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Comment by ambicapter | Hacker News Reader

> And why shouldn't it when there is zero negative ramifications for being completely fucking unethical?

Well, I mean, except for large, systemic ramifications that affect everyone in society, but who's counting?

The people making obscene amounts of money give zero shits about that.

They live in private neighborhoods with private security guards and send their kids to private schools. Once they get enough money they fly on private jets and go to private islands to private parties that you're not invited to.

Simply put the consolidation of wealth in a very small percentage of the population always leads to outcomes like this. These people become completely disconnected from the reality that 98% of the rest of their country lives in.

You cannot build morals through legislation. Ultimately all systems rely on the individual to behave responsibly and morally. You cannot legislate your way out of that.

The collapse of collective consideration is a major reason the west is in decline. Championed by neoliberals without insight into history, it seems.

>Championed by neoliberals without insight into history,

Ah yes, it was the neoliberals that spout "I am the rugged American individualist and I don't need no society"

That is exactly correct, are you being sarcastic?

You can absolutely disincentivize unethical behavior through legislation though, whether they believe it at the core of their being or not. See slavery, murder, rape, robbery, etc. There will always be loopholes people can exploit, but that doesn't mean legislating away the larger ones doesn't have an effect.

Legislation on education curriculums can also have an impact on people's core morals, though that can be tough when even concepts like "share your toys" and "slavery was wrong" can be called indoctrination these days.

Of course. But ultimately every institution rests on the goodwill and morality of its individuals.

You can’t build a moral society without laws eliminating unethical parasitical business models either.

That is a very false and misleading dilemma.

Coordination matters. And coordination is too hard to do as a call for everyone to just be good.

If you live in a jungle of “free” actors (unconstrained by a need to compete constructively), the good path becomes unrealistic for everyone. And everyone but a few, have to work increasingly harder to pay off the damage of those few.

Or suffer the unrelenting undertow on their lives as highly rewarded parasitic behavior finances its own continued growth.

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What would a single chart of computing power devoted to commercial surveillance and feed manipulation, on hire to actors both good and bad, look like?

I can tell you, that the scrapbook and organic sharing aspects of the major social networks, even with non-surveillance personalized ads, would be profitable with a small fraction of the servers being used to optimize users for advertisers. If that wasn’t the enabled bar.

In the meantime, the leverage compounds as how do good actors who need to advertise compete without themselves feeding these highly centralized surveillance/manipulation machines? Even while they increasingly siphon off the margins of their revenue as real producers?

And how can direct competitors avoid becoming monsters? Whatever OpenAI’s natural good intentions, high or low: to compete with Google and Facebook in the consumer market they will also have no choice but to also start and innovate new ways of extracting surveillance/manipulation value from users.

Not just ads to cover natural costs, but s/m driven ads to keep up with the s/m margins and therefore investment by competitors they have to compete with.

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Without guardrails for everyone, everyone (at a practical level) is forced to be actively or passively complicit in increasing damage as a major growth industry.

Margins for profits in legally externalized negative outcomes are, by definition, better than for productive on-their-merits businesses.

I’m not arguing for a lack of regulation or a jungle. Far from it. But I’m pointing out that many people behave within the law but not in the spirit of it, for example.

Google exists, Facebook exists, both require intrusive advertising technology that has undermined democracy, led to large scale violence, etc. and it’s legal, and thousands of nerds make it happen.

>You cannot legislate your way out of that.

You absolutely can use legislation to tamp down on amoral behavior, though.

You can reduce it, but nowhere near eliminate it.

Ah yes, human history is full of societies that never legislated morality. They always trusted in the individual. After all we all remember the nature of God's law and the ten commandments - Thou shalt follow your conscience.

Humanity is a largely defined by our exercise of legislating morality. For a lack of insight into history you should consult a mirror.

I didn’t say don’t legislate, I said it is not enough. The responsibility ultimately lies with the individual.

If I’m an academic and I want to pursue being a professor over helping a student, that’s my choice and no system will stop me. That’s why so many PhD students are endlessly screwed over by their supervisors so they can fuel their career.

Individual morality is what maintains institutions and the west has replaced that culture with selfish neoliberalism and now it is screwed.

This doesn't make any sense. Is it individual or up to the culture? You have a culture but it ultimately lies with the individual? So what was this culture before? How can the ultimate responsibility ever be displaced by any culture if it's up to the individual ultimately? Is your claim neoliberalism single handedly altered the nature of morality? You don't think something like students getting screwed can see improvements if legislated? Selfishness was invented within the last 100 years?

Sorry, but imo your argument is just bad. It's just griping about neoliberalism dressed up as some argument whose terms wouldn't even pass a type checker level of logical validation. And it's also boring. Neoliberalism is so easy to dunk on these days and yet you couldn't even manage to do it convincingly.

I was chatting with someone about the evils of capitalism. My position was that capitalism was viable as long as culture controlled capitalism. When culture capitulates to capitalism it's a death spiral.

When I speak with overseas friends there's often a sense of "of course" or "reasonable" moral lines in the relationship between their culture and where capitalism can't tread. That seems completely gone right now in the US, though it's been heading in that direction for decades. It was mediated by social constructs that have since been completely eradicated.

EDIT: Always interesting to watch comment points go up and then come down.

When U.S. lawmakers admitted that between democracy and capitalism they'd pick capitalism, I knew we were in trouble.

Are you referring to a specific event here?

Here's an example: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/18/capitalism-trumps-democracy-...

If I have any hope for the future of America it is that the upcoming generation finds 'Industrial Society and its Future', and instead of becoming radicalized, simply turns its back on tech fetishization.

Almost any reply mentioning that capitalism actually could have some problems on HN ends up being controversial. I can only assume some hate it and others worship it like a god.

In practice the system is such that 'everyone' doesn't really seem to include the people making a lot of money they are effectively outside the system the rest of us have to deal with.

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