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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

Consider: you are on the Amazon Basics product development team. If you do well, you will be promoted, given bonuses, and greatly financially rewarded. If you do poorly, well, Amazon let's go of 6% of employees in every org every year[0].

There are policies in place saying that you definitely can't look at the data around which third party sellers are doing well, selling lots of stuff. But also there's no auditing in place to see if you check it or not. It's all a big data warehouse and you have access to it.

And hey, you've heard everyone else is looking at this data. You're just taking a quick look to get ideas do you don't get fired. What's the harm? You'll help the company do well and won't have to polish your resume.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-performance-review-6-...

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They should have used the Google excuse for the middle step.

Construct an algorithm that tells you what you want, based on the data that you're not supposed to be using, and then throw your hands up when anybody asks and say "Nobody really knows how ML models work."

Or before machine learning was an option: management consultants.

"Yes, this is a clean room implementation, guided with a ML model."

    import torch
    design_parameters = torch.chinesewall(existing_product_url)

Consider: not working for an unethical company.

PMs at Amazon, even people who need visa sponsorships, have options (and probably better options). Don't defend their poor choices. Engineers at Amazon have even more options.

> Consider: not working for an unethical company.

You mean one of the companies Amazon is driving out of business? For some reason they aren't hiring.

Capitalism (Society?) rewards unethical behaviors, as long as it's even just a little obfuscated. It's a competition for resources.

Ethical people act ethically and tend to stay far away from the unethical.

It follows that unethical people will this group together to commit their unethical conspiracies. See the Political parties, big oil, pharma, insurance, the fed, hedge funds, etc.

Ethical people have been self selecting out of these lucrative industries forever. What’s left are the clueless and the criminal.

I wouldn't say it's a capitalism problem but more of the erosion of a free market.

Anything that is counter to a free market rewards unethical behaviors. But politicians don't need to be bought. It's just what has been tolerated. This is a great enabler and you can see this with the SEC as just one example.

Regulatory capture occurs [1] and the megacorps infiltrate. People want to get ahead and they hide behind these megacorps, many of which have unethical behavior pushed by the leadership, investors, their boss, and sometimes even condoned by in-house lawyers. If there is no risk to shareholder value and no risk of personal charges, they will do it.

We need some criminal charges levied and some extreme fines. Maybe just set the fines to equal the money they stash overseas? It HAS to grossly outweigh the economic gain from the behavior, so that it's a big hit to shareholder value. [1]

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

There are always rewards for unethical behaviors, which is why people engage in them. This is true whether the framework is communism, capitalism, or marriage.

Competition encourages the unethical behaviors and punishes the ethical behaviors. Set the competition knob to 0, everyone slacks, crank it to 11, and everyone cheats.

Despite the fact that managing this balance is fundamental to a capitalist society, it's extremely typical for the latter half of this balance to be ignored, for competition to be framed as an unmitigated positive, and for the Goodhart's Law side of it to be completely swept under the rug.

Culpability should be attributed both to the individual and to the system. Otherwise it's easy to construct systems that bypass responsibility. Like we see here.

I feel like what differs is what type of unethical behaviors different systems encourage.

Capitalism encourages screwing over other people, being cutthroat in business, etc.

Communism encourages different faults, such as passivity, mob mentalities, and not taking responsibility.

Anarchism would discourage considering the effects of 2nd-order+ consequences.

The competition knob is but one knob among many. It's the one America happens to have at about an 8.5 (and one which I dislike greatly), but I don't think this problem is unique to capitalism.

>The competition knob is but one knob among many. It's the one America happens to have at about an 8.5 (and one which I dislike greatly), but I don't think this problem is unique to capitalism.

Given the levels of consolidation we've seen over the past 30 years or so, I'd say that a lack of competition also contributes to unethical behavior. In fact, the consolidation pursued by many corporations is predicated on swallowing up even potential competitors in an effort to consolidate their dominant position.

I'd say that was unethical too.

Every communist state has been rife with communism. Centralization is what increases the reward to corruption.

If you don't follow the perverse incentive du jour in a decentralized system, you'll get rolled.

We're drifting off topic, though. If Amazon heavily incentivizes bad behavior, should they be allowed to reap the rewards and discharge the blame? Absolutely not. They're culpable.

Unfortunately, liberal people are unable to parse most of your comment because it goes against their religion.

And if you are caught, you are a rogue employee.

Imagine you could get out of a robbery charge by claiming it was perpetrated by a rogue glove.

Even better, you can be like Johnson & Johnson and create a new crappy glove, then abuse bankruptcy laws to transfer liability to that new glove so that it becomes responsible for everything. Now you get away with committing robbery and you still get to keep your favorite glove too.

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