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Comment by felipellrocha | Hacker News Reader

In other news, the sky appears to be blue.

People in this thread say variations of your comment, that it's obvious, that everyone knows it.

But then at the same time people still make excuses for companies like Facebook. They urge others not to assume any bad (or purely profit oriented) intent, to believe that the people working at Facebook are honest about what their PR campaigns and Zuckerberg claim and the list goes on...

Also it is absolutely common that people really want to give companies the benefit of the doubt when it comes to morals vs. profit.

So it's clearly not that obvious to most, it's just that people agree if you phrase it the way this headline does.

Also still everyone does the dance of company marketing and "mission statements". Quotes like "we here at <generic megacorp> want to make the world a better place" are still often taken at face value or repeated outside the work environment.

It's not clear, or if it is, most still play along.

I find it very interesting the number of people in these comments making the simple claim that companies are often (at least often enough to be relevant) primarily motivated by things other than profit.

That's not even what neoliberals argue. The more compelling, but still not that compelling, argument is that certain types of profit maximization (usually long-term, "pro-innovation" profit maximization) inherently result in outcomes (maybe net outcomes) that align with pro-social (i.e. good for society) motivations.

Something, something, Wizard’s First Rule.

People will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true.

I'm surprised that there are people out there that do not realise this

I live in the UK, certainly takes some convincing.

Lots of people love to complain about the U.K. weather and it is true that we have particularly rainy parts (eg the north west) but people also feel the cultural need to make such complaints in parts of the south east where it is generally warm or temperate and infrequently wet or windy and bitingly cold. I’ve personally become a bit of a weather contrarian, especially when talking to Americans who have heard about British people always complaining about the weather.

I complain about the weather primarily because the weather is shit.

In other words, even people from the UK behave like humans?

Looks like those bullshit PR feelgood ads really do work on some people.

I don't know how naive you would have to be to believe that $CORP really cares about you.

Since we are talking about the UK, as Adam Smith said, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest.“

I don't know if Adam Smith meant it in the sense that present day libertarians and other naive people take it, but I am sure nobody would want to shop from a psychopathic butcher that only cares about profits.

But what would that look like in Adam Smith's time?

Suppose there was a butcher known to be a psychopath who people would really rather not buy from. Given the relatively low barrier to entry of being an 18th-century butcher (relative to many of our large industries today), someone could enter the market and just not be a psychopath and take all that guy's business because people would prefer shopping there.

Knowing this, then from a purely game-theoretical perspective, the psychopathic butcher would realize that if he wanted to be competitive in his village, he should probably dial the psychopathy back. An alternative would be to outright attack competition, but before the industrial revolution he probably wouldn't have enough of a leg up on challengers to afford that.

Arguably that has changed since, where incumbents benefiting from economies of scale have much greater advantage over new competitors and therefore have less to fear from bad behavior (see basically the history of labor post-industrial revolution). Incumbents do still get disrupted, but for some reason virtually never on ethical differentiation.

If they knew he was a psychopath, they wouldn't shop from him, regardless of behaviour. And that's my point. Self-interest is obviously not enough to sustain a successful society, it's only really enough when combined with all the unwritten rules of common decency in society, and I'm sure that's how Adam Smith meant it too.

Pretty sure that gp made a joke about the weather in UK

Pretty sure on average the sky isn't blue on the UK, specially during winter months.

Source: live in Yorkshire.

Well $CORP is here to serve its various stakeholders and its customers is arguably one of the most important.

The issue with $ADS_CORP is that the people it serves ads to are not the customer. But they are still a stakeholder, simply a less important one.

https://xkcd.com/1145/

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