Comment by no_wizard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by no_wizard | Hacker News Reader

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Edit: for the sake of discussion can we unflag the parent? There are some legit interesting conversations that will be missed due to the parent comment being flagged

I had a nice chat not that long ago with someone who founded a very successful software business and has worked in tech since the 1980s.

They said something that really stuck with. He said that the problem he has seen with today’s entrepreneurs is that in order to get ahead anymore, everyone got comfortable with breaking the rules

At first it was rhetorical, like tearing down old business culture or norms. However at some point that morphed - he said somewhere around 2014 or so he notice a big shift in attitudes from investors in down, in that breaking the rules went from simply the rhetorical to the literal. This was the beginning of what he feels is widespread rule breaking turned into breaking the law, eschewing civil norms in the name of profit and generally the shift from “let’s solve interesting problems and help people” to “let’s make as much money as possible before anyone looks too closely at this” became the norm not the exception.

He feels that in today’s world of business breaking the law to get ahead is now an accepted strategy and as a result it is harder than ever to run an honest business that gets ahead fair and square.

I always think about this conversation when I think about issues related to tech and society

This is pretty much Wall Street finance behavior and when you consider money motivated, highly educated, succeed at all costs, personality types had steered away from finance and into tech over this time period I think it makes a lot of sense. Also, crypto as a whole being lumped into “tech” is massively tempting way to commit fraud. There’s so much room for shenanigans that it draws in con men of all pedigrees.

Do you think leaders should have moral training? And if so, how would such training be provided? Ytcombinator itself maybe deficient in providing moral guidance, but this just one anecdote. What does it say about our mentors and community leaders when they stay out of the moral and simply stay in the technical and business?

Mark Zuckerberg had to turn around and beg forgiveness from the parents of social media users in Congress. This needed to be broadcast globally, and witnessed, because that event shows the full power of the entire history of what this all was, that by the end of it we had to beg forgiveness. I do believe we’ve crossed a threshold and these topics are now in the forefront. The moral question.

Maybe just enforce law would be a good start I would think.

> Do you think leaders should have moral training?

I suspect that they'd then learn even better what to say to make good impressions, while continuing exploiting others and society as much as always nevertheless.

If a person want to rob a bank, would you think moral training would stop him? (Repeating "it's not my money" 10 times)

Well, are we willing to do serious moral training? For example, if you make Elon Musk live with a family that relies on Medicaid, would that be sufficient to convey the experience to such a person? Moral training requires exposure and being uncomfortable. You have to inspire someone to feel the other side, and I agree, just telling them doesn’t appear to work.

I think ethics is what we are really talking about, not morality policing. If there was ethical enforcement and codification of generally acceptable ethical behavior to go along with it, you’d see changes.

I hold no hope of changing Elon Musk’s morales but making it hard to run directly counter to conducting yourself in an ethical manner would make his morales to a certain degree irrelevant as society / community standards would hold bad actors accountable and in check or face consequences

> make Elon Musk live with a family that relies on Medicaid

Interesting idea, if that changes his stance on empathy?

https://www.instagram.com/p/DHAyaTKgOAZ/

It would be interesting if something like that was part of school, say, everyone had to live or work a month with <something> that help them understand how e.g. being dependent on Medicare can be.

Seems tricky to arrange though? Moving in together with a family just because they live on Medicare sounds intrusive

I think the failure is indicative with the trend that boils down to this: the more insulated you become to the failure of decisions made by yourself and others like you it’s easier to make bad ones. When you don’t have to deal with the ethics of the actions taken and their consequence what incentive does anyone have to do better?

On the direct question you asked, YC and others should have some form of a course on ethics and ethical decision making and ideally how they teach that should be public for the sake of transparency and scrutiny.

I want to state for the record I also don’t have all the answers to the seemingly exponentially increasing ethical concerns unfolding in 2025.

[-]: for clarity I think ethics is a better defined for what we are talking about in practice

Moral training is useless in the face of the social media flamethrower. It's very easy for people to surround themselves with a feed that tells them that immoral things are Good, Actually. People can reason themselves into anything. The Effective Altruism lot turning into financial crimes with SBF is a good example.

> for the sake of discussion can we unflag the parent? There are some legit interesting conversations that will be missed due to the parent comment being flagged

Also, the parent comment (while not especially interesting or insightful) isn't breaking the rules or anything. "Flag" is not a mega-disagree button, people.

"Get rich or die tryin" was in the early 2000s ? "Too big to fail" was from the late 80s.

The general feeling, both from the top and the bottom, that breaking the law can either be a calculated risk or counted as cost of business has been prevalent for a while IMHO.

Jerk CEOs constantly reported as getting fined for private infractions and throwing money at the problem as a way of life was only making it more culturally palpable IMHO.

Or even Michael Jordan's Nike deal. We've been there for a while.

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