Seven signs of ethical collapse (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Seven signs of ethical collapse (2012)

scu.edu

351 pointstacon137 comments

> To front-line employees, the line between right and wrong is very bright. Something happens to people as they climb up through management, she said. The bright line seems to fade.

This doesn't seem like a mystery to me. In my experience the more you climb up through management the more you leave the realm of clear-cut choices and enter a world of nasty trade-offs. Do that enough times, and get your head spun around enough by trade-offs you don't know how to navigate but have to deal with immediately, and you'll get a kind of "trade off numbness".

> and get your head spun around enough by trade-offs you don't know how to navigate but have to deal with immediately, and you'll get a kind of "trade off numbness"

I wonder if this could explain why corporations grow into slow behemoths, as a kind of subconscious moral cover. Most people think the causal arrow happens one way, ie. corporations grow due to efficiencies or other factors and moral rot is a side-effect, but maybe it's actually the other way around in some cases. Since everyone tries to see themselves as basically good, but they still want to make money and be profitable, they migrate towards structures with extra layers that provide extra plausible deniability and obfuscation of questionable moral decisions.

A Freakonomics episode claims that corporations "grow into slow behemoths" because, by the nature of being successful, you tend to have more programs to maintain. So you spend more time in maintenance mode and outsource your innovation by acquiring scrappy start-ups. It's a risk/reward tradeoff of its own.

This matches my experience. Complexity is a real problem. I've found this video does a good job outlining how this happens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rp4RCIfX66I

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rp4RCIfX66I

Good watch, thanks!

I think the opposite applies too - "move fast and break things" is a helluva excuse for doing extremely shady things and not worry about the consequences.

Culture and incentives are just extremely hard to get right and align with the morals, and it's a continuous struggle for any business. And this applies even to solo companies.

a mentor once referred to it as 'ship fast and shout down externalities' which always stuck with me

That all being said I think for many people the ability to have a bright line is because the abstractions involved in deeply understanding these types of trade offs are not a common part of life. We are (nearly) universally worse at the types of reasoning (especially reasoning with abstractions) that we don't do frequently.

Haha. Yes. Basic risk aversion.

Do you have an example of nasty trade offs? I am not familiar with managing so I am interested what those could be. I assume taking care of the worker vs taking care for the company (growth) is one of them, but again not sure.

There's plenty of situations where you can do things right, but it will be expensive, slow or otherwise inconvenient, or you can screw someone over (that someone may be the taxpayers, or local community whose environment you pollute), and make the problem go away.

Two direct reports aren't getting along. Their work styles are both valuable but clash with each other. You need to ask one of them to adjust to the other's expectations.

Is it better to lay off 10 more people and save the money or is it better to keep more people around to deal with the uncertainty of the next 6 months? How do you want to protect the team? With extra people or with extra money?

Depends on how many billions you spent on stock buybacks that year..

not business but I'll give one from my own work in academia.

Do you change a requirement for a BS degree to only require 6 instead of 9 credits of research?

Upside - students might graduate faster (this is one of many constraints on graduation) which saves them money and time.

downsides - faculty may have less students to help with research (which helps faculty succeed via research productivity)

complicating - students might do the research anyways, they can still get credit it just doesn't officially count for anything.

context: the department is responsible to both...the actual impact of both the upside and downside are functionally impossible to predict because they are part of a broader complex partially social system that will anneal itself in ways you don't expect, metrics of success for students and faculty are important to everyone, albeit through different arms of an org chart which results in them each advocating for their metric at the expense of all others, because their success is partially evaluated on that metric.

solution (this is sarcasm): remove a math course as 'required' that most students get transfer credit for and have to have as a pre-requisite for other classes. Only effect is on the 2% of students who actually have to take the course.

result: everyone sees change, which they want, without perceiving a risk of harmful side effects, and with no actual change to the status quo.

Tradeoffs become multi-arm as you go up the chain. For instance, complying with the letter of the law at great engineering, operational and product UX expense, vs cutting corners to maintain a smooth UX, low operational overhead, and straightforward maintainable systems. In todays world no one is able to be experts in all those considerations. Leadership must make apples-to-oranges tradeoffs all day long, and they must rely on communication and maturity to navigate the cascading inputs of these choices. What is possible to execute on cross-functionally, in what timeline, and what are the externalities of different tradeoffs? These are fiendishly difficult to navigate, so generally financial metrics will serve as the tiebreaker, and even then it's based on a lot of guesswork and proposals made up by self-interested internal parties over-representing an uncertain outcome. It's no surprise that the really big ethical concerns get lost in the shuffle—there's simply no system of checks and balances on ethics with anywhere near the effectiveness of that imparted by the incentives corporate capitalism bolstered by individual self-interest (note I avoid the word greed here since the incentives aare chained all the way down to individuals which no one would consider well-off enough to be labeled "greedy").

> to individuals which no one would consider well-off enough to be labeled "greedy")

Greed doesn't have anything to do with how much money you have, it's about how much do you want "more" and what are you willing to do to get it. You can be content with nothing and greedy with nothing; content as a billionaire or greedy as a billionaire.

Sure, fair point, but where you draw the line isn’t really material to my argument. In fact no one needs to be particularly greedy in order for large corporations to do very bad things. It just happens organically through local incentives and diffusion of responsibility.

Also you won't climb very far if you're not willing to sacrifice at least some of your ethics.

I do not think it is just that. In organizations where low level employees are rewarded for breaking the law or doing unethical acts, front-line employees have as muddled line between right and wrong as managers.

In corporations, as you climb up, you get rewarded for unethical more and more. Ethical people get kicked out of the ladder.

I immediately sanity checked this with three examples.

SBF fit amusingly well. His fraud had all of these, with Effective Altruism providing an extreme example of how goodness in some areas atones for evil in others.

Stanford's president Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned after his reputation was found to be based on fraudulent research. Descriptions that I've read from those in his lab showed most of these.

Enron is too canonical an example to ignore. Yes, it had all of these.

SBF could not have been a generation older than his reports. They'd be 10 years old.

So, 6 out of 7 then.

No, he was not a generation older. But he managed to still create a persona that was bigger than life.

I think ' a generation older' is really just a proxy to explain the social dynamic of "subordinates are unwilling to question the authority of the CEO"

Seniority can be only a part of it. A CEO who is extremely wealthy and who is an actual celebrity does not like being told "no" to. It only gets worse with time - as they begin to think they are uniquely brilliant (and funny).

There's a very, very prominent example of that today. Let that sink in.

I think it's more that he staffed his entire company with young, ambitious, and inexperienced people.

That's the canonical example, but it's not about age in and of itself, but the gap between the CEO that turns them from a person into an idol. It's often an age gap (especially in the past) due to the culturally-entrenched ideal of automatic respect and deference to one's elders, but it can be any gap that makes the direct reports feel like they are somehow inherently beneath the CEO in ways other than corporate rank.

The point of that sign is that the CEO's direct underlings can't even question the CEO's choices.

It's not just their direct reports or even their employees. HN, Twitter, and Reddit are full of commenters simping and white-knighting for CEOs they have no relation to, whenever someone questions them. Corporate leaders have become this weird "priesthood" complete with followers and apostles praising them online.

Wells Fargo misses most. So does HSBC

I don't know enough about what happened inside of those to evaluate.

They're banks, so the assumption is lack of ethics.

They appear to from the outside. Most of the examples of ethical collapse that I'm aware of weren't entirely clear until after the organization collapsed and the dirty laundry went public. A lot of these would either be actively suppressed or they'd only be clear to people who are inside the organization.

In other words, the list is usually only useful to insiders.

Only those trying to blow a whistle (generally not good for one’s health), or get out before the indictments start landing anyway.

HSBC did everything right and still gets crucified for it. Whether your system can distinguish between Wells Fargo and HSBC is actually a pretty good test case.

If you want an even better example look at Steve Jobs.

I think the sanity checking works better the other way round: how much of this is just corporate norms that apply to most companies above a certain size, including ones with no particularly significant ethical challenges? One of the bullet points starts off by pointing out that 47% of companies have one type of conflict of interest!

CEO being higher profile and a generation older than [some of] the people sounds like a pretty normal company tbh, and probably only a major issue if the ethical issues are caused by the CEO (it technically doesn't apply to SBF, although his reports were even less experienced and in awe of him)

CSR and diversity initiatives and other corporate do-good messaging? Most companies do that to some extent, and it's not like the ones who don't even attempt to launder their reputations tend to be squeaky clean rather than too cynical to even try to look like they care.

And sure, KPIs and stretchy sales targets can definitely cause bad behaviour and lying, but they're also extremely common, and can be beneficial when companies actually get them right.

I am not sure if that is an objection because "50% of companies are involved in one or more ethical violations," sounds plausible.

I don't think "Purchase or sell insider services" necessarily means a conflict of interest, insiders could be winning the bidding process honestly as well.

Insiders are usually disqualified from bidding because of an inherent conflict of interest.

It does render the notion of "ethical collapse" and supposed comparisons to Enron a bit meaningless if we're also counting the sorts of ethical violation most companies are guilty of though. It's a bit like if a study of "criminality" makes a point of honing in on everyone who's broken a speed limit before...

Exactly. The usefulness of criteria for predicting anything depends on both false positive and false negative rates, and this article doesn't seem to care about false positives (what fraction of companies do trendy, visible ESG stuff but are also honest behind the scenes?) at all.

Might as well add an 8th point, "Companies that sell a good or service", and really bring that false negative rate all the way down to zero.

you’re right, it’s like inverse survivorship bias

how much of this is just corporate norms

Evil is the corporate norm, or at least psychopathy. It's even enshrined in law ever since Dodge v. Ford Motor Co.

Treat it like the DSM: a single symptom is not enough to diagnose, you need X/7.

To be fair, so many fast growing startups would tick multiple of their 7 boxes. Have you sanity checked it the other way (false positive)?

They don't define "ethical collapse" in terms of the company failing to make money. I imagine a fast growing startup could behave unethically without anyone really noticing (or at least saying anything) for a while.

Uber was on the cusp on a bunch of these (numbers pressure, fear/silence, big CEO, innovation, goodness atoning for evil). I think fear/silence tilting + strong governance forced Kalanick out and saved the company.

WeWork had every single one of these, and governance ultimately was too little too late to save the company.

AirBnb, Stripe had a few of these, but turned out OK.

It seems like the common variable that spares startups from ethical collapse is good board governance and having a reasonable / willing to evolve CEO.

FB is an interesting case, because they check most of these boxes (maybe not fear/silence?), yet are fairly "successful". Governance isn't the explanatory variable, since Zuck has 90% of voting shares. The explanatory variable seems to be Zuck's willingness to listen to and learn from a board and his execs.

I'd argue that "successful" is a poor measure of how ethical a company is.

AirBnb has managed to shake off some pretty bad ethical issues. Facebook was credibly implicated in a genocide, and Instagram in particular (and social media in general) has been causally linked to increased rates of juvenile suicide.

Oh for sure, that's why I put "successful" in scare quotes. As mentioned, FB checks pretty much every one of the "ethical collapse" boxes with a bolded checkmark.

That they've managed to be successful financially in spite of that fact (so far!) is pretty singular. That's a rare group. Not saying it's one to emulate, though, far from it.

Has OpenAI just joined the club too? What is the score?

6/7, the board of directors was not "weak" (they fired the CEO). Guess which one of the 7 Silicon Valley is now fiercely complaining about...

Arguably they were weak, but not entrained enough to the CEO to meet the criteria of this definition of weak.

It's easy to find these things in retrospect. It could be that ethical breaches are common and it's easy to ascribe lapses and wrongdoing to someone after a scandal.

For the model to be useful we have to show it can be used to consistently predict scandals and wrongdoing before they happen and before others notice

Eg. Can we confidently use this model to short corporate stock

On the one hand, the article and the talk it is about stresses the severity of the moral transgression: "moral meltdowns", "really crossed very bright lines", "ethical collapse".

But on the other hand, the implications of the moral failure for the moral status of the company and its employees is pushed far away into the corner:

- "These are great companies, great organizations, good people"

- "misguided companies"

- "good people at great companies"

The list that follows is something you can retroactively apply to numerous instances of corporate wrongdoing, but also provides an enormous amount of false positives and a false negatives.

Thousands of businesses don't meet these criteria and yet are morally compromised (e.g. Cargill). Thousands of businesses do meet these criteria and yet aren't going to be called out as "ethically collapsed" by the author before they've been outed and widely accepted as failed.

Seven signs of ethical collapse:

1. Pressure to maintain numbers 2. Fear and silence 3. Young ‘uns and a bigger-than-life CEO 4. Weak board of directors 5. Conflicts of interest overlooked or unaddressed 6. Innovation like no other company 7. Goodness in some areas atones for evil in others

Umberto Eco's 14 signs of fascism:

1. The cult of tradition. 2. The rejection of modernism. 3. The cult of action for action's sake. 4. Disagreement is treason. 5. Fear of difference. 6. Appeal to social frustration. 7. The obsession with a plot. 8. The humiliation by the wealth and force of their enemies. 9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. 10. Contempt for the weak. 11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. 12. Machismo and weaponry. 13. Selective populism. 14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak.

Each list contains symptoms of some degenerating organisation. However, I can easily find counterexamples of successful organisations which demonstrate one or more of these qualities. In fact, these organisations may be successful because they exhibit one or more of these qualities. This way of understanding the world is entirely juvenile and unfit as an evaluative framework.

Unethical and successful are not mutually exclusive. Nor is fascism and success.

I cannot agree. It is not a juvenile way of understanding, it is the only sensible way of understanding. Or rather it is not a way of understanding, it is one of the tools that can speed up understanding.

Social systems are very complex, you cannot write an algorithm of evaluation in terms of "measure this and that, then use this formula". It never works. You need to understand how the system works and it takes some research.

To do the research these 7 signs can be very helpful at first. They allow you to form you hypotheses fast on a data that not completely irrelevant. Just one more thing: these 7 signs are not just a measure procedure giving you one number, each one is a facet of an organisation that should be studied.

To be sure you'd better find some another evaluation framework, and study facets of an organization that it deems to be the most important.

It is like psychological tests: they do not diagnose the problems, but they allow to see a client from different perspectives. Tests are relatively cheap and they give you some threads to unravel.

> I can easily find counterexamples of successful organisations which demonstrate one or more of these qualities

1. No one said that these signs are signs of an unsuccessful organisations. You can be completely unethical and pretty successful at the same time. To my mind, the question does ethics correlate with a success or not is an ideological one. Theoretically speaking you can study it in a relatively objective way, but ideologies will win at the end. Either your indoctrination will take the upper hand, or indoctrination of others will force you to argue in a favor of "our sin will be punished inevitable" or something like. It is hard to find thinkers who are immune to that, there is a lot of wishful thinking goes on.

2. 1-2 signs is not a verdict, but an invitation to look deeper at the matters. Likewise 0 signs is not a verdict but very suspicious situation: how so? I will be very surprised if I find no these signs in any mildly successful organisation.

Part of the problem with this sort of analysis is that hindsight is always 20/20.

You may think your company has is transparent and has a wonderful process for handling conflicts of interest. Then only when things collapse do people come out of the woodwork and start dishing drama.

If they have a fear and suppression program that works, you would never hear about it!

Yes, it's often hard to identify this as an outsider. But people inside the company know, and if you've worked in places that handle conflict in healthy ways and in some that handle it not-so-well, you'll know quite clearly within a few days where your workplace stands.

This article, and especially point 2 (Fear and silence) is a great rebuttal against the flaw of the Radical Candor/Manipulative Insincerity framework; which considers apathy towards issues in the workplace as tantamount to being manipulative without considering why people resort to this behavior in the first place.

It is not easy for an single employee to change deeply embedded negative organizational behaviors, and therefore it is better for the employee to work with the goal of reward maximization (through a focus on total compensation and hitting numbers) and feigning ignorance or not bothering to report issues that cross ethical lines, which may backfire and cause trouble for the employee (constructive dismissal, smear campaigns, lawsuits etc.)

Incentives are a hell of a drug.

My last job was at a company where the CEO had the vision and the personality to lead the company through a necessary transformation (it was in a long-tail business).

The individual contributors were smart, experienced, and good people.

But between the top and the bottom there was a complete disconnect, as people were driven by incentives that rewarded individuals and teams for things that did not serve the company as a whole.

Not an unusual scenario in any large organization, but it was beyond frustrating.

How do you get a CEO with vision to structure the incentives towards achieving the vision (presumably starting with the incentives for his direct reports and maybe coaching them to do the same for their reports, and on down the chain)?

I am not sure you can without the CEO understanding all the ways the incentive can be gamed or hacked. The CEO would need to be as good as the workers at their particular job roles.

If the workers are in already with the vision, the CEO needs to understand the managers “only”.

The CEO I referred to apparently was aware of structural problems and approached them as "I have to let them fail first". This is not entirely unreasonable but painful as hell to stand by and watch.

Incentives are a hell of a drug.

This is the Homo sapiens version of the Alignment Problem.

> Incentives are a hell of a drug.

A more-prosaic example: I worked at a company where their internal enterprise software was sometimes the battleground between different groups, in particular Operations kept trying to put in guardrails to prevent commission-driven Sales from closing unprofitable deals.

hmm. in hindsight, that sounds like the first company i worked at, as a dev on the ops team. i was oblivious to those higher level strategies, and set out improving the internal orchestration software. it felt like each optimization and bug fix i released caused the rest of the ops team to resent me, even though it drastically reduced after hours pages and let them focus more on their long term projects. now its pretty clear to me that i was an expert beginner; its likely true that the work i was doing in the ops team ended up improving the sales team's positions with leadership, rather than the ops team that i was a part of.

in the end, though, our customers benefitted from the better internal ops tooling, and the customer experience improved. some deals were unprofitable from an ops perspective, but in my opinion the ops perspective misses the forest for the trees. sometimes a short term loss is a longer term win, and thats literally what a sales team is for. if ops doesnt trust sales, the org suffers.

> the CEO had the vision and the personality to lead the company

How did you know? I ask because most people in a position to know would also be part of the middle that you are blaming for the company's dysfunction.

The WayBack Machine's 2018 snapshot <https://web.archive.org/web/20181008124103/https://www.scu.e...> dates this article to (2007)

Not exactly clear-cut to identify... 7 different subjective signals?

Sounds too much like astrology where 10/12 different horoscopes would apply to most people anyways.

Before subscribing to something like this, I'd want to see hard data around how common each of these signals is in a random sample of companies(possibly even with a breakdown by industry)

> 4. A Weak Board of Directors

> Weak boards tend to have inexperienced members, often ones who are too young to have experienced a complete business cycle, which was often the case with companies in the dot-com boom.

> Often they have ethical conflicts of interest as well, in terms of consulting arrangements, related party transactions, …

Sound familiar?

If we're going to list the signs that could apply to OpenAI, let's list them all:

3. Young ‘uns and a bigger-than-life CEO

6. Innovation like no other company

7. Goodness in some areas atones for evil in others

Feels like half of this advice is directed at people that wouldn‘t profit from it. The reason people higher up are/become less ethical is because that usually is a quality needed to rise.

1. Pressure to maintain numbers

2. Fear and silence

3. Young ‘uns and a bigger-than-life CEO

4. Weak board of directors

5. Conflicts of interest overlooked or unaddressed

6. Innovation like no other company

7. Goodness in some areas atones for evil in others

The direction of progress is the direction of increasing accountability

good book about that - https://www.amazon.com/Reckoning-Financial-Accountability-Ri... tldr thesis is that the invention of double entry bookkeeping is the thing that has caused modern prosperity, not capitalism. we can only cooperate to the extent that we can detect cheating. Consider a 1600s merchant – without the ability to detect fraud, how can you give your goods to a shipping company? Capitalism is only possible if you can count your capital! a memorable example was a French king (Louis XV?) who bankrupted the realm because he didn’t know how much money he had.

It makes for an kind of inherent contradiction--or at least tension--inside certain types of laissez faire capitalist thought, between perfect-information versus the autonomy of secrecy.

On Monday, capital-C-Capitalism is celebrated as being the most efficient and economist-approved system (i.e. the bestest) when--if--there is somehow perfect price/deal information available to all actors.

On Tuesday, no-True-Capitalism is lauded as immune to cartels and collusion, because any actor will quickly undercut the others with secret prices and deals and hidden identities and wash-trading.

On Wednesday, Virtuous Capitalism needs no oversight because nasty behavior will be seen and detected by consumers who will vote with their wallets.

On Thursday, Property-Respecting Capitalism refuses to infringe on the owners' essential freedom... to construct impenetrable webs of shifting corporate ownership to obfuscate all controlling relationships.

Pressure to maintain numbers Fear and silence Young ‘uns and a bigger-than-life CEO Weak board of directors Conflicts of interest overlooked or unaddressed Innovation like no other company Goodness in some areas atones for evil in others

I was hoping for something, but sadly feel these all apply to our majority government in many world countries today, don't they?

Unsurprisingly, there's some gross oversimplification going on here, but this is interesting stuff.

That's 2012. Now we have a TikTok generation. After seeing interviews with Free Palestine protesters and general TikTok crowd, I fear US has no future and it will be an easy pick for China. These people are from prestigious universities but they are so dumb. Very, very dumb. In 20 years they will be working for US government ( because Yale, Harvard). TikTok is a weapon of mass destruction.

Show me one company not checking at least one of the boxes...

So economy in the aggregate is in the midst of ethical collapse?

You can find numerous examples across institutions and industry that meet all these criteria.

1. Pressure to maintain numbers… line must go up economy.

2. Fear and silence… quiet quitting, workers keep going in while expressing fear in private

3. Young uns and bigger than life CEO… see tech, finance, academia, politics exploitation of naive grads

4. Weak board of directors… voters and workers are subservient to 1%

5. Conflicts of interest overlooked… why do so few have so much reach into all our lives?

6. Innovation like no other… US capitalism is unsurpassed! World cannot do without it!! Resell yesterday with faster chips and flatter design!! … metrics hacks line up!!

7. Goodness in some areas atones for evil in others… we are burning up the planet for the next generation but how about that iPhone 15, dick rockets into space, and those massive F350s!

Yes, my thoughts were that all of these symptoms have become even more acute and obvious as time has gone on. This article from 2012 was probably only useful for scholarly purposes and high level debates between ethicists, but now even the commoners can see all of these issues glaring so clear and bright that this article is less useful and more the obvious being stated about what is constantly happening around us.

> 7. Goodness in some areas atones for evil in others… we are burning up the planet for the next generation but how about that iPhone 15, dick rockets into space, and those massive F350s!

This is not what that point means. “Goodness” isn’t referring to cool shit. It’s referring to doing good things.

Someone buys an F350 but then “offsets it” by donating money to a climate activist charity.

"Our competitor is getting away with it"

sounds like google

(2012)

Here they are:

1. Pressure to maintain numbers

2. Fear and silence

3. Young ‘uns and a bigger-than-life CEO

4. Weak board of directors

5. Conflicts of interest overlooked or unaddressed

6. Innovation like no other company

7. Goodness in some areas atones for evil in others

Great tldr of the article

It seems that many news media companies have these 4 in 2023!

    - Pressure to maintain numbers
    - Fear and silence
    - Conflicts of interest overlooked or unaddressed
    - Goodness in some areas atones for evil in others

Much more sobering, at least to me: I, personally, arguably have five of them.

(2012)

> “I hire them just like me: smart, poor, and want to be rich,” she quoted former Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski as saying.

Some time later... "Ex-Tyco CEO Kozlowski says he stole out of pure greed"

( https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tyco-kozlowski-release-id... )

"...but my motives were pure!" — "You stole it out of greed." — "Pure greed!"

Somehow that makes me think of the memorable (and ambiguously villainous) speech from The Network (1976) [0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35DSdw7dHjs&t=1m11s

Fundamentally ethics are a luxury. I might have some if I ever become rich and financially independent of the rest of society, but until that point I will not have any.

And even then, it comes after other needs like comfort and achieving my own goals. I won't sacrifice much of anything for ethics.

Campguard an option for very good comp? Or would that be a bridge too far?

I suspect you might have a different definition of ethics. I doubt many people would, for instance, murder for comfort or achieving their goals.

Murder is illegal and has significant negative personal consequences. But lots of things are not illegal and thus can be done with non-social risk.

Most unethical behaviors (regardless of being illegal or legal) have significant personal consequences. However, most unethical things are actually also illegal, falling under "fraud", "willful neglect", etc.

There's a gray area, usually referred to as "dark patterns" that aren't yet proven to be illegal, but likely are, if the regulators ever had the free time to care.

But yeah. Unethical people might find they have a hard time actually getting past a certain point in relationships (business or friendly), though sometimes it's good to have a few shrewd people in your back pocket to call on.

Let's hope so, otherwise it looks like someone is... sunglasses Murder for FIRE

> doubt many people would, for instance, murder for comfort

Individually, no. But we have a remarkable ability to adapt group ethical systems when resource needs demand it. The conflict arises when these adaptations occur in too-small a group, e.g. at the company level within a country, or a country level within an integrated continent.

Would you press a button that puts a million poor people each in $10k debt and gives you $1m?

Does the answer change if it's a million rich people?

Mine does

yes, it turns from a no to a hard no. that's destroying a lot to gain a little.

many of those "rich" people could be supporting many other "poor" people via jobs that you just wiped out for a small personal gain.

$10k is nothing for rich people. Just putting them in debt for it doesn't mean nothing of value was provided.

The reverse would be true where poor people could be ruined, unless the value provided is worth significantly more than the debt created, which seems doubtful.

$10k in debt would mean wiping out their net worth so they have more debt than assets. Not just $10k payment.

To be in $10k debt, it means you have more debt than assets.

Either way, wealth distribution is wrong. Stealing is stealing.

How is wealth distribution wrong? It sounds like you are arguing in favour of inequality.

It may well do. The percentage loss in wealth is smaller, the time spent in debt will be minimal rather than months or years, and wealthy people may be less likely to experience anxiety and depression as a result of being in debt.

There are whole industries built around pushing that button.

Ironically, the poor are typically more ethical than the wealthy in research. You may be among the ~.5% of humans unconcerned with harming others, regardless of wealth level.

There seems to be quite a bit of evidence of the opposite, or at least that "high-status" people are equally or more ethical. Some of the misperception seems to be explained by society holding high-status individuals to a higher ethical standard and more attention when they deviate from the norm.

That’s interesting. Of course we can’t 1:1 equate wealth with high-status, but I guess there’s often significant overlap.

The poster wrote that research shows that poorer people are typically (or in general) more ethical than richer and your reply is that there is evidence to the contrary without any evidence just a hand waving argument. That doesn't show anything.

You can indeed question the research of less ethical behaviour by richer people however you need to bring some evidence. This [1] article for example talks about a study which didn't replicate the behaviour. It's actually a well balanced discussion of the overall evidence.

[1] https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/are_rich_peopl...

What was the hand-waving? A better approach is just to be intellectually curious and ask. Besides, snarkiness is against the HN guidelines. This article [1] has a lot of references that support that claim, and it's a higher quality of rigor than a magazine article. FWIW, I'm not saying the original claim was wrong, just that we should be cautioned against strong claims when there is mixed evidence at best. Likewise, I would caution against extrapolating too much from studies that use cars as a proxy for wealth. Car model != socio-economic status for a variety of reasons. I'd argue that original (and replicated) study from your link is pretty flawed to begin with.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-42204-z

Sorry I didn't mean to come across as snarky.

By handwavy I meant that one can easily come up with "logical" arguments around behaviour that dont reflect reality, so it needs to be backed up by evidence.

Thanks for posting the article I was not aware of this research (while I was aware of the research showing the opposite).

2 things to note: 1. How is it possible that the two don't cite each other?! I have to call out the scientific report paper in particular. Piff's work is more than 10 years old and well known. Instead the authors only cite work that supports their premise. I would have thrown it out as a reviewer just based on this. That said the article I linked should have mentioned some of the work cited in the scientific reports article as well.

2. It seems studies are done quite differently, the article you linked seems to largely rely on surveys (sidenote I really dislike the use of mechanical turk for these things, way too unreliable) of assessment others or their own ethical behaviour. Piff's work was more experimental (thus lower numbers and less reliable in that sense)

No apologies needed, but I appreciate the thoughtful response.I agree that surveys are not the best tool. Unfortunately, for a lot of work that covers social components, they are a common method. While wealth is easily quantifiable, people's feelings towards topics like ethics are often best done by asking them.

I think the Piff study is just really flawed because they were trying to use a quantifiable proxy.

"we used observers’ codes of vehicle status (make, age, and appearance) to index drivers’ social class."

IMO they chose a really bad proxy, and they never validated it. It's completely based on an assumption, and one that we can all probably point to personal examples that violate it. To me, that's "hand-wavy" science. To your point, I could probably come up with a handful of different explanations that correlate car make/model to seemingly aggressive driving behavior. Some of them probably correlate with wealth and others not so much.

I do think there's a danger of confirmation bias. Just like the nature study demonstrates that there is a normative belief that wealthy people act less ethically, it's really easy for our status-obscessed ape minds to latch onto studies that support it. Even when they aren't the greatest.

Regarding survey's I don't necessarily disagree with surveys (although they can be flawed), but find that mechanical turk seems to give the worst way of doing a survey. It rewards going through the survey as quick as possible and I would also argue attracts people who optimise toward time (although I don't have hard evidence), not necessarily honesty (an interesting ethics question in itself).

Regarding your thoughts on the car study I broadly agree it is not a very good proxy for wealth (also areas with many company cars likely skew results as well). However I do think that it's trying to independently verify peoples self-evaluation using similar experiments what gives us much better insights and there were a number of other studies with similar results.

Confirmation bias is always a danger and the paper that was described in the article which could not reproduce the correlation between car cost and behavior tried to follow best practices to minimise it, so probably should be given more weight. I actually wondered if there is a difference also according to culture, i.e. Piff's results were obtained in the US, while the other article was in the Netherlands.

Yeah, I agree. I think the MTurk is not a great approach. Researchers rely on it too much because it's easier to implement than other options. On the other hand, if I were a reviewer of the Piff article, I personally wouldn't have let it pass peer-review as-is. The entire article is based on an unvalidated wealth model. I see this quite a bit with research that comes for peer review: 1) We have this model, 2) Look at all these neat findings we extrapolate from this model

They are missing the intermediate step that shows the model measures what it's supposed to. In this case, they never validate that car make/model is a good proxy for wealth. The entire premise is based on a book titled "Luxury Fever"[1] and not on peer-reviewed research. They never actually explain this model, either. What cars are mapped to their 1-5 scale? Is a Lincoln a 5 or a Ferrari? No idea. There's contradictory evidence that many wealthy people drive Hondas and Fords and that less-wealthy people buy luxury cars as a pseudo-status symbol. That's why symbols of wealth (clothes, cars, etc.) are a bad model for actual wealth, especially in a society with a large debt burden and when the models go unvalidated. There are other questions I would have, like small-ish sample sizing, to basing the entire study in Berkeley, to only doing the traffic study between 2-5pm. I would question how well that study can be extrapolated. If you do a quick Bayesian statistical significance test on their vehicle data, it doesn't appear statistically significant. But they report correlations instead.

All that to say, there's a lot of contradictory evidence on both sides. Social science is hard, and I was trying to make the main point that we need to be very careful about making strong and broad claims from limited evidence. And I say this as someone who drives a bargain-basement hatchback with mechanical windows :-)

I would argue that holding someone to a standard, ethical or otherwise, requires some sort of accountability.

And yet, in the US, we have congressmen/women who regularly engage in insider trading and accept bribes in the form of lobbying and cushy jobs after they leave office, we have multiple sitting Supreme Court justices accepting bribes, and we have a former president who isn't even held to the same standard we hold our children.

I'd be hard-pressed to come up with any examples of a high-status individual being held to a higher standard than the rest of us. Sure, there's a lot of belly-aching on social media from time to time, but in most (all?) cases, it's for falling short of a standard we're all expected to satisfy, and there's almost never any real consequences.

> we have multiple sitting Supreme Court justices accepting bribes

When you use the word “bribe” to describe something that isn’t, it dilutes your point significantly.

This is a thread about ethics, you can use precise words and still talk about how they are unethical.

Links?

Depends, ethics are part of having integrity. And people with integrity can go a long way over time, since integrity is part of being reliable, And reliable people keep getting invited back.

It's the difference between a short term and a long term view.

Ethics is really just scaffolding to explain how people interact. This reads as a rationalization for the ends justify the means, which might be considered a branch of consequentialist ethics.

It sounds to me like they were describing rational egoism / objectivism. Rand described the ethics of objectivism as:

  "Man — every man — is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others.
    He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor
    sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-
    interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life."

Ethics is a luxury. The luxury of not having to hire armed guards every time I go to the ATM. The luxury of not having to test my groceries to make sure they aren't going to poison me. The luxury of being able to trust the financial statements of my bank, or my broker.

It's a luxury to live in a society where most people have ethics. I really enjoy having that luxury; I suspect you do, too.

So if you want to not have them yourself until you get ahead of everyone else, that sounds kind of like a sociopath.

Ethics is what's popular according to influencers. Enjoy this double entendre.

You just described your own system of ethics. I think you're confusing the concept of ethics with a particular construction of ethics

That's a very hostile mindset to have, but at least you admitted it, which is a bit better than the people who think the same way but pretend otherwise.

I don't know that it's a bit better. I'd much rather work with someone I know will be unethical, given the chance they won't get caught. They're easy enough to spot. I can strategize around the getting caught part. Someone that wears lack of ethics as a badge of honor, I'd rather just never work with.

Rich people have the resources to safety burn bridges, make enemies and get themselves into trouble they can dig themselves out of with lawyers, bribes, etc. If you're poor, then for your own sake it is even more important to behave ethically, in a way that makes other people inclined to like you.

The only reward from trying to be likeable is getting your own box to fit into. Being likeable often requires masking and being the fakest, bubbliest version of yourself. Not what I'd call a reliable way to enjoy life.

You don't have to be phony, you just have to not be unethical and screw over the people you meet, turning your acquaintances into enemies. If you behave like a normal reasonable moral person, you will make friends and form a social safety net that can support you when you need help. Poor people who behave unethically are truly stupid. Any short-term gain you might get from screwing people is going to come back to bite you before long.

The 'normal, moral person' is load-bearing in this argument. It's a wild card used to filter based on superficial preferences. It can be wildly inconsistent, even within its own framework.

Normies simply will never understand what it's like to be on the receiving end of normie social habits. They're more insular than you're indicating.

> independent of the rest of society

That's the seed of evil: the idea of isolated existence. The strong just pull it out. The weak passively watch how it grows and wait until it's rotten down in envy, experiencing all sorts of sufferings on the way there.

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