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Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

I don't. I want X that I've just bought to do what I bought it for. Unless that was explicitly to "make me a better person", I don't want X or anyone selling X to go anywhere near that.

The culture of sales - which eventually shades into law and politics, because they're all based on the same psychology - is incredibly toxic. It's also noisy and expensive, culturally and ecologically.

I'd much rather have sales operate as customer solution generation - with "Sorry we can't do that for you" as an option - than customer predation.

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This is based on a faulty understanding of what sales is supposed to be (and what it is, when it is done well) - at any level, sales is primarily a discovery exercise (what does the customer want?) and working out if you can mostly fulfill those needs. This is hampered by a few things namely 1: commission structures, 2: customers not knowing what they want (regardless of what they might tell you) and 3: customers not wanting to admit what they want.

While there are some egregious examples, the rate at which a sales interaction is based on outright fraud is thankfully very small.

As for focusing on customer solution generation, I would highly recommend you spend more time working with customers before setting others up for that sort of torture.

Is this your first year? Because this is completely contrary to my experience.

Salespeople are some very driven folks but honesty and a desire to help customers solve needs is not a common trait.

No, but I should disclose that I am a recruiter (salesperson alert!) who works to help salespeople get jobs. Not to say I've met some terrors in my time, but I think the vast majority of salespeople are good people (just like the vast majority of devs/engineers are also well intentioned people).

Fraud wasn't mentioned.

Take for example the Pepsi challenge, in a blind test people reliably choose Pepsi, but knowing brands, they choose coke.

Coke are successfully increasing sales for something people arguably don't want. Except they do because they feel coke says something about them? They're told coke says something about them? What's the morality implications there?

Anyway, whatever your opinion that isn't about finding a customer solution, customers clearly want Pepsi, perhaps with coke branding, marketing is working against that in this case.

Agreed. That's how you would like the world to be, not how the world is.

It's how the world could be. But first we need to stop using an economic belief system built around feedback loops that reward sociopathic behaviour.

A long time ago cannibalism was considered the norm. At some point the disadvantages became obvious.

We're about to go through an analogous transition with our economic belief systems.

It isn't clear to me how you would prevent sociopathic behaviour.

If current trade relies on trust, sociopaths could take advantage of that trust. If you replace it with a trustless system you take all the humanity out of it(?), which starts seeming a bit dystopian to me.

Plus to me marketing is very broad, and can basically be divorced from economics. Marketing (propaganda) still existed in the USSR.

Can you be more specific about this new economic belief system?

I disagree with this - the system we have is based on money and trust, which while gamed easily, is much less violent, brutal and inequal when compared to other systems that we've tried in the past - such as communism/socialism (the USSR still had a market, but it was based on how much political power you had, rather than pure money - a much more violent game), or feudal systems where it was all about how much land you were born into (or possibly conquered for yourself). Of all of the systems we've tried, this is probably the least sociopathic yet.

Which bit do you disagree with?

I said I cant imagine a system more hostile to sociopaths. You've provided historic examples that are less hostile.

I wonder if there is some evolutionary mechanism that rewards sociopathic behaviour in a small percentage of the population of any group.

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