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Comment by LastTrain | Hacker News Reader

Hanlon’s Razor applies to human behavior, not corporations.

Engineers are humans.

Corporations are not, they're made of humans but they behave worse than an individual.

And who do you think makes these behavioural decisions? There is no “corporation”, there are, however, those currently on that company’s payroll.

It’s their fault. The people. The humans. The ones working there. The ones knowingly employing their knowledge in service of the company.

It’s always the humans.

If the structure doesn't have any influence at all on the behavior, why do we have regulations against monopolies (at least on paper)?

No one says structure doesn't influence behavior. Intended behavior is not the same thing as actual behavior, and groups of people don't behave like individual people. Metaphors to organisms are just: metaphors. We've known for a very long time that mobs of people will do nasty, destructive things that individuals in the mob wouldn't otherwise do. Corporations will also do nasty destructive things that individuals in the corporation wouldn't otherwise do.

Did you read the comment I was responding to? They said corporations don't exist and the individual humans deserve all of the blame. I fully agree with everything you said except for "No one says structure doesn't influence behavior"; I think that's pretty much exactly what the comment I responded to argued.

I don't have access to that commenter's state of mind, but I take it to mean that the "corporation" as a singular entity only exists on paper and in fact acts as a group of individual humans. I don't think that's the same thing as saying the structure having _no influence_, especially since that structure pays people and money influences the behavior of individuals. No influence is a much stronger claim than what was made. But I could also just be projecting my thoughts on the matter onto others when I say "no one says structure doesn't influence behavior".

I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree then. The context of their comment was whether the corporation or humans are to blame, and the comment I responded to reads to me like saying that the corporation has no blame and the humans have all of it.

Your opinion honestly does seem mostly aligned with mine (there's potentially blame for both the corporation and the individuals, with the corporation's portion of the blame being from influence on the individuals), and personally I find it kind of hard to determine how much the individual deserves since it depends a lot on circumstances we might never know (e.g. if the individual had a really sick family member, I genuinely might find it understandable that taking a job from Google that pays well even if it's doing some weird stuff with browsers; that's an extreme example, but my point is that I don't think whether it's blameworthy or not is a binary). I just don't read the comment I responded to as agreeing with any sort of nuance like that; my reading is that they're asserting that the individuals are fully and solely blameworthy and that the fact that they were operating under the behalf of a corporation is insignificant.

Fully agree. Humans are social animals who behave differently in different contexts, and the corporate context statistically ensures that the humans inside of it behave in all sorts of lamentable ways.

Corporations are just groups of people working under a common name towards a common goal, even when that goal is flimsy or bad.

Yes, but the worst human in an org, has the potential to drag the whole org down. Further, people are not aligned, so groups may disagree with an act, but each lack a majority to effect change. And group infighting may mean no cooperation.

We see this in politics. Orgs are political too.

(no "political" doesn't mean US Left/Righr here. It means simply "political" which can have nothing to do with government or party politics)

> Corporations are just groups of people working under a common name towards a common goal

Exactly in the same way as humans are just groups of cells working under a common genetic identity towards a common goal.

Politicians are also humans, everyone working for De Beers are also human... Please stop justifying egregious behavior from company who is destroying the fabric of internet with too many useless ads....And it isn't first time they are doing it, these "engineers" were the one who removed mv2 without better ad blocks in mv3.

>useless ads

If the ads were useless, advertisers would not pay for them to exist.

>without better ad blocks in mv3

MV3 adblockers were built before MV2 was deprecated.

Just for your info classic ublock style doesn't work on mv3. Google have severely limited adblocking in chrome now. They deprecated very late due to pressure from people, not out of goodwill.

Useless to users, not to advertisers. And, many people like me have never purchased any products after seeing ads at least on internet.

1. ads are not useless. 2. without ads, there would be significantly less free content for people to read. 3. politicians are human too, but not the best of us except a few. Yes.

It's hip to say ads make things worse, but reality is often much more nuanced.

My original point being, many times an external person may think something is intentional when it may very well be a bug or may be there for a good reason.

I have observed a few of those both as an external person or an internal person.

I don't think anyone is denying the value of advertising to Google or its advertisers.

But with fewer ads influencing their spending, readers might have more disposible income left over to fund content.

Might is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

Can't remember the last time I saw an ad for something I was actually interested in. These days I am often discouraged from buying a product based on ads.

It's also just a razor, and not a very useful one.

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