Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

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For the same reason that if some kind of Cordyceps-like brain-parasite were to infect a person and make them murder people, that wouldn't be that person's fault. Especially if the brain parasite could be removed, reverting their personality to normal. I wouldn't hold that against the person going forward (unless they for some reason actively pursued further brain-parasite infections as a general preference.)

Companies can be evil on a structural level. But also, companies that aren't evil on a structural level, can be parasitized by evil individuals. Unless the company actively pursues hiring evil individuals, why would you hold the latter against them?

The point of companies having reputations is to predict what they'll do, and thereby trade with companies for which trade with them will predictably be positive-sum, and avoid trade with companies that would predictably be zero-sum or negative-sum.

A company itself being evil on a structural level, predicts that in the future it will do many zero- or negative-sum things, regardless of employee turnover.

A company that is not evil on a structural level, hiring one evil individual, who does an evil thing and then gets fired, doesn't predict any future evil behavior from the company.

That's an interesting way of framing the issue. By that logic, while active malfeasance may be the scenario that generates more outrage, it's actually the banal/emergent evil that represents more of a reason to avoid a business because between the two it's much harder to fix.

I don't know where the talk about evil individuals came from - Uber's billing is not the result of a single "potentially evil" individual. Instead it is the result of the company culture and processes. This incident was not an intentional decision to charge drivers to work, but still a predictable outcome of the way they operate, and thus indistinguishable from actual malice from the perspective of the customer, both in terms of result and predictive value.

> I don't know where the talk about evil individuals came from - Uber's billing is not the result of a single "potentially evil" individual.

It's what would be true for the situation outlined in the root comment of this subthread to pertain: that it was "an intentional product decision."

For that to be true, there would need to be an individual that made that decision, with the thought-process I outlined in my first comment. Such a thought-process wouldn't just be sociopathic (zero-sum), it'd be negative-sum/"evil". It would be a choice to hurt both drivers, and the corporation itself (when people inevitably find out), and oneself (when blame is inevitably pointed at them.) For what? Who knows. Evil. (Industrial sabotage, maybe.)

Obviously, like another commenter said, this wasn't an intentional product decision. (It was maybe an intentional project management decision, but one made in by no one individual.)

But that same commenter rhetorically asked why it mattered whether it was an intentional product decision or not. That's why I explained the difference. Acts of evil individuals that have parasitized good companies shouldn't reflect on those companies (once the evil individual is removed.) Acts of structural evil — acts that are generated from an algorithm the corporation is following as a whole, and would still follow if you replaced every employee ship-of-Theseus style — should reflect on the company itself.

This, of course, is an example of the latter kind of act, one that should reflect on the company itself.

But it's important to distinguish these acts from acts that are, in fact, committed by bad actors that have "infiltrated" the company. For the same reason that we distinguish "terrorism" from "domestic terrorism." The latter — domestic terrorism — can, in some ways, be "a reflection of the culture of the country." When there's a school shooting, we can ask what the country is doing wrong that leads to people like this cropping up. But the former — plain old terrorism — is not, and cannot, reflect on the country. The person who committed the act wasn't even an enculturated citizen of the country, so what would it tell us about the country?

You're missing the actually relevant case: the company hires evil individuals on a regular basis.

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