Hacker News Reader

Comment by ien24sdq | Hacker News Reader

This is a really important thing that people on the left in particular seem to consistently overlook: local incentives, emergent corporate behaviors, and the unconscious need to believe you’re “right” have way more explanatory power than “X is actually evil”.

View on HN

The banality of evil is a well-known idea. That evil is often done by people who are just doing their jobs and see themselves as decent people.

Words are cheap, thoughts are cheap, and voting is cheap. A full-time job, on the other hand, is a substantial contribution towards something, and it comes with a huge opportunity cost. The job you have is a major factor in determining your moral character. Determining what kind of a person you actually are, as opposed to the kind of a person you believe to be, or wish you'd be.

I don't think its reasonable to use the whole "banality of evil" for people working FAANG jobs unless they are on trial for war crimes and genocide. The Nazi officers were not standard grunts but rather key executives of the regime and then they tried to throw Hitler under the bus by claiming they were just following orders. When in reality, they were all pyschopaths and truly believed in what they were doing to minorities was right.

Extrapolating that to Meta or Google is a fundamental misunderstanding of history and insenstive.

The need for belonging is also really powerful, and companies actively try to fulfill that need. Not, generally speaking, for nefarious purposes, but because people do better work when they feel a sense of belonging.

If you decide that your work is against your values, you're also deciding to separate yourself from the group, even if you don't actually leave the company. That's painful. It's not an excuse, but it is a powerful motivator.

Yes, but once you're aware of these factors and leverage them for personal gain anyway, it's evil. It's not like it's impossible to make out the bigger picture on many issues, or to ask oneself if the upsides are really so great that it's worth being responsible for the downsides.

This is equally true for leftist projects. If one is dedicated to the cause of improving the general welfare and creating economic and social opportunities for as many as possible, that's laudable, but you can't use it as an excuse to just ignore the human rights whenever you run into a problem or a tricky ethical situation.

Yeah but keep in mind what Zuck specifically has done. He copied Snapchat multiple times, Facebook overwrote people's public-facing emails, "dumb fucks" in IMs

Zuckerberg is awful person but he alone is not "Meta." It is a company made up of thousands of employees and each of those people play their role in enshittifying the internet. Some of do it gleefully and others do it because they think the battle is better fought in the company than out of it. The large salary also doesn't hurt.

If your incentives and emerging behaviors land at an evil result, it is evil. I’d argue the problem is everyone who constantly generates these “well actually” reasons to excuse the consequences. Marx wrote about people being simultaneously perpetrators and victims of capitalism over 150 years ago, I assure you the left isn’t overlooking this very obvious mechanism.

It’s also a little funny to turn a thread about the blatant failures of a neoliberal “success” story into a weird criticism of the left.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com