Comment by paul | Hacker News Reader

Comment by paul | Hacker News Reader

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That's a good question. There's no simple (non-circular) answer, but I can try to give a few heuristics.

First, it's important to remember that any significant action is likely to have some negative consequences. One test is to ask, "Ignoring personal loss/gain, would the world be better if I stopped doing X?" For example, if a spammer stopped spamming, I think we'd all be better off, therefore spamming is probably evil. On the other hand, news.yc is a nice service that benefits a lot of people, so it's probably non-evil.

At the specific time that I made up the "Don't be evil" phrase, there were a number of topics in mind, including the spyware/scumware problem, and paid-inclusion, which was popular at the time among our competitors (you could pay to sneak your site in their regular search results). These are both examples of tricking your users for your own benefit, which is generally evil. Paid inclusion is hidden advertising -- none of their users knew which results were paid for. It would be similar to a reporter who takes bribes to write favorably about something. Spyware is evil not because it is spying on you, but because it is doing so without your consent and probably against your will. If users had actually knowingly given informed consent (not hidden in some EULA somewhere, or anything like that), then the "spyware" wouldn't be evil -- it's like the difference between justin.tv filming his own life, and someone else secretly doing so.

Thanks for the clarification. So the "evil" refers to the very narrow context of the specific functionality of the google product, rather than to a wider context which is usually understood by the idea?

With your broader point: "Ignoring personal loss/gain, would the world be better if I stopped doing X?", what standard would you use for judging what is better for the world?

To frame the rule in the positive action sense, if you were judging whether to take some action, you would think about the world minus yourself, and then see if the world is "better" after the action. How would you judge what "better" means here? Would it mean adding "value" to others? If so, how would you bridge the gap between those who value mystical pursuits divorced from real world evidence and modern media versus those who might want to increase their knowledge about the world through focused learning and induction? (Say between Pennsylvania Amish and tech startup founders) Some people value manipulating others, some controlling others, some killing others - the range between individual values is very large. In short, it seems impossible to approach "better" by looking at what each person in the world values as everyone values different things in spite of some similar things that people do value in common which is what we here are trying to provide, and of course it is impossible to know what everyone values anyway.

So without your personal value as a standard and other individual values as a standard for better, what do you use?

I don't think his stated definition has a narrow context at all. It seems to apply to anything. As a corporate motto, of course it only applies to Google...but as a statement of ethics it looks pretty general.

Popup ads, spam, integrating paid results with search results, and spyware/adware were the big problems during the dot com crash, when ethics went out the window, and the main community for nerds (slashdot) really liked to call companies evil for their behavior way before digg or redit existed. Once Google made that a slogan, Google was mentioned all the time in such threads for the slogan, and not just because they are a search engine.

Google's name still comes up when any evil corporate behavior is discussed in any nerd community (not so much non-nerd groups) because of that great catch phrase, especially when Microsoft is mentioned. I've always believed, as it sounds from your post, that the phrase has no philosophical or religious meaning beyond "enough is enough". If they teach otherwise in business school, they're making things up.

"Google's name still comes up when any evil corporate behavior is discussed in any nerd community (not so much non-nerd groups) because of that great catch phrase, especially when Microsoft is mentioned."

I think it was Cringely who said something like: "Microsoft's slogan is similar to Google's, but slightly different. Be evil."

"If they teach otherwise in business school, they're making things up."

This is an understandable belief given all the publicity the bad companies get. But what about the companies that do well and actually act in a moral way? There must be many of those as well, but not nearly as exciting to report on. Here's a rising bank that makes a very large point of their moral approach to running their business: http://www.bbt.com/bbt/about/philosophy/values.html

Maybe with the increasing leveling of the business "playing field" and the increasing openness of communication, businesses that actually act in ethical ways will gain ever larger advantages in winning and keeping customers over their less ethical competitors. A business that gains a reputation for integrity in its field that focuses on providing customer value will be hard to topple.

There are two fundamental problems here.

One is that the customer can't easily discern between a good company and an evil company without doing business with them. Once they hit a certain size and have a large enough customer base, reputation helps.

But companies that act in their own short-term interests without regard to integrity are likely to out-compete companies that try to behave ethically -- so all other things being equal, if a large company doesn't make a fuss about ethics and integrity, odds are it's evil.

The ethical company has the long-term advantage, but the unethical company has the short-term advantage. If the unethical company can use the short-term advantage to its benefit, it can build up enough of a business that it's hard to topple despite being unethical.

The second point is that the larger the company, the more its inherent trend towards self-serving (probably evil) behavior. Bureaucracies are inhuman, because the responsibility for the evil act or evil policy can always be passed on elsewhere or euphemized away, and a large number of problems turns into a statistic. One person screwed over by the company is a real problem; ten thousand screwed over by the company justifies the budget for the complaints department.

It takes a very principled, very public stand to avoid both of these problems.

Perhaps you could clarify something that's puzzled me. I thought when I first heard about it, the phrase was "Do no evil". Then "Don't be evil" became more prevalent. Was there ever a switch, or was it just mis-reported initially?

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