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Comment by stemlord | Hacker News Reader

Yes the system is broken

What is the broken part? There is a difference between investment and donation, should investors be forced to invest in ventures which don't explicitly promise them financial return on the investment?

The broken part is that the system overall has negative incentives. We, as humans, want to improve humans’ lives, make technological progress, provide for our needs, etc. and the current strategy of prioritizing profit over any other metric only sometimes aligns with these goals.

Come up with a different measurement for good that is equally wanted and fungible

> What is the broken part?

"most investors want to invest in companies whose explicit purpose is making money for the investors".

Rational investors should favor companies whose explicit purpose at least resembles a value proposition, which "PROFIT$!" does not.

The unspoken premise here is that profit correlates to value creation, so it may be more rational to allocate resources to people who can generate value regardless of the form it takes (that's kind of Friedman's idea if you dig a layer deeper).

Rational investors should favor companies which prioritize investor interests, rather than companies which intentionally prioritize someone else's interests over investors.

The broken part is when the investors sue the company for not making maximal profit possible, ethic be damned. This is exactly where choosing to be a social purpose corporation might help.

>What is the broken part?

The second law of thermodynamics is always at fault

We're in the complex phase between point A of a low-entropy uniform distribution of densely packed particles with strong gravitation, and point B of a high-entropy uniform distribution of widely spaced particles with almost no gravitation.

The second law is unfortunately taking us to B eventually, but it's also responsible for the journey from A to where we are today!

A being the Big Bang and B being heat death (est. 1.7×10^106 years).

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