Comment by anonporridge | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonporridge | Hacker News Reader

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> I hate, hate, hate the way corps try to brush away any unpleasantness like ignoring it means it didn't happen!

I personally don't mind it. It's a good reminder that we as individuals are just replaceable cogs in the machine, that all of us are only as valuable as the productivity we can contribute in the future, and that our sense of loyalty to it should be adjusted accordingly.

Don't ever expect a corporation of any kind to act like a human or a family, because it's not, even if they try to put on a humanoid face.

Having said that, I expect more corporations will start trying to act more humanely in the face of this kind of trauma, precisely because those that don't will engender a sense of deep distrust and disloyalty from their employees, which will make them weaker in the long run. The more generations of people go through the machine and see how it really works, and teach their children the truth, the less they'll be able to take advantage of naivety. This also tends to be a reason that the powers that be want tighter control on social media, so people can't as easily share widely the truth of their lived experience that will preemptively poison the trust of others towards machines designed to use and discard people.

Once heard this in response to a discussion of an org's virtue signalling. What do you make of it, in this context?

A man had been injured on a journey and was lying on the road, wounded. A good Samaritan saw him and helped him get up. Onlookers then retorted, "Well, the good Samaritan only helped him get up to signal their virtue!"

An evolutionary psychologist might argue something like that.

Another way to put it, is that while the individual might act selflessly with pure and honest empathy, with no conscious expectation of something in return, this kind of behavior wouldn't have survived in our gene pool if there wasn't some evolutionary advantage to behaving that way.

So, the onlookers would really have to specify whether they're talking about the conscious being who is the good Samaritan or if they're talking about the unconscious entity that is the generic big brained ape that has deeply embedded survival and reproductive instincts that drive their conscious behaviors and desires outside of their control.

I can simultaneously say that the person was honestly just being good while acknowledging that the biological entity may have achieved some kind of advantage by signalling their virtue. Alternatively, I could also say that the good Samaritan is actually acting in a way that is a detriment to his survival, and only happens because of a bug in his generic and psychological programming or an old beneficial feature that is no longer good for a new environment and will eventually be removed via natural selection.

But this is humans we are taking about. Humans have evolved genetically to be maximally flexible in behaviour. Our psychology is learned from role models and repurposed by our cultural institutions[1]. So here we are, discussing a story passed down over generations, to guide our moral values. This is culture, not biology.

This particular story teaches us that we should judge people by their individual intentions. Western cultures tend to judge that way[1]. Most other human cultures will ignore intentions and judge by outcome. They will also punish a whole family or clan, not an individual (except within their own clan or family).

So, according to our culture, we should judge people by their intentions. What about companies? Given that a company has many legal rights of a person, maybe we should judge it like a person - by the goodness of its intentions? Or maybe we can only judge individuals. But then why do so many individuals justify what they do with the needs of a company? Even questions about death, it seems.

[1] See Henrich's books: "The Secret of Our Success" and "The WEIRDest People"

The fact that a company has the legal rights of a person is a mockery of human rights in my opinion, and Citizens United a huge mistake.

That aside, I don't think you can judge the intent of a company's actions. Let's ignore the small family business for now, but if you look at a big corp, decision making is a distributed responsibility with individuals checking off their part as it passes through their department.

There is no single person you can ask to determine intent. The intent of the many people making the decision could be contradictory, or someone like the CEO could be acting in bad faith and misleading his employees to approve a decision that benefits the CEO and no one else. We see this more frequently with crime or negative actions, where sometimes the CEO is the scapegoat but we conveniently forget the various VPs and individuals that contributed to the decision.

My point is that companies shirk responsibility by obfuscating individual responsibility, and I think that would apply the same way to judging a company's intent.

Lastly, judging implies a verdict, and you can't put a company behind bars. Yet companies are more than capable of committing atrocious crimes the likes of which rival war crimes (child labor/slavery in foreign countries, polluting waterways/airways and poisoning entire cities, running propaganda campaigns against the interest of public health, etc.) I find it ridiculous that a company can enjoy our rights but shirk our duties and accountability.

It's not self evident that virtue _signals_ are evolutionarily advantageous. Actually being virtuous is what provides a benefit to your society / tribe / species.

Once a behavior has been socially locked in as "virtuous", then doesn't it create an incentive for individuals to signal that virtue?

Not necessarily, no. Why would it?

Maybe because it's perceived as noble thing to do so people would signal that to others as benefit to themselves - to get higher status in a group.

Maybe depends on how dumb the others are -- the easier to fool, the more effective virtue signaling would be?

And, like @Scarblac wrote, sometimes it's a bad idea -- if the others see through it?

To reap benefits of cooperation, there is no need to signal it. It still helps the species survive and thrive, even if the only organism aware of an act of cooperation is the one providing help.

People mimic what they see. Seeing other people be helping makes people more helping. Seeing them being selfish makes one more selfish.

That is on of vectors how culture is created.

> Alternatively, I could also say that the good Samaritan is actually acting in a way that is a detriment to his survival, and only happens because of a bug in his generic and psychological programming or an old beneficial feature that is no longer good for a new environment and will eventually be removed via natural selection.

Evolution does not "work" on behalf of individuals. It works on behalf of species. So if a member of a species is willing to sacrifice himself or take risks for the whole, that is an evolutionary feature not a bug.

If a species were truly focused on the individual, I imagine it would quickly die out, which, let's face it, seems like a threat to our species in our modern world when people choose not to have kids because they don't want the responsibilties involved.

If the Samaritan had tweeted about how he felt the person really was deserving of help, he would have been signaling. Maybe they scheduled a seminar for their company on how best to help people after having walked by?

But the Samaritan acted. Helped someone. Did a thing.

Action is not signaling. Action is action.

Maybe it helps one’s reputation doing it for the Gram, but you are actually helping another person and that is something.

In this case it was at the cost of their own reputation given how Samaritans were viewed at the time.

The Bible might say that if you are doing it only because of how you feel or what it means reputationally it is not the same as doing it out of compassion alone, but it’s still doing something and different than signaling.

> But the Samaritan acted. Helped someone. Did a thing.

> Action is not signaling. Action is action.

I don't really understand why those would have to be exclusive. I think taking action to help people is important, and if suddenly everyone became aware every time someone helped someone else to the point where it became an expectation, I guess I don't really see why this would be a problem. At the end of the day, if more people are genuinely being helped due to being charitable becoming table stakes, I don't really care whether the help only happened due to ego or due to actual benevolence. I can see it becoming a problem if people weren't actually helping people and only signalling, but I don't really see how that would apply to companies giving people time and space to grieve and then also setting the example for the rest of industry.

Giving employees time to grieve, cancelling meetings, making space where people can talk -- those are all actions, not a company virtue signaling.

To the person injured, the reason for being helped is less important than the fact that he was HELPED.

Too many people will ignore things like this. Too many people will stand around helplessly--if nothing else, at least call 911. The number of times I have been the first person to actually call 911 at an accident is embarassingly high--I have only ever been the first person on site once. The rest of the time a crowd was gathering but nobody bothered to call 911.

Personally, I'll take help even if they're doing it selfishly. And I'll thank you just the same.

People forget: in this story, the Samaritans were enemies and known to be hostile. So how is it virtue signaling, to another group of people to whom you don't want to belong? In this story it was an act of altruism.

The Samaritan knew this was his opportunity to be immortalised in a religious text so he pretended to be extra good. And he nearly got away with it for 2400 years, until all of us in this thread figured it out.

In an ideal world, the onlookers are secretly good souls, working acts of kindness and charity away from the public eye. In practice, they typically have no virtue to signal, and their comments are merely a variation of "sour grapes".

‘Tis more blessed to give than to receive.

Means you’re preventing someone from obtaining a blessing if you don’t take their gift. And by definition, it’s less blessed to receive than to give. But if everyone only gives, no one receives, grinds to a halt.

Metrics on virtue make things so difficult.

They say that, but what actually bothers them is that it makes them look bad. They might have wanted to help the man, but they all invented reasons not to, because they knew the majority would respond exactly as they did…

Precisely. These are the kinds of people who say that buying a more energy-efficient car/biking/eating less meat/volunteering/donating to charity etc is "virtue signaling," because they're just pissed off that it makes them look bad.

I don't think of it as virtue signal as much as it is community building, which certainly has a reproductive advantage if the community is stronger because of it.

Virtue signaling would be if you took a picture of the guy and posted it on social media complaining that such an outcome was possible in this world without doing anything that could actually help.

The corporation may not be kind as an entity, but it would be nice if the individual people are.

That's the rub, at least for me. The poster above you is right, corporations are just corporations. If you look up the etymology of the word it comes from latin: corpus (genitive corporis) "body, dead body, animal body.

This is why I think that, more and more, people who have a heart, are moving away from big entities like this. I expect in a couple of generations corporations will be a thing of the past, or something so far removed from society, that it will no longer exist as a social norm.

The biggest problem is not the people, its the amount of people that organize together to make something happen. When you live and work in a sea of people vying for attention, to be seen and heard, there is no possibility of humanity. Its the size that makes or breaks the organization, not the people in it. It breaks accountability and it breaks social connections.

I see smaller organizations all the time that act responsibility. These organizations usually consist of smaller teams. This is the future, a new way of living, small decentralized organizations providing the world with what it needs in a human way.

> If you look up the etymology of the word it comes from latin: corpus (genitive corporis) "body, dead body, animal body.

You could just shorten this to "body", which has the same range of meanings. If you want to say "corpse" in English or Latin, you can use a more explicit word, but you don't have to.

The idea of "incorporation" is that something comes into existence - that it becomes "corporeal", not "soulless".

> I expect in a couple of generations corporations will be a thing of the past, or something so far removed from society, that it will no longer exist as a social norm.

Alternatively, in a couple of generations, people who have too much heart/soul and can't stomach being part of a corporate machine will be bred out of the gene pool and/or thrust into the powerless underclass, while the psychopaths that have no problem with them will acquire the most resources and reproduce the most, passing on their genes and their way of thinking to their children.

Some might argue this already happened generations ago.

That's not how reproduction works though. The unprivileged often have more kids and people on the corporate bandwagon tend to have fewer.

They're also the first in line to die via disease, famine, and war.

> Don't ever expect a corporation of any kind to act like a human or a family, because it's not, even if they try to put on a humanoid face.

Many years ago, we hired a guy from halfway across the country. For money reasons he left his wife and kids behind and started the job ASAP, with the plan to rent an apartment and go back to get them over a holiday weekend approximately 1 month away.

So he worked with us for about 4 weeks, and then when driving his family here on that holiday weekend they were hit by a drunk driver; he and his wife were killed and the kids needed to be airlifted to a big city hospital.

Our CEO intervened with the insurance companies to backdate everything so his life insurance would pay out and the kids' medical bills would be paid for as long as they needed to be paid. He made sure that the kids got airlifted again - to the hospital nearest to their grandparents, and then said that any employees who wanted to travel to attend the funeral would get paid time off to do so (he went too).

Did the Board of Directors approve all of that?

Corporations are like a computer program. Sometimes they act a bit sentient, but mostly they just do what they're told.

The only people who are people are people.

> I personally don't mind it. It's a good reminder that we as individuals are just replaceable cogs in the machine, that all of us are only as valuable as the productivity we can contribute in the future, and that our sense of loyalty to it should be adjusted accordingly.

To the company as a whole, yes. To each other? No, I don't think I believe this. This doesn't mean you owe anything to your teammates in terms of staying in a job if a better opportunity comes or if you aren't happy or treated right, but we're still all human beings seeing each other every day, and if you build a bond with those you work with, it's not any less real just because you only happened to meet due to the coincidence of being hired by the company. I've only been out of college for less than a decade, and I've had some coworkers I did not get along at all with, some who I was indifferent towards, a great many I had casual friendly relationships with, and a select few who are this point are as close to any friends I've met outside work and remained that way after one or both of us moved on from the job where we met. I still don't think I'd be completely emotionally unaffected if someone who I was currently working with in the first two categories happened to die, and I certainly would be if someone I worked with in one of the latter two groups did. It's not at all uncommon to feel grief or numbness when even a casual acquaintance outside of work dies, and the fact that whatever company you work for happens to consider you only a value-generating machine doesn't magically make this go away. Humans are humans even when working together, and I don't think pretending that's not the case is in any way more emotionally healthy than acknowledging it.

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