Googling for Sociopaths
aaronsw.com
aaronsw.com
Oh please. This is so weak that it's laughable. First, Google hasn't always had this much market share in search and the other big search providers (to my knowledge) didn't ban their competitors. Microsoft didn't ban other office suite products from working on Windows. They didn't ban other browsers. Yeah, IE might have been more tightly integrated, but please explain how this is different from the incestuous pile of Google products that promote Google search at every turn?
Instead of glossing over how Google gets some criticism and then beating your anti-Microsoft strawman, maybe we should take a look at some of the questionable things Google has done (China).
It'd be nice if I was wrong, but in my opinion, Google isn't some special orgy of love and kindness towards humankind. It's a multi-billion dollar company with millions of shareholders and it'll do whatever it thinks is best for turning a profit. If that happens to be stuff that isn't "evil", so much the better. If not (China), so be it.
Let's revisit when Google is as old as Microsoft or Disney or News Corp. is now and see how it all turned out. I'm betting the only difference is that now articles like this will make Google out to be the big bad corporation filled with sociopaths trying to destroy the world.
EDIT: added a closing thought
Yahoo had links to Altavista, lycos, google, etc, at the bottom of its search results years ago. I'm not sure where he's coming from. If the internet was a book, the text would be companies like Disney and the index would be google. It would seem strange that the author would be paid less and be held in less esteem than the guy who compiled the index.
Of course the vanguard of the media industry doesn't like Google. They've spent billions creating content and Google's entire business model is to lower the value of that content to free so they can sell more ads against it. And we cheer Google on because we want shit for free, meanwhile complaining about how Demand Media and Aol and TechCrunch are pumping out incredible quantities of shitty content to get more ad views.
The middle of media is dying, and it's partly thanks to Google. You can go niche / high quality and produce artisanal content that small groups are willing to pay for, or you can mass produce piles of shit and make pennies at scale. But I'm not sure you can produce good content for a large audience anymore.
/rant
To be clear, I'm not really blaming Google, or Demand or anyone. This is what the market wants, and I'm not sure it's evil to give it to them. If they hadn't done it, someone else would have. My point is just that Google isn't some altruistic genie.
I don't think saying "CHINA = EVIL" is terribly helpful, either.
1. It states that it was only in a beta release of Windows 3.1 and was removed for the final product. Is this really the basis of your argument here?
2. They clearly went about it in a deceptive way, but is what they were doing at the core wrong? Was Windows 3.1 considered an upgrade from MS-DOS? If so, I don't see how requiring users to have the base package is wrong, any more than Apple is unwilling to allow you to upgrade from Windows 95 to Snow Leopard. Maybe I'm not understanding the situation?
And as far as the other search engines go, at one point it got to the point where they effectively not only banned their competitors but banned any useful site out there. Towards the end, Altavista was so blatantly selling search results, that no matter what you searched for you would always get a bunch of porn with a couple of pages selling those stupid Ethernet cameras sprinkled in.
I do not know whether Google is truly not evil or wont become evil in the future. But they had much more integrity than their competitors and that is one of the reasons they became successful.
Yeah, kind of like how Google is tiptoeing around that now?
What exactly makes Eisner a "sociopath" and Brin & Page "normal decent people"? It's apparently that Google makes things people want and Disney does not. I'm not sure this holds up. Disney doesn't make desirable things?
I think this is one of those times when "don't be evil" is conveniently the same thing as "build the best (or most profitable) search engine". That Google is not censoring search results says nothing of whether they're "good" or "evil"; it just seems like a smart business move.
I don't get this quote. It's quite clear Brin and Page did outsmart them. Murdoch's latest rantings clearly show he doesn't understand we live in a world of algorithms now and just having a team of content producers has nothing on having a team of programmers, a host of servers and the capacity to find people the content they need in the vast expanse of the Internet/long tail.
Newspapers are second best at almost everything now, world news (vs. the top blogs or state-funded like BBC), local news (vs. long tail of blogs), dating (vs. numerous sites, craigslist), classifieds (vs. ebay, craigslist), book reviews/sales (vs. amazon), reviews (vs. tons of sites), advertising (vs. algorithmically placed ads). A bundle of second bests, the newspaper, was the best when it was the only thing you could buy. It was a very effective delivery mechanism that far exceeded trying to subscribe to multiple newsletters/pamphlets/zines to cover each base. But tabbed browsing (or even sequential browsing untabbed) just slaughters that delivery mechanism in specialization/choice, cost and cost of delivery, time of delivery and place of delivery.
Murdoch will be able to charge for some financial news, perhaps even some political news for a while, he will be able to put some sports he gets the exclusive rights to on mobile pay-per-view (banning twittering sportsmen/women and banning video/enforcing "IP rights" at sports events). But in the end he can't beat the fact that a newspaper or a TV station is just a bundle of second bests and isn't customized. He probably knows this deep down and is just looking to "hide the decline" until he retires (which has to be in the next 10 years given how old he is) so that his legacy is intact. But my will he be biting his fingernails in retirement.
And frankly, this is how it should be in any somewhat capitalist system. I don't want to hear a journalist expound on economic matters when they don't have a degree in economics, only in journalism (or no degree at all). I can just go onto one of the many economic blogs, quite a few run by professors of economics. Ditto political news. Ditto tech news on reddit, HN or slashdot where there are multiple commentators who often have graduate degrees in the subject matter and certainly many links posted to peer reviewed articles or at least Wikipedia. So often tech journalism is just the recycling of press releases, or science journalism pops up with, yet again, a correlation/causation fallacy with all of the interesting details cropped out for a mass audience. I am glad journalism is dying, the bailouts were insane enough, but there was actually a stage where some journalists tried to float the idea of bailouts for all the big newspapers and media groups. Absolutely disgusting. Hopefully they will never get any more "IP" rules passed or sabotage net neutrality and the world of information plenty that we happy few live in can be expanded to the rest of the population on the planet (half of whom have yet to make a phonecall, which is humbling when you see the resources at our fingertips).
The thing is, journalism as you paint it isn't dying. The medium is changing, but the landscape is still dominated by journalists, meaning people who write stories on subjects they don't deeply understand, for a mass audience who doesn't know any better. And I'm really not sure that the quality is improving at all. Look at the top 10 tech blogs, or political news sites, or whatever, and tell me I'm wrong. The fact of human nature is that we're predisposed to believe people who sound like they know what they're talking about, and who can write in a persuasive manner. And our info economy has driven us to a shallower understanding of the world, I think, so we're satisfied with getting Twitter-sized updates every 10 seconds on a thousand different topics. The places like Aol and Demand Media who build content farms get this, and that's why they're going for volume and scale instead of deep quality. HN and places like it will never be mainstream, because people don't like to spend this much time thinking about stuff.
At least for local news, I'm happy about twitter-sized updates. This way I can get a gist of what's going on without the unnecessary details. For example:
Gunman shoots 3 people in X town
I'm interested if you can name one mainstream economist or economic commentator, especially a famous one, who comes even close to being as factual and prescient as Mish.
This is just one site...the blogosphere was all over the impending economic collapse for years, while the mainstream economic journalists, many with economics degrees, had it exactly backwards. And if your retort is that it wasn't a big deal, all is well now, I recommend you do more reading and decide for yourself if that is true.
On HN, we (usually) seek out the best information and data by using rationality and logic and having a high standard for what constitutes intellectual discussion. We hold subject matter experts in high regard and we seek to sidestep fallacies and gratuitous displays of emotion.
Most people are not this way.
Witness the rise of 24/7 cable news that blathers endlessly about whatever is the big story of the minute, or conservative talk radio, designed to whip people into an emotional frenzy. Or Twitter! I'm pretty sure that if Mish was restricted to 140 characters, he'd be a lot less insightful.
The medium is changing, but human nature hasn't changed. And the result of making everyone a content producer is that there are many orders of magnitude of content out there, which means you have to get attention by being intensely targeted (HN), or by pure volume (Demand Media). My point is that human nature seems to be driving more people to the latter.
Because Google proclaimed that they will "do no evil". So therefore they are not evil ... fire up your blogs praising Google in 1...2....
Of course a few dissidents who were turned in by Google to face long prison sentences in countries with oppressive regimes might have something to say about the track record of the "do no evil" policy, but somehow everyone already forgot about that.
Once a company outgrows its founders, becomes a publically-traded behemoth, it is really not that different from other publically-traded behemoths. Some just learn from the mistakes of others, and handle their marketing and PR better (e.g. Microsoft is considered the "Evil Empire" so we will market ourselves as "good" on the moral spectrum).
For instance, it helped Google's PR tremendously to take a "moral stand" as a company. Perhaps their cost-analysis showed that when they do something immoral nobody will notice and they'll use their awesome marketing skill, and everyone will forgive and forget. It worked great in that respect. But that typifies sociopathic behavior.
Now I am not blaming Google too much. I think it is the legal environment that creates a Darwinian competition where sociopaths rise to the top. If companies had personalities (I don't think they do, at least not to the extent that everyone anthropomorphizing them), most would be diagnosed as dysfunctional sociopaths. Those that aren't, we never hear about.
No offense, but saying that they were 'turned in' is a little loaded. The governments queried Google for identities and got them. I never heard of a story where Google was actively searching for dissidents to turn into the government like some sort of bounty hunter.
Never-mind their active participation in blocking information and issues relating to Tibet and thus contributing to the problem.
Well, I expected to get down-voted on HN for even alluding that Google would do something wrong, and for not worshiping Sergey & Larry. This is definetly Google fanboy country.
"Hail Almighty Google!" -- there, fixed it now. Let the points roll in.
I'm definitely no Google fanboy. It just really irks me when I see something that is seemingly trying to convince me of a point with subtle cues rather than just presenting the information. I have no problem 'attacking' people that share values with me if I think that they might be misrepresenting the facts or just coming across in a way that would hurt 'the cause.'
Alarmist: Big corporations are run by sociopaths! What this means is never really defined (are we using the lay or clinical definition of sociopathy? If lay, then what definition?), but more tossed about as a straw man for why big companies are Bad(tm).
Self-congratulatory: Big companies are Bad(tm), but us feisty startups are so awesome. We're a force of good in this world! Us technical folk sure are more moral and just plain better than them durned "sociopaths"!
I find the constant overuse (and lack of definition or apparent understanding) of the word "sociopath" to be particularly stomach-churning, and it reads of alarmist hate-scribe not much unlike the racist, sexist, and other reprehensible things extremists tend to write about "them" (where "them" is a convenient, sometimes made up, demographic to blame). The consistent attempt to dehumanize these "sociopaths" (again, never defined) is really kind of sickening.
Google wins the way better scientists do.
I don't think they're simply benevolent. I think what they've discovered is that focusing on doing good work actually makes you more dangerous.
Oh, yes, someone's going to have a marry christmas.
The men who created the media empires were incredibly aggressive. Many of their business practices were rooted in organized crime.
For instance, Lew Wasserman, creator of MCA and Universal. He inspired terror throughout Los Angeles. No, he was not going to have you killed (despite one minor flirtation with the real mafia) but he could kill your career or your company.
Wasserman was every bit a latter-day Genghis Khan. And I think it's true that capitalism directed his energies into making movies rather than building a mountain of skulls.
There is an undeniable style difference between MCA/Wasserman and Google/Schmidt.
A total ban of an obvious competitor would clearly raise so much controversy that it is "almost unimaginable", I agree.
But Google's smaller-scale bans and reorderings, always for ostensibly legitimate purposes, have sometimes caused accusations about Google's real goals by the webmasters affected. That's not to say their paranoia is correct -- but "[n]ever been accused" and "unimaginable" is a bit strong given the real history.
And they are 'demoting' other content incrementally all the time -- whenever they promote their own content in the first few vertical positions. Tried any health-related search on Google recently? As of a couple months ago, 'Google Health', with an image, is almost always the top hit.
Do non-YouTube videos get as prominent placement as YouTube videos?
Most people who work for giant tech corporations aren't sociopaths -- far from it. The top American tech firms are filled with people that are almost painfully conscientious, in an upper-middle-class way. Don't even think about cancelling the recycling program or face a general uprising at the next assembly. This is true whether you work for Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Apple, Oracle, or whatever. I don't know the telecom or media industry, but I bet it's about the same there.
The sociopath angle makes sense to describe the behavior of the corporation itself. (viz. "The Corporation" film). Even if there's an opportunity you have qualms about (subprime mortgages, expanding into China), the shareholders will insist you get into that market as long as competitors are making money.
Google's corporate behavior is pretty "evil". To their competitors. And sometimes even their partners. Consider how they are bootstrapping off TeleAtlas' mapping data product to basically make that entire industry obsolete, once people are carrying around iPhones that constantly map everything.
But as long as they are "evil" to competitors in the service of making a better product, they are "good" for everyone else.
The traditional media monopolies stopped really competing a generation ago, and after the consolidation of the 80s and 90s it's all been about denying entry to competitors, and controlling access to markets. That's what makes them "evil".
Google isn't in any position where they can do that yet, except maybe online advertising (sort of). So for the most part Google is focused on breaking open markets. That might change if they ever start "owning" a consumer, like say with a Chrome-powered netbook. Just you wait.
Both Google and other firms believe they are bringing value to the market. It's hard to believe Rupert Murdoch, for example, believes his companies bring nothing of value. You may not like what he produces, but it's hard to accept he doesn't in some way, and his customers certainly do.
It's pleasing to believe Google is full of salt o' the earth types out to make the world a better place, and Newscorp, for example, and its like is full of evil men and women--but this is a picture far too black and white to be taken seriously.
Essentially assuming two giant companies are so different to the extent that one wishes to make people lives happier, and has the success of the business as a second priority, and the other is inversed seems very fantastical, and without evidence.
After all we know, it is probably the best. In every other system known to mankind psychopath cause incredibly more damage. Think Soviet Russia, North Korea, the Roman Empire, Nazy Germany, Cold War Romania, ...
The irony: Aaron Swartz probably had some idealistic system in mind when he wrote it (correct me if I'm wrong or if I am erecting a straw man), that would handle everything better if only the "right" people were in charge. The available data speaks otherwise.
"Not to be a socialist at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head." Georges Clemencea
If you pay attention you will see that Google, just like MS, is making an effort to be better than its competitors in order to disrupt and dominate their markets. Where there are no competitors, Google is letting its products languish. If they end up a virtual monopoly for the main markets, they won't be much different than MS.
Substitute "word processor", Microsoft, and Word with email client, Google, and Gmail as appropriate.
Very odd.
A sociopath has conscience, empathy, and ethics but his differ radically from those of mainstream society. For example, a gang member who'll kill someone in a rival gang-- breaking the law in most societies-- but would take a bullet to save his mother, is a sociopath-- not a psychopath.
Psychopaths are selfish and devoid of any conscience or empathy. However, they're very manipulative and often skilled at playing within society's rules, which sociopaths rarely do (because they have so much contempt for society). Dr. House might be considered a very mild sociopath, but he's not a psychopath: he's never cruel, and he has very strong ethics, but absolutely no regard for the ethical principles society expects him to hold.
The difference is that sociopaths reject society's superego and conscience but still have their own. Psychopaths have none. So the corporate barons and media moguls are correctly typed as psychopaths, not sociopaths.
Otherwise, good article.
http://www.mental-health-matters.com/index.php?option=com_co...
Psychopath is not a technical term.
Your take is not one that I have heard before, but I am interested to know more.
The author describes a number of case studies of what he calls psychopaths who are neither dangerous nor offensive to the society around them.