[HN Gopher] Seven signs of ethical collapse (2012)
___________________________________________________________________
Seven signs of ethical collapse (2012)
Author : tacon
Score : 252 points
Date : 2023-11-21 16:55 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.scu.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.scu.edu)
| cbsmith wrote:
| Unsurprisingly, there's some gross oversimplification going on
| here, but this is interesting stuff.
| exac wrote:
| Here they are:
|
| 1. Pressure to maintain numbers
|
| 2. Fear and silence
|
| 3. Young 'uns and a bigger-than-life CEO
|
| 4. Weak board of directors
|
| 5. Conflicts of interest overlooked or unaddressed
|
| 6. Innovation like no other company
|
| 7. Goodness in some areas atones for evil in others
| hackernewds wrote:
| Great tldr of the article
| stcredzero wrote:
| It seems that many news media companies have these 4 in 2023!
| - Pressure to maintain numbers - Fear and silence
| - Conflicts of interest overlooked or unaddressed -
| Goodness in some areas atones for evil in others
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Much more sobering, at least to me: I, personally, arguably
| have five of them.
| pstuart wrote:
| Incentives are a hell of a drug.
|
| My last job was at a company where the CEO had the vision and the
| personality to lead the company through a necessary
| transformation (it was in a long-tail business).
|
| The individual contributors were smart, experienced, and good
| people.
|
| But between the top and the bottom there was a complete
| disconnect, as people were driven by incentives that rewarded
| individuals and teams for things that did not serve the company
| as a whole.
|
| Not an unusual scenario in any large organization, but it was
| beyond frustrating.
| indigochill wrote:
| How do you get a CEO with vision to structure the incentives
| towards achieving the vision (presumably starting with the
| incentives for his direct reports and maybe coaching them to do
| the same for their reports, and on down the chain)?
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| I am not sure you can without the CEO understanding all the
| ways the incentive can be gamed or hacked. The CEO would need
| to be as good as the workers at their particular job roles.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| If the workers are in already with the vision, the CEO
| needs to understand the managers "only".
| stcredzero wrote:
| _Incentives are a hell of a drug._
|
| This is the _Homo sapiens_ version of the Alignment Problem.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > Incentives are a hell of a drug.
|
| A more-prosaic example: I worked at a company where their
| internal enterprise software was sometimes the battleground
| between different groups, in particular Operations kept trying
| to put in guardrails to prevent commission-driven Sales from
| closing unprofitable deals.
| CrazyStat wrote:
| (2012)
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| Fundamentally ethics are a luxury. I might have some if I ever
| become rich and financially independent of the rest of society,
| but until that point I will not have any.
|
| And even then, it comes after other needs like comfort and
| achieving my own goals. I won't sacrifice much of anything for
| ethics.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Campguard an option for very good comp? Or would that be a
| bridge too far?
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I suspect you might have a different definition of ethics. I
| doubt many people would, for instance, murder for comfort or
| achieving their goals.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| Murder is illegal and has significant negative personal
| consequences. But lots of things are not illegal and thus can
| be done with non-social risk.
| withinboredom wrote:
| Most unethical behaviors (regardless of being illegal or
| legal) have significant personal consequences. However,
| most unethical things are actually also illegal, falling
| under "fraud", "willful neglect", etc.
|
| There's a gray area, usually referred to as "dark patterns"
| that aren't yet proven to be illegal, but likely are, if
| the regulators ever had the free time to care.
|
| But yeah. Unethical people might find they have a hard time
| actually getting past a certain point in relationships
| (business or friendly), though sometimes it's good to have
| a few shrewd people in your back pocket to call on.
| NotMichaelBay wrote:
| Let's hope so, otherwise it looks like someone is...
| _sunglasses_ Murder for FIRE
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _doubt many people would, for instance, murder for comfort_
|
| Individually, no. But we have a remarkable ability to adapt
| group ethical systems when resource needs demand it. The
| conflict arises when these adaptations occur in too-small a
| group, _e.g._ at the company level within a country, or a
| country level within an integrated continent.
| n4r9 wrote:
| Would you press a button that puts a million poor people each
| in $10k debt and gives you $1m?
| GrinningFool wrote:
| Does the answer change if it's a million rich people?
| MakeThemMoney wrote:
| Mine does
| theultdev wrote:
| yes, it turns from a no to a hard no. that's destroying a
| lot to gain a little.
|
| many of those "rich" people could be supporting many other
| "poor" people via jobs that you just wiped out for a small
| personal gain.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| There are whole industries built around pushing that button.
| skygazer wrote:
| Ironically, the poor are typically more ethical than the
| wealthy in research. You may be among the ~.5% of humans
| unconcerned with harming others, regardless of wealth level.
| bumby wrote:
| There seems to be quite a bit of evidence of the opposite, or
| at least that "high-status" people are equally or more
| ethical. Some of the misperception seems to be explained by
| society holding high-status individuals to a higher ethical
| standard and more attention when they deviate from the norm.
| skygazer wrote:
| That's interesting. Of course we can't 1:1 equate wealth
| with high-status, but I guess there's often significant
| overlap.
| cycomanic wrote:
| The poster wrote that research shows that poorer people are
| typically (or in general) more ethical than richer and your
| reply is that there is evidence to the contrary without any
| evidence just a hand waving argument. That doesn't show
| anything.
|
| You can indeed question the research of less ethical
| behaviour by richer people however you need to bring some
| evidence. This [1] article for example talks about a study
| which didn't replicate the behaviour. It's actually a well
| balanced discussion of the overall evidence.
|
| [1] https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/are_rich_
| peopl...
| bumby wrote:
| What was the hand-waving? A better approach is just to be
| intellectually curious and ask. Besides, snarkiness is
| against the HN guidelines. This article [1] has a lot of
| references that support that claim, and it's a higher
| quality of rigor than a magazine article. FWIW, I'm not
| saying the original claim was wrong, just that we should
| be cautioned against strong claims when there is mixed
| evidence at best. Likewise, I would caution against
| extrapolating too much from studies that use cars as a
| proxy for wealth. Car model != socio-economic status for
| a variety of reasons. I'd argue that original (and
| replicated) study from your link is pretty flawed to
| begin with.
|
| [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-42204-z
| cycomanic wrote:
| Sorry I didn't mean to come across as snarky.
|
| By handwavy I meant that one can easily come up with
| "logical" arguments around behaviour that dont reflect
| reality, so it needs to be backed up by evidence.
|
| Thanks for posting the article I was not aware of this
| research (while I was aware of the research showing the
| opposite).
|
| 2 things to note: 1. How is it possible that the two
| don't cite each other?! I have to call out the scientific
| report paper in particular. Piff's work is more than 10
| years old and well known. Instead the authors only cite
| work that supports their premise. I would have thrown it
| out as a reviewer just based on this. That said the
| article I linked should have mentioned some of the work
| cited in the scientific reports article as well.
|
| 2. It seems studies are done quite differently, the
| article you linked seems to largely rely on surveys
| (sidenote I really dislike the use of mechanical turk for
| these things, way too unreliable) of assessment others or
| their own ethical behaviour. Piff's work was more
| experimental (thus lower numbers and less reliable in
| that sense)
| bumby wrote:
| No apologies needed, but I appreciate the thoughtful
| response.I agree that surveys are not the best tool.
| Unfortunately, for a lot of work that covers social
| components, they are a common method. While wealth is
| easily quantifiable, people's feelings towards topics
| like ethics are often best done by asking them.
|
| I think the Piff study is just really flawed because they
| were trying to use a quantifiable proxy.
|
| "we used observers' codes of vehicle status (make, age,
| and appearance) to index drivers' social class."
|
| IMO they chose a really bad proxy, and they never
| validated it. It's completely based on an assumption, and
| one that we can all probably point to personal examples
| that violate it. To me, that's "hand-wavy" science. To
| your point, I could probably come up with a handful of
| different explanations that correlate car make/model to
| seemingly aggressive driving behavior. Some of them
| probably correlate with wealth and others not so much.
|
| I do think there's a danger of confirmation bias. Just
| like the nature study demonstrates that there is a
| normative belief that wealthy people act less ethically,
| it's really easy for our status-obscessed ape minds to
| latch onto studies that support it. Even when they aren't
| the greatest.
| atmavatar wrote:
| I would argue that holding someone to a standard, ethical
| or otherwise, requires some sort of accountability.
|
| And yet, in the US, we have congressmen/women who regularly
| engage in insider trading and accept bribes in the form of
| lobbying and cushy jobs after they leave office, we have
| multiple sitting Supreme Court justices accepting bribes,
| and we have a former president who isn't even held to the
| same standard we hold our children.
|
| I'd be hard-pressed to come up with any examples of a high-
| status individual being held to a higher standard than the
| rest of us. Sure, there's a lot of belly-aching on social
| media from time to time, but in most (all?) cases, it's for
| falling short of a standard we're all expected to satisfy,
| and there's almost never any _real_ consequences.
| kortilla wrote:
| > we have multiple sitting Supreme Court justices
| accepting bribes
|
| When you use the word "bribe" to describe something that
| isn't, it dilutes your point significantly.
|
| This is a thread about ethics, you can use precise words
| and still talk about how they are unethical.
| withinboredom wrote:
| Links?
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Depends, ethics are part of having integrity. And people with
| integrity can go a long way over time, since integrity is part
| of being reliable, And reliable people keep getting invited
| back.
|
| It's the difference between a short term and a long term view.
| bumby wrote:
| Ethics is really just scaffolding to explain how people
| interact. This reads as a rationalization for the ends justify
| the means, which might be considered a branch of
| consequentialist ethics.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| It sounds to me like they were describing rational egoism /
| objectivism. Rand described the ethics of objectivism as:
| "Man -- every man -- is an end in himself, not the means to
| the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake,
| neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing
| others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-
| interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral
| purpose of his life."
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Ethics _is_ a luxury. The luxury of not having to hire armed
| guards every time I go to the ATM. The luxury of not having to
| test my groceries to make sure they aren 't going to poison me.
| The luxury of being able to trust the financial statements of
| my bank, or my broker.
|
| It's a luxury to live in a society where most people have
| ethics. I really enjoy having that luxury; I suspect you do,
| too.
|
| So if you want to _not_ have them yourself until you get ahead
| of everyone else, that sounds kind of like a sociopath.
| idlejitter wrote:
| Ethics is what's popular according to influencers. Enjoy this
| double entendre.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| You just described your own system of ethics. I think you're
| confusing the concept of ethics with a particular construction
| of ethics
| neilv wrote:
| That's a very hostile mindset to have, but at least you
| admitted it, which is a bit better than the people who think
| the same way but pretend otherwise.
| kgwxd wrote:
| I don't know that it's a bit better. I'd much rather work
| with someone I know will be unethical, given the chance they
| won't get caught. They're easy enough to spot. I can
| strategize around the getting caught part. Someone that wears
| lack of ethics as a badge of honor, I'd rather just never
| work with.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| Rich people have the resources to safety burn bridges, make
| enemies and get themselves into trouble they can dig themselves
| out of with lawyers, bribes, etc. If you're poor, then for your
| own sake it is even more important to behave ethically, in a
| way that makes other people inclined to like you.
| akomtu wrote:
| > independent of the rest of society
|
| That's the seed of evil: the idea of isolated existence. The
| strong just pull it out. The weak passively watch how it grows
| and wait until it's rotten down in envy, experiencing all sorts
| of sufferings on the way there.
| spa3thyb wrote:
| (2012)
|
| > "I hire them just like me: smart, poor, and want to be rich,"
| she quoted former Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski as saying.
|
| Some time later... "Ex-Tyco CEO Kozlowski says he stole out of
| pure greed"
|
| ( https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tyco-kozlowski-release-id...
| )
| Joker_vD wrote:
| "...but my motives were pure!" -- "You stole it out of greed."
| -- " _Pure_ greed! "
| Terr_ wrote:
| Somehow that makes me think of the memorable (and ambiguously
| villainous) speech from The Network (1976) [0].
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35DSdw7dHjs&t=1m11s
| btilly wrote:
| I immediately sanity checked this with three examples.
|
| SBF fit amusingly well. His fraud had all of these, with
| Effective Altruism providing an extreme example of how goodness
| in some areas atones for evil in others.
|
| Stanford's president Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned after his
| reputation was found to be based on fraudulent research.
| Descriptions that I've read from those in his lab showed most of
| these.
|
| Enron is too canonical an example to ignore. Yes, it had all of
| these.
| lordnacho wrote:
| SBF could not have been a generation older than his reports.
| They'd be 10 years old.
| not2b wrote:
| So, 6 out of 7 then.
| btilly wrote:
| No, he was not a generation older. But he managed to still
| create a persona that was bigger than life.
| bumby wrote:
| I think ' a generation older' is really just a proxy to
| explain the social dynamic of "subordinates are unwilling to
| question the authority of the CEO"
| renegade-otter wrote:
| Seniority can be only a part of it. A CEO who is extremely
| wealthy and who is an actual celebrity does not like being
| told "no" to. It only gets worse with time - as they begin
| to think they are uniquely brilliant (and funny).
| outworlder wrote:
| There's a very, very prominent example of that today. Let
| that sink in.
| legitster wrote:
| I think it's more that he staffed his entire company with
| young, ambitious, and inexperienced people.
| LegibleCrimson wrote:
| That's the canonical example, but it's not about age in and
| of itself, but the gap between the CEO that turns them from a
| person into an idol. It's often an age gap (especially in the
| past) due to the culturally-entrenched ideal of automatic
| respect and deference to one's elders, but it can be any gap
| that makes the direct reports feel like they are somehow
| inherently beneath the CEO in ways other than corporate rank.
|
| The point of that sign is that the CEO's direct underlings
| can't even question the CEO's choices.
| ryandrake wrote:
| It's not just their direct reports or even their employees.
| HN, Twitter, and Reddit are full of commenters simping and
| white-knighting for CEOs they have no relation to, whenever
| someone questions them. Corporate leaders have become this
| weird "priesthood" complete with followers and apostles
| praising them online.
| hackernewds wrote:
| Wells Fargo misses most. So does HSBC
| btilly wrote:
| I don't know enough about what happened inside of those to
| evaluate.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| They're banks, so the assumption is lack of ethics.
| LegibleCrimson wrote:
| They appear to from the outside. Most of the examples of
| ethical collapse that I'm aware of weren't entirely clear
| until after the organization collapsed and the dirty laundry
| went public. A lot of these would either be actively
| suppressed or they'd only be clear to people who are inside
| the organization.
| stvltvs wrote:
| In other words, the list is usually only useful to
| insiders.
| lmm wrote:
| HSBC did everything right and still gets crucified for it.
| Whether your system can distinguish between Wells Fargo and
| HSBC is actually a pretty good test case.
| legitster wrote:
| If you want an even better example look at Steve Jobs.
| notahacker wrote:
| I think the sanity checking works better the other way round:
| how much of this is just corporate norms that apply to most
| companies above a certain size, including ones with no
| particularly significant ethical challenges? One of the bullet
| points starts off by pointing out that 47% of companies have
| one type of conflict of interest!
|
| CEO being higher profile and a generation older than [some of]
| the people sounds like a pretty normal company tbh, and
| probably only a major issue if the ethical issues are caused by
| the CEO (it technically doesn't apply to SBF, although his
| reports were even less experienced and in awe of him)
|
| CSR and diversity initiatives and other corporate do-good
| messaging? Most companies do that to some extent, and it's not
| like the ones who don't even attempt to launder their
| reputations tend to be squeaky clean rather than too cynical to
| even try to look like they care.
|
| And sure, KPIs and stretchy sales targets can definitely cause
| bad behaviour and lying, but they're also extremely common, and
| can be beneficial when companies actually get them right.
| whatshisface wrote:
| I am not sure if that is an objection because "50% of
| companies are involved in one or more ethical violations,"
| sounds plausible.
| suoduandao3 wrote:
| I don't think "Purchase or sell insider services"
| necessarily means a conflict of interest, insiders could be
| winning the bidding process honestly as well.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Insiders are usually disqualified from bidding because of
| an inherent conflict of interest.
| notahacker wrote:
| It does render the notion of "ethical collapse" and
| supposed comparisons to Enron a bit meaningless if we're
| also counting the sorts of ethical violation most companies
| are guilty of though. It's a bit like if a study of
| "criminality" makes a point of honing in on everyone who's
| broken a speed limit before...
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| Exactly. The usefulness of criteria for predicting _anything_
| depends on _both_ false positive and false negative rates,
| and this article doesn 't seem to care about false positives
| (what fraction of companies do trendy, visible ESG stuff but
| are also honest behind the scenes?) at all.
|
| Might as well add an 8th point, "Companies that sell a good
| or service", and really bring that false negative rate all
| the way down to zero.
| geepytee wrote:
| To be fair, so many fast growing startups would tick multiple
| of their 7 boxes. Have you sanity checked it the other way
| (false positive)?
| neltnerb wrote:
| They don't define "ethical collapse" in terms of the company
| failing to make money. I imagine a fast growing startup could
| behave unethically without anyone really noticing (or at
| least saying anything) for a while.
| gen220 wrote:
| Uber was on the cusp on a bunch of these (numbers pressure,
| fear/silence, big CEO, innovation, goodness atoning for
| evil). I think fear/silence tilting + strong governance
| forced Kalanick out and saved the company.
|
| WeWork had every single one of these, and governance
| ultimately was too little too late to save the company.
|
| AirBnb, Stripe had a few of these, but turned out OK.
|
| It seems like the common variable that spares startups from
| ethical collapse is good board governance and having a
| reasonable / willing to evolve CEO.
|
| FB is an interesting case, because they check most of these
| boxes (maybe not fear/silence?), yet are fairly "successful".
| Governance isn't the explanatory variable, since Zuck has 90%
| of voting shares. The explanatory variable seems to be Zuck's
| willingness to listen to and learn from a board and his
| execs.
| imhoguy wrote:
| Has OpenAI just joined the club too? What is the score?
| rossdavidh wrote:
| 6/7, the board of directors was not "weak" (they fired the
| CEO). Guess which one of the 7 Silicon Valley is now fiercely
| complaining about...
| svnt wrote:
| Arguably they were weak, but not entrained enough to the
| CEO to meet the criteria of this definition of weak.
| thundergolfer wrote:
| On the one hand, the article and the talk it is about stresses
| the severity of the moral transgression: "moral meltdowns",
| "really crossed very bright lines", "ethical collapse".
|
| But on the other hand, the implications of the moral failure for
| the moral status of the company and its employees is pushed far
| away into the corner:
|
| - "These are great companies, great organizations, good people"
|
| - "misguided companies"
|
| - "good people at great companies"
|
| The list that follows is something you can retroactively apply to
| numerous instances of corporate wrongdoing, but also provides an
| enormous amount of false positives and a false negatives.
|
| Thousands of businesses don't meet these criteria and yet are
| morally compromised (e.g. Cargill). Thousands of businesses do
| meet these criteria and yet aren't going to be called out as
| "ethically collapsed" by the author _before_ they 've been outed
| and widely accepted as failed.
| legitster wrote:
| Part of the problem with this sort of analysis is that hindsight
| is always 20/20.
|
| You may think your company has is transparent and has a wonderful
| process for handling conflicts of interest. Then only when things
| collapse do people come out of the woodwork and start dishing
| drama.
|
| If they have a fear and suppression program that works, you would
| never hear about it!
| shimon wrote:
| Yes, it's often hard to identify this as an outsider. But
| people _inside_ the company know, and if you 've worked in
| places that handle conflict in healthy ways and in some that
| handle it not-so-well, you'll know quite clearly within a few
| days where your workplace stands.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Feels like half of this advice is directed at people that
| wouldn't profit from it. The reason people higher up are/become
| less ethical is because that usually is a quality needed to rise.
| stillwithit wrote:
| So economy in the aggregate is in the midst of ethical collapse?
|
| You can find numerous examples across institutions and industry
| that meet all these criteria.
|
| 1. Pressure to maintain numbers... line must go up economy.
|
| 2. Fear and silence... quiet quitting, workers keep going in
| while expressing fear in private
|
| 3. Young uns and bigger than life CEO... see tech, finance,
| academia, politics exploitation of naive grads
|
| 4. Weak board of directors... voters and workers are subservient
| to 1%
|
| 5. Conflicts of interest overlooked... why do so few have so much
| reach into all our lives?
|
| 6. Innovation like no other... US capitalism is unsurpassed!
| World cannot do without it!! Resell yesterday with faster chips
| and flatter design!! ... metrics hacks line up!!
|
| 7. Goodness in some areas atones for evil in others... we are
| burning up the planet for the next generation but how about that
| iPhone 15, dick rockets into space, and those massive F350s!
| segasaturn wrote:
| Yes, my thoughts were that all of these symptoms have become
| even more acute and obvious as time has gone on. This article
| from 2012 was probably only useful for scholarly purposes and
| high level debates between ethicists, but now even the
| commoners can see all of these issues glaring so clear and
| bright that this article is less useful and more the obvious
| being stated about what is constantly happening around us.
| kortilla wrote:
| > 7. Goodness in some areas atones for evil in others... we are
| burning up the planet for the next generation but how about
| that iPhone 15, dick rockets into space, and those massive
| F350s!
|
| This is not what that point means. "Goodness" isn't referring
| to cool shit. It's referring to doing good things.
|
| Someone buys an F350 but then "offsets it" by donating money to
| a climate activist charity.
| dustingetz wrote:
| The direction of progress is the direction of increasing
| accountability
|
| good book about that - https://www.amazon.com/Reckoning-
| Financial-Accountability-Ri... tldr thesis is that the invention
| of double entry bookkeeping is the thing that has caused modern
| prosperity, not capitalism. we can only cooperate to the extent
| that we can detect cheating. Consider a 1600s merchant - without
| the ability to detect fraud, how can you give your goods to a
| shipping company? Capitalism is only possible if you can count
| your capital! a memorable example was a French king (Louis XV?)
| who bankrupted the realm because he didn't know how much money he
| had.
| Terr_ wrote:
| It makes for an kind of inherent contradiction--or at least
| tension--inside certain types of _laissez faire_ capitalist
| thought, between perfect-information versus the autonomy of
| secrecy.
|
| On Monday, capital-C-Capitalism is celebrated as being the most
| efficient and economist-approved system (i.e. the bestest) when
| --if--there is somehow perfect price/deal information available
| to all actors.
|
| On Tuesday, no- _True_ -Capitalism is lauded as _immune_ to
| cartels and collusion, because any actor will quickly undercut
| the others with _secret_ prices and deals and hidden identities
| and wash-trading.
|
| On Wednesday, Virtuous Capitalism needs no oversight because
| nasty behavior will be seen and detected by consumers who will
| vote with their wallets.
|
| On Thursday, Property-Respecting Capitalism refuses to infringe
| on the owners' essential freedom... to construct impenetrable
| webs of shifting corporate ownership to obfuscate all
| controlling relationships.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| This article, and especially point 2 (Fear and silence) is a
| great rebuttal against the flaw of the Radical
| Candor/Manipulative Insincerity framework; which considers apathy
| towards issues in the workplace as tantamount to being
| manipulative without considering why people resort to this
| behavior in the first place.
|
| It is not easy for an single employee to change deeply embedded
| negative organizational behaviors, and therefore it is better for
| the employee to work with the goal of reward maximization
| (through a focus on total compensation and hitting numbers) and
| feigning ignorance or not bothering to report issues that cross
| ethical lines, which may backfire and cause trouble for the
| employee (constructive dismissal, smear campaigns, lawsuits etc.)
| overvale wrote:
| > To front-line employees, the line between right and wrong is
| very bright. Something happens to people as they climb up through
| management, she said. The bright line seems to fade.
|
| This doesn't seem like a mystery to me. In my experience the more
| you climb up through management the more you leave the realm of
| clear-cut choices and enter a world of nasty trade-offs. Do that
| enough times, and get your head spun around enough by trade-offs
| you don't know how to navigate but have to deal with immediately,
| and you'll get a kind of "trade off numbness".
| naasking wrote:
| > and get your head spun around enough by trade-offs you don't
| know how to navigate but have to deal with immediately, and
| you'll get a kind of "trade off numbness"
|
| I wonder if this could explain why corporations grow into slow
| behemoths, as a kind of subconscious moral cover. Most people
| think the causal arrow happens one way, ie. corporations grow
| due to efficiencies or other factors and moral rot is a side-
| effect, but maybe it's actually the other way around in some
| cases. Since everyone tries to see themselves as basically
| good, but they still want to make money and be profitable, they
| migrate towards structures with extra layers that provide extra
| plausible deniability and obfuscation of questionable moral
| decisions.
| bumby wrote:
| A Freakonomics episode claims that corporations "grow into
| slow behemoths" because, by the nature of being successful,
| you tend to have more programs to maintain. So you spend more
| time in maintenance mode and outsource your innovation by
| acquiring scrappy start-ups. It's a risk/reward tradeoff of
| its own.
| overvale wrote:
| This matches my experience. Complexity is a real problem.
| I've found this video does a good job outlining how this
| happens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rp4RCIfX66I
| torvald wrote:
| > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rp4RCIfX66I
|
| Good watch, thanks!
| dinvlad wrote:
| I think the opposite applies too - "move fast and break
| things" is a helluva excuse for doing extremely shady things
| and not worry about the consequences.
|
| Culture and incentives are just extremely hard to get right
| and align with the morals, and it's a continuous struggle for
| any business. And this applies even to solo companies.
| avs733 wrote:
| a mentor once referred to it as 'ship fast and shout down
| externalities' which always stuck with me
|
| That all being said I think for many people the ability to
| have a bright line is because the abstractions involved in
| deeply understanding these types of trade offs are not a
| common part of life. We are (nearly) universally worse at
| the types of reasoning (especially reasoning with
| abstractions) that we don't do frequently.
| overvale wrote:
| Haha. Yes. Basic risk aversion.
| prox wrote:
| Do you have an example of nasty trade offs? I am not familiar
| with managing so I am interested what those could be. I assume
| taking care of the worker vs taking care for the company
| (growth) is one of them, but again not sure.
| badpun wrote:
| There's plenty of situations where you can do things right,
| but it will be expensive, slow or otherwise inconvenient, or
| you can screw someone over (that someone may be the
| taxpayers, or local community whose environment you pollute),
| and make the problem go away.
| suoduandao3 wrote:
| Two direct reports aren't getting along. Their work styles
| are both valuable but clash with each other. You need to ask
| one of them to adjust to the other's expectations.
| overvale wrote:
| Is it better to lay off 10 more people and save the money or
| is it better to keep more people around to deal with the
| uncertainty of the next 6 months? How do you want to protect
| the team? With extra people or with extra money?
| avs733 wrote:
| not business but I'll give one from my own work in academia.
|
| Do you change a requirement for a BS degree to only require 6
| instead of 9 credits of research?
|
| Upside - students might graduate faster (this is one of many
| constraints on graduation) which saves them money and time.
|
| downsides - faculty may have less students to help with
| research (which helps faculty succeed via research
| productivity)
|
| complicating - students might do the research anyways, they
| can still get credit it just doesn't officially count for
| anything.
|
| context: the department is responsible to both...the actual
| impact of both the upside and downside are functionally
| impossible to predict because they are part of a broader
| complex partially social system that will anneal itself in
| ways you don't expect, metrics of success for students and
| faculty are important to everyone, albeit through different
| arms of an org chart which results in them each advocating
| for their metric at the expense of all others, because their
| success is partially evaluated on that metric.
|
| solution (this is sarcasm): remove a math course as
| 'required' that most students get transfer credit for and
| have to have as a pre-requisite for other classes. Only
| effect is on the 2% of students who actually have to take the
| course.
|
| result: everyone sees change, which they want, without
| perceiving a risk of harmful side effects, and with no actual
| change to the status quo.
| dasil003 wrote:
| Tradeoffs become multi-arm as you go up the chain. For
| instance, complying with the letter of the law at great
| engineering, operational and product UX expense, vs cutting
| corners to maintain a smooth UX, low operational overhead,
| and straightforward maintainable systems. In todays world no
| one is able to be experts in all those considerations.
| Leadership must make apples-to-oranges tradeoffs all day
| long, and they must rely on communication and maturity to
| navigate the cascading inputs of these choices. What is
| possible to execute on cross-functionally, in what timeline,
| and what are the externalities of different tradeoffs? These
| are fiendishly difficult to navigate, so generally financial
| metrics will serve as the tiebreaker, and even then it's
| based on a lot of guesswork and proposals made up by self-
| interested internal parties over-representing an uncertain
| outcome. It's no surprise that the really big ethical
| concerns get lost in the shuffle--there's simply no system of
| checks and balances on ethics with anywhere near the
| effectiveness of that imparted by the incentives corporate
| capitalism bolstered by individual self-interest (note I
| avoid the word greed here since the incentives aare chained
| all the way down to individuals which no one would consider
| well-off enough to be labeled "greedy").
| csours wrote:
| "Our competitor is getting away with it"
| jahewson wrote:
| > 4. A Weak Board of Directors
|
| > Weak boards tend to have inexperienced members, often ones who
| are too young to have experienced a complete business cycle,
| which was often the case with companies in the dot-com boom.
|
| > Often they have ethical conflicts of interest as well, in terms
| of consulting arrangements, related party transactions, ...
|
| Sound familiar?
| Vegenoid wrote:
| If we're going to list the signs that could apply to OpenAI,
| let's list them all:
|
| 3. Young 'uns and a bigger-than-life CEO
|
| 6. Innovation like no other company
|
| 7. Goodness in some areas atones for evil in others
| neon_me wrote:
| Show me one company not checking at least one of the boxes...
| adverbly wrote:
| Not exactly clear-cut to identify... 7 different subjective
| signals?
|
| Sounds too much like astrology where 10/12 different horoscopes
| would apply to most people anyways.
|
| Before subscribing to something like this, I'd want to see hard
| data around how common each of these signals is in a random
| sample of companies(possibly even with a breakdown by industry)
| RadixDLT wrote:
| sounds like google
| myth_drannon wrote:
| That's 2012. Now we have a TikTok generation. After seeing
| interviews with Free Palestine protesters and general TikTok
| crowd, I fear US has no future and it will be an easy pick for
| China. These people are from prestigious universities but they
| are so dumb. Very, very dumb. In 20 years they will be working
| for US government ( because Yale, Harvard). TikTok is a weapon of
| mass destruction.
| Thoreandan wrote:
| The WayBack Machine's 2018 snapshot
| <https://web.archive.org/web/20181008124103/https://www.scu.e...>
| dates this article to (2007)
| mannanj wrote:
| Pressure to maintain numbers Fear and silence Young 'uns and a
| bigger-than-life CEO Weak board of directors Conflicts of
| interest overlooked or unaddressed Innovation like no other
| company Goodness in some areas atones for evil in others
|
| I was hoping for something, but sadly feel these all apply to our
| majority government in many world countries today, don't they?
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