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Don't be Google

doonesbury.washingtonpost.com

84 pointschris-at30 comments

So how are "page ranking, search results, and cached data" inherently evil? These are some of the basic services that make the web as we know it work. Also, energy consumption? My understanding is that they were doing quite a lot to meet their needs with renewable sources[1][2]. I hardly think that qualifies as evil.

Sure, there are times and issues we can point to where Google has failed their motto. You could make an argument that their mission to "organize the world's information" is evil when it is carried to it's logical extreme, or at least empowers evil. But this comic is not making those points. It's just grabbing a bunch of old headlines, some of which aren't even relevant.

Though I confess I never really "got" Doonesbury. It's rarely accurate enough to pass as a political cartoon and rarely funny enough for the funny pages.

[1]: http://www.google.com/green/energy/

[2]: http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/07/20/us-google-windpowe...

Doonesbury is not calling Google evil for these things. They're pointing out that others have, fairly or otherwise.

Advertising is inherently evil, and Google is an advertising company first and foremost (it's where the vast majority of their revenue comes from, after all).

Why? I hate advertising, and believe it's gotten way way way too pervasive in all aspects of modern life, but I still wouldn't even say it's inherently evil.

I think one 'problem' is that advertising's goal is to manipulate and condition the human mind to desire a product. Of course, there is a very blurred line (if any at all) between "informing" someone of a product and using subtle psychological tricks to make them desire the product. Idk, complex grey area for me which I find fascinating yet somehow conflicted about.

The problem with that analysis is that damn near all human communication uses "subtle psychological tricks" to achieve ends, good, bad and neutral. When advertising gets called out specifically in that context, it's a consequence of the ancient snobbery towards commerce, pioneered by the aristocracy and improbably adopted by the academia.

http://www.economist.com/node/21541857

That is correct, which is why I never trust communication done by someone who has an incentive to draw a profit from it.

That's the point. You don't trust anything, commercial or not, by default, you use your critical faculties and evaluate the information available to you to reach a conclusion. As such, advertising isn't special, and isn't inherently evil anymore than any other type of communication.

Can you give an example of communication that does not have an incentive to profit?

My comment above. I assume yours as well. Most of the internet, actually (e.g. HN, Reddit, ...) - the owners of the website might benefit (pageviews & ads), but not the most often anonymous posters. (Of course, there are exceptions, and any post on the internet should go through a bullshit sensor, but it's a different bullshit sensor than when someone is trying to sell you something.

Not profit in a strict monetary sense, but you benefit in various direct and indirect ways from advancing your worldview and challenging mine.

I see the focus on monetary profit as somehow 'dirty' at the expense of the myriad other ways people benefit from interactions as a further symptom of the snobbery described in the link I posted.

my communication was a challenge to you, to promote my worldview (laissez faire free market) to the 3rd party readers of our exchange. Since my skills, knowledge, are heavily intertwined with this worldview, my value goes up when people sway to this worldview. So in pushing this agenda, I profit.

Let's say our posts were purely entertainment value only. I still profit because I am entertaining myself for cheaper than the alternatives, saving money, and therefor profiting.

Usually we call people who take action that don't benefit themselves crazy or self-destructive.

I totally agree that all communication has a goal/motive; I was referring specifically to advertising/for-monetary-profit communication, mainly because such communication in itself is an indication that the originating party is driven by profit (they are willing to lose money for the chance of convincing you), not by altruism (such as e.g. reading these comments on HN or reading fitness advice on reddit).

This also the problem with paid advice (lawyers, fitness trainers, therapists, ...), as the incentives are rarely aligned - the better the service (faster resolution of the problem), the more the customer benefits, and the less the seller earns. Hence, sellers are incentivized to not offer perfect service. Of course, market efficiency is high enough that those who offer really bad service (solve the problems too slowly or not at all) will get a bad reputation, but it's reasonable to believe that the optimum for each individual seller (and hence for the market itself) is less-than-perfect-service offered to customers. This is obvious even in fields that are highly regulated, e.g. medicine: most drug research is targeted to managing long-term diseases (HIV, cancer), so that the customer stays a customer as long as possible; one-shot medicine (e.g. for snake bites) are "priced out".

It's even worse in politics; politicians can promise anything, get elected, do the opposite, and blame the opposition.

On the other hand, the incentives online are different. There is no money, only reputation, good feelings (altruism) and lulz. Therefore, you need a "bullshit-test" to filter out the trolls (e.g. upvoting, reputable peer-reviewed blogs), but if you do that successfully, the incentives of producers and consumers of information are aligned.

Finally, this is only my thinking and analysis of the state of the world; I might be wrong, and I encourage you to point out any errors in my thinking and change my mind.

Your thinking is well reasoned. However, I think you are defining profit too narrowly to a direct currency transaction. Money <> Time <> Happiness are fungible to a large degree. Even altruistic actions are done for profit. I received more satisfaction and sense of well being from building a Habit for Humanity all day than I do from a $500 prostitute. My point is that people who don't profit (monetarily) from communication are not 'good' or morally better than people who do. Your politician example is a great example. Their effective communication definitely increases their future profits (govt employment, lobbying, or political donations) because it increases their political power. You could say that Brand advertising has the same profit timeline as political speech.

I don't think there are many differences between online and off. Main differences are anonymity and scale. The drivers of behavior and dynamics are pretty much the same.

I agree with you (still reading the article by the way). That's why I consider it a grey area because we all have various goals that drive several action. In some way, we 'profit'. I suppose the problem easily becomes an ethical/moral (loosely defined) issue where one has to decide on where lines are drawn - if any at all. Is the monetary profit from advertising that different from the emotional/mental profit from donating to a charity? If so, where do we make the distinction? Clearly, an action to achieve a specific end (good, bad or neutral) doesn't cut it.

No, it's not.

Future comment on the twitter stream "Shit HN Says" https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says

You realize that of all advertising methods, Google's is probably the least evil? "Searching for a product? Here is that product sold by a large variety of competitors."

That's not the evil part. The evil part is how they appropriate, to varying degrees, the works of content creators, and then sell advertising on top.

It is trivial to tell Google not to index your work if you don't want them to.

> Advertising is inherently evil

Advertising in its basic form is a lie. When advertising you never speak about the competitors who are better than you, the flaws in your offering, you extrapolate your advantages, you "fake it until you make it" and so on, but... "evil"?

Just like Churchill's saying about democracy (democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried), I would say the same about advertising.

Advertising is the worst form of informing people about what you can offer, except all other that have been tried.

Telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Pfft, that would be so boring.

What other forms have been tried, and how were they worse?

The other form is when you try to be very objective and tell the whole truth. Try this next time when you pitch an idea or try to explain the benefits using some product / service. I bet there will be a lot of yawns and eye rolling. That's why engineers are usually not the best people to present something new (a product or just an idea). Because they try to be objective and stick to the facts. And most of the time people don't want that, they want excitement. And excitement needs some lying.

The way I understand it, it's not that cached data or page ranking are evil, but the way Google does it; it's completely opaque, prone to random changes (even though many people depend on it for their livelihood) and, the most important problem IMO, when there is an issue, Google is handling it really badly (e.g. nobody can be contacted about it) - not really something inherently evil, but something a big company could do something about (and Google chooses not to).

They're not inherently evil. What the comic actually says with respect to Google is "They've had issues with" those things.

Putting the punchline in the title totally ruined this.

Yeah, the title should just be "Don't be Evil"

Google is 15 years old with almost 50,000 current employees. Of course it has done evil things. Now, don't know of a coherent widely agreed-upon definition of evil, but once you get to that scale, there is enough human behavior going on that some of it will be evil for pretty much any definition.

The lack of a widely agreed-upon definition of evil is a problem for Google though. That word gets thrown around enough that "don't be evil", really only means "Don't use 'we're a for-profit corporation' as an excuse to do something egregious."

If you're going to link to a comic with a joke in it, don't put the punchline in the title of the submission!

Google is also evil with their AdSense banning[1].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7672910

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