Tobacco is huge in India and a major public health issue.

The danger of Juul is really yet to be determined -- but odds are extremely high that the public damage is far less than tobacco. These recent reports of lung collapse in minors all results from crap low quality thc vaping products, not Juul or even ecigs.

Also, vape products don't combust the liquid which should prevent inhaling of many different carcinogens.

Why is this "cognitive dissonance" and not someone simply having a different sense of morality than you? Is everyone with different moral values than you suffering from cognitive dissonance?

It might, but most people would agree that causing cancer intentionally is immoral. So cognitive dissonance is a valid assumption.

> I suspect there is a lot of cognitive dissonance involved.

This for sure. I had multiple friends work for Crispin Porter & Bogusky in the early 2010s. They're the main ad agency for companies like Burger King and Dominos. Great opportunity for them to begin their careers as designers, but at some point, all of them had to learn how to swallow selling diabetes to kids.

Maybe it's more of a philosophical internal vs external locus of control thing, but I don't find this one similar to tobacco. It's easy to use Dominos and Burger King "responsibly". I don't find anything unethical about their business and wouldn't feel bad working for them.

Tobacco I'm less sure about, since I don't really know of anyone who uses it "responsibly".

I think it might be different if your boss is telling you to design an advertisement to target 4-8 year olds with junk food ads.

Not for me, since I don't think it's unreasonable for a 4-8 year old to have Burger King. They just can't have it all the time, but it's a nice treat.

I don't see that as the same at all. They're providing a necessary service. People need to eat, they don't need to gamble or smoke.

Burgers and Pizza aren't the healthiest food in the world, but they're not the worst either. A typical burger consists of bread, meat and salad. There's nothing inherently wrong with any of those things.

I worked for dominos and I sold pizza to adults

Is there anything wrong with building pokie machines? Should they not be available for people who are able to play them responsibly?

I believe it's up to the government to regulate these things and ensure fair business practice.

The old saying goes that if mankind were angels we would need no governments. So saying the govt. ought to do something is functionally saying something is wrong with making the machines.

Absolutely not, suggesting that the government should regulate gambling and responsible gaming has nothing to do with building the machines outright.

As I said, these machines should be available if you can use them responsibly, the government should dictate policy that gambling operators should adhere by to ensure that users don't take things overboard.

Blaming the engineer who built the machine makes for an easy scapegoat, of course, but if the issue isn't addressed on a societal scale, there will always be another engineer to replace him.

The issue is that in this case they're specifically and willfully being engineered to foster irresponsible behavior.

>Blaming the engineer who built the machine makes for an easy scapegoat, of course, but if the issue isn't addressed on a societal scale, there will always be another engineer to replace him.

We can still say theft is bad regardless of the legal enforcement around theft. Some things are just morally wrong.

> We can still say theft is bad regardless of the legal enforcement around theft. Some things are just morally wrong.

I have to assume that your perspective is being coloured by personal experience. At this point, your argument is simply: "Building pokie machines is bad because I think it's bad". Sorry, but I disagree with that, as stated before, they should be available to those who can use them responsibly.

To give a counter example, I think we can easily agree that government should regulate vehicles being driven on public roads and yet we don't mean to imply that there is something wrong with making vehicles to be driven on public roads.

We can say, however, that there is something wrong with making vehicles that are inherently unsafe when on public roads. That's more in line with making products to foster addiction or compel people to behave in ways that are against their best interests.

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