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Comment by BobbyJo | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's an emergent property, I think it's a by-product of the constraints. It's all well and good that they want to make Facebook safe and healthy, and I honestly believe plenty of people working there are trying to do just that. However, they are operating under the constraint that they cannot move backwards on profits, and therefore engagement.

Imagine if you were trying to fix climate change, but under the condition that you weren't allowed to burn fewer fossil fuels. You may try very hard, and very sincerely, but it's fool's errand.

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Nice.

> I don't think it's an emergent property, I think it's a by-product of the constraints. > Imagine if you were trying to fix climate change, but under the condition that you weren't allowed to burn fewer fossil fuels.

There is one person who controls all the constraints: Zuckerberg. He even went so far as to enforce that through his stock classifications. It’s entirely understandable and acceptable to have empathy for those working at FB who are attempting to solve the problems. But Zuckerberg made the decision to be the single source of the constraints that bind everyone below. And his constraints are: profit over all else. He should face consequences for setting those constraints, just as anyone should who set a constraint of “address climate change without adversely effecting GDP”.

Separately, and as the “revelations” of Zuckerberg’s immoral behavior continues year after year, those who work for him but are attempting to solve the problems, should recognize at some point in the future, now, or in the past that the problems are insurmountable within the confines of the constraints. As that knowledge spreads, then the question becomes whether those idealistically earnest individuals are justifiably ignorant of the reality: that all their best intentions are moot in the face of the constraints as were determined by Zuckerberg. And when or if they are no longer justifiably ignorant, they become culpable.

Zuckerberg is simply over his head and I think he knows it(I certainly wouldn't want to be in his shoes). I don't think he's evil I think he was enamored of this toy he built, he pushed it in very logical "business" directions, and now it's been adopted by so many people and its so big, its business model is having real world impact where I'm sure he'd prefer, from an intellectual perspective, that it acted totally passively. He's right, no business should have to determine the morals of a society, which is essentially what we are asking of facebook. The bigger picture is more complex than most people realize.

I think you are overly generous to him. He has extremely powerful tools at his hand, and he properly owns them and has absolute power over them.

But due to whatever reasons (ego, greed of seeing his net worth rising and fear of losing some of it etc.) he won't take morally right step that would harm FB's financials in any way.

On top of that, let's be clear - the mission of FB never was some altruistic connecting the world, in contrary - it was all that juicy private data on each of us while we are connecting and interacting, quietly building a shadow profile for every single human being. There is no moral high ground there no matter how much mental gymnastics you try. If FB would somehow leak those data publicly, the company would go bust very quickly.

In more than 1 way, I struggle to understand these whistleblowers - they get hired for tons of money into company with clearly amoral (or at very best dubious) mission and then they are surprised when it actually is... Similar case would be going to investment or private banking and then being surprised how business is set up and how decision makers in it behave

Nobody is forcing him to keep doing this. He’s waking up every day and making the choice to keep running FB today the same way he ran it yesterday. He could just quit

Sure, but... what would that change?

This is a rebuttal to the “he’s in over his head” argument. If he personally is in over his head, the obvious solution is to quit and let someone more capable run the company.

I personally do not buy the “in over his head” argument, fwiw.

Fair enough.

> Imagine if you were trying to fix climate change, but under the condition that you weren't allowed to burn fewer fossil fuels. You may try very hard, and very sincerely, but it's fool's errand.

I like this. This helps me. Thanks.

> Imagine if you were trying to fix climate change, but under the condition that you weren't allowed to burn fewer fossil fuels. You may try very hard, and very sincerely, but it's fool's errand.

This also happens to be the literal policy towards climate change of China. They announced the pause of funds for external coal plants, doubled down on their internal ones.

A rule more analogous to Facebook's presumed position would be, "you can fix climate change, but you can't do anything that would reduce GDP per capita". Which in practice means that while some useful tools would be on the table, others would definitely not be.

Not really since facebook revenue is much more directly tied to engagnement than GDP ia to fossile fuel consumption.

To extens the metaphor, Facebook's "alternative energy" is non-advertising based revenue. I see zero efforts from facebook to move away from ad based revenue so there is zero chance that Facebook is going to make meaningful progress in changing.

> I see zero efforts from facebook to move away from ad based revenue

Portal hardware. Oculus + Game Store. Facebook Gaming.

Lots of projects, no stable hits.

Maybe they realized internally they are as hopelessly addicted to fossil fuels (ad revenue) as most advanced economies were in the 20th century.

If Conway's Game of Life taught us anything, it's that even very simple rules can have surprising emergent behavior.

Agreed. Any moderately complex system can have emergent behavior. This is a fundamental feature of complexity. You can sometimes take advantage of it, by finding unexpectedly profitable features that only exist at scale or in conditions you happened into.

When that emergent behavior both increases profits and takes advantage of your customers in negative ways, the relationship moves from something symbiotic to something parasitic. This is where it begins to cross the line and people start throwing "evil" around when describing you.

I don't think most companies are out to create a worse world, but many do it until they are forced to reset.

I think a more apt analogy has advertising as Facebook's fossil-fuel burning, but then I expect severely curtailing fossil-fuel use will severely reduce GDP, which I am guessing is not a common belief around here. (I'm guessing that many around here think that it is essentially just the stubbornness of those in power that keeps fossil-fuel use high, and that even if we force the whole world economy to transition to 100% renewals over, e.g., the next 5 years, things will turn out fine.)

The hypothetical "most people" in this statement would be dreadfully, dreadfully wrong if they think it would all turn out fine. They are vastly under estimating how much the modern world, in literally almost any aspect you can imagine, is reliant on fossil fuels.

Yup. I've always said this. You must solve climate change but nobody anywhere is allowed to lose money. Go.

Conflicting goals. And the one you want to fix is secondary to not losing money.

There is geoengineering! :-)

What’s the equivalent of geoengineering for Facebook?

Offering every user a free Zoloft prescription.

It’s a fun idea!

Although if this plan were viable, one can imagine the Zoloft marketing department would have already purchased the ad space. The limiting factor is probably the need for a psychiatrist to approve a prescription for every patient. Most users in developed countries are already eligible to get the itself drug for free, or at least cheaply.

Spot on.

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