Comment by themodelplumber | Hacker News Reader

Comment by themodelplumber | Hacker News Reader

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themodelplumber

My guess vis-a-vis the morality is that he naturally ignores it. Try being hardcore logical (not just rational, but like A + B = B + A stepwise logical) and hardcore moral at the same time, you'll be torn forever. And if you don't naturally learn a sort of turn-taking approach for those modes via your upbringing, good luck learning it later.

Unfortunately, ignoring moral perspectives & decision points is effectively the same as "being without morals". And I really mean unfortunately--this is a problem for all of humanity and we keep looking for individual evil scapegoats, but eventually we need to reconcile this.

In practice there's also this extra innovator's dilemma: Yield to known industry practice and reap ethical rewards as a natural part of the process, or lean into the novelty & growth curve and possibly reinvent huge swaths of custom, ethic, and morality which were previously vague.

I don't think people appreciate how close we've come to that happening at various points in history, and to what degree.

If you do take that second path, almost by definition you immediately blind yourself to huge swaths of moral decisionmaking. This is more especially true if you are forced to look at your customers as "audiences" or similar groups.

These groups are effectively perceived at higher levels as cohesive organisms. Groups are known to demonstrate a more primitive subjective morality than most any individual (i.e. individiuals may be smart, humans in large groups not so much), and this can greatly restrict a founder's own willingness to address morality-related issues by more than a couple inches, so to speak, here or there.

I think most any business owner probably understands this view, though in the context of this huge story I'm sure it wouldn't be easy to admit.

But you are right that in terms of individual human perception, the puzzle _must_ be solved, and often in a very subjective manner no matter what resources may be available. That's a huge issue.

There’s no inherent conflict between morality and logic. Even with the vaguer definitions you seem to be using related to business processes, running a business that others (customers, regulators, outsiders) view as morally clean will always provide advantages over one that isn’t perceived that way.

You're referring to big-picture practices and conflicts, which are different.

Also, think about businesses where morality simply isn't a day to day concern of customers, not because they are rotten customers, but because their set of concerns is another facet of the benefit spectrum. "I am their customer because of X and Y." Not _your_ X and Y, but theirs.

In that light, perhaps you can see how much of a blind-spot crutch it can be to end up defending morality as a kind of forced issue by dint of your own subjective focus, which while commendable, isn't the point here.

It's an issue of what else there is.

This is also probably very difficult to understand if you yourself naturally focus extremely hard on giving a clean deal to your customers. As is common in that mindset, maybe you often find yourself the martyr, taking a loss here or there to quietly test your own generosity in that way, for example. Or maybe you enjoy mentally pairing yourself with "good people", those you rate via your conduct system as individuals with whom you feel more free to conduct the generous business that makes you see the world in a better light.

In such a case, of course you have a good argument for branding around that personality facet.

And at the same time, you are still way different from a lot of other businesses...

...which from even this beneficial-morality lens can't be said to come out the worse by some basic psychological calculus. "Be like me" still isn't a fair business assessment tool.

(I know it can be a bit of a frustrating heartbreak to have access to those morality tools, and enjoy demonstrating that benefit in a crooked world...and then hear that a successful business can focus on entirely different facets and psychological processes without cheating their customers...)

It’s certainly true that branding as morally pure isn’t usual beneficial, but even businesses that brand themselves as sinful or evil have internal processes to maintain moral principles. Often to a greater extent than non profits that are selling morality. An example: casinos request regulation to enforce rules about payout odds, while unregulated casinos create mathematical proofs that their outcomes are honest. They also often run programs to provide assistance to customers suffering from gambling addiction. These actions aren’t because casinos are “pure” or making sacrifices; it’s because the expected payouts to the owners are higher by enforcing these processes.

It’s also important to remember that customers are not the only agents that matter to an entity’s survival. Public opinion, regulators, employees, shareholders, etc also matter. One instance of this in crypto is the lack of assassination markets. There’s been theoretical work on how to build anonymous assassin markets since the early 90s but no one has done it even though there’s proven customer demand. Why? Because for someone with the ability to build such a market, there exist better options that have higher payouts due to lower regulatory enforcement, easier access to capital, cheaper labour, etc. Again being “pure” has nothing to do with it since people with those skills do build dark net markets that sell other illicit services which are viewed as not really wrong by a large percentage of the population and as less severe to regulators than assassins.

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