[purple-again]

Always a losers game. You implement it with ethics in mind, I do not. I win and you fall into obscurity. The law is all that matters. If I can not lose what I take, there is no reason for me not to take it (so long as I'm still chasing the 'fuck you money', morals are great after you have it).

I understand it, lots of people have dreamed big dreams of how great the world would be if everyone else was just like them too.

[KirinDave]

Flip side of this: People who say this are usually folks trying to justify the fact that they're resorting to underhanded, abusive tactics to compete with talented, successful people who are not. It is the battle cry of the mediocre, the hallmark of scammers, the ultimate admission of the untalented and unworthy.

I know a lot of folks in fintech and blockchain, and we've all skated the outer edge of what's defined by law. The folks who give a damn about setting sustainable policy and not exploiting customers? Those are the folks who are still around. Even big US national banks, notorious for their immunity to law and enforcement, are starting to feel the pressure. Rumor is, Customers left Wells Fargo in droves after the last kerfuffle and new account opening went down substantially at Citi after their money laundering fine. The hidden cost of bad optics is immense. And as data science makes the formerly invisible behaviors of the world visible, society's going to get a whole lot more capable of identifying "bad behavior" and punishing it.

To say "The law is all that matters", in the context of these industries, is beyond naive. It's not just wrong, but it's leaving money and opportunity on the table. It's bad business AND bad optics.

> (so long as I'm still chasing the 'fuck you money', morals are great after you have it).

If this ethos is so effective, why are you still "chasing?" Or is this the rhetorical we? Or the royal we? I can never tell here.

[kerkeslager]

> Those are the folks who are still around. Even big US national banks, notorious for their immunity to law and enforcement, are starting to feel the pressure. Rumor is, Customers left Wells Fargo in droves after the last kerfuffle and new account opening went down substantially at Citi after their money laundering fine. The hidden cost of bad optics is immense.

There are two parts to a cost/benefit analysis, and you're only talking about the cost part of unethical behavior, as if the benefit doesn't exist. With Wells Fargo, Citi, Experian, Bank of America, etc., when their scandals went down, did they lose more money in the scandals than they gained from their antisocial behavior? I haven't tracked all of these cases til their end, but at least with Wells Fargo, they did not.

More importantly, did the individuals who made the antisocial decisions, who are protected by limited liability, lose money? I doubt it. Maybe they're not "still around", but they're happily retired in mansions and there are plenty of newcomers willing to do the same thing to get the same reward.

It's not 100% of the time: there are cases when bad behavior actually results in a net loss. But I'd say these are anomalies and not the norm. And even if they weren't, antisocial behaviors are profitable enough of the time that some percentage of antisocial behaviors have a positive expected value when looked at probabilistically.

[KirinDave]

> With Wells Fargo, Citi, Experian, Bank of America, etc., when their scandals went down, did they lose more money in the scandals than they gained from their antisocial behavior?

Wells: Yes, almost certainly. Citi: Good question. Every I've talked to from Citi seems to think it was a disaster that hurt the business bottom line. BofA: Not sure which BofA problem we're talking about here. Experian: They walked away. They're a great example of how the government SHOULD have come in and made it more expensive and then given that money back to people they hurt.

On Experian, I do know that their scandal with fake credit scores direct to customer hurt that business badly.

> More importantly, did the individuals who made the antisocial decisions, who are protected by limited liability, lose money? I doubt it.

In some cases yes, in some no.

> But I'd say these are anomalies and not the norm.

We could make it the norm :)

[kerkeslager]

Keep in mind the chain of comments you're responding to started with:

> [I]f we forced some liability on companies for what the software they sell does, that would change a lot of things fairly quickly.

In that context, it sounds like you're saying we don't need liability regulation, we need data science to help consumers make better decisions, so that the economic downsides to antisocial action are higher.

This is the repeated lie of laissez faire economics: that if we can just get consumers to become savvy they will stop giving money to bad actors and the invisible hand of the market will enforce ethics without having to resort to regulation.

This has never worked. At best, regulation finally steps in after the companies have trashed people's lives and fines the company, and the people who made the decisions are forced to retire with their millions. At worst, the companies lobby successfully and their sociopathic business practices become not only the norm but the standard. Laissez faire economics is typically only espoused by businesses when they don't have the regulators in their pocket.

Forgive my cynicism, but I don't think data science is the missing piece that makes laissez faire economics work. It's simply not realistic to believe that the average consumer will become knowledgeable enough to make ethical decisions on what they consume. Most people aren't savvy enough, don't care, or don't have the time. I like to think I understand most issues once I have the data, and I care, but I simply can't keep up with all the different companies and their misdeeds. The invisible hand of the market simply can't keep up with this problem.

[KirinDave]

> In that context, it sounds like you're saying we don't need liability regulation, we need data science to help consumers make better decisions, so that the economic downsides to antisocial action are higher.

I'm not sure why you make it sound like an decision. We're already seeing that improved computing power and statistical methods, coupled with the falling costs of these, are giving us transparency which can guide both consumers and regulators.

Its one of the reasons I'm a fan of "legible" societies once the asymmetry if power and information is overcome. We can all hold each other accountable.

If you check my comment history you'll see I'm a big fan of the CFPB and generally want the government to make bad behavior more expensive, so I appreciate the rest if your post but you're preaching to the choir. I'm furious at what the Executive has done putting a scam artist at the wheel to dismantle it.

[kerkeslager]

My apologies for a confrontational tone then. Your previous post came across to me as being yet another defense of the idea that regulation is bad and incentivized corporations will solve all society's ills. That's possibly more a reflection of my own sensitivities than your communication. :)

I will say that a ton of changes which should be made are low hanging fruit that don't need data science to prove. We don't need data science to prove that bailing out corporations when predatory lending goes wrong, or that fining corporations a fraction of the profits they made from money laundering, are ineffective enforcement.

The underlying problem is that international corporations are, to some extent, above the law, and that is a much harder problem to address.

[whatshisface]

"Lots of accounts leaving after public relations disaster," is not really something that you need data science to detect. A chart, maybe.

[TallGuyShort]

Which is about what a lot of people claiming to be data scientists can do.

[cheeze]

> blockchain

sigh

[KirinDave]

Plenty of people are doing legitimate things in this space. One need only look. Legitimate NON-currency (token or integrity) applications abound.

In a very real sense, github was an early blockchain startup. Do you type "sigh" on an internet forum when people talk about github?

[theoh]

The "hub" aspect of GitHub takes a decentralised protocol and adds a trusted third party (github). The whole point of blockchain is to avoid creating trusted third parties, something people like Nick Szabo identified a long time ago as a problem for protocol design.

[KirinDave]

> The whole point of blockchain is to avoid creating trusted third parties

Nonsense. The "point" of "blockchain" is to commit blocks to merkel trees with an agreed upon protocol. Your value judgement are just as unwelcome as the previous post's.

You're also wrong about github, as its only a point of centralization for specific UI services. It need not be canonical, it's simply privileged.

Please stop policing the direction blockchain conversations go with religious anecdotes.

[kbenson]

But all this is irrelevant to his original point, and how blockchain was referenced within it. People are reacting to the word and their preconceptions and ignoring the point, which is a real shame because those same preconceptions actually strengthen the point being made.

[theoh]

There's no need to police the direction the conversation takes. I was responding only to the GP, as a matter of fact.

[miketery]

> The law is all that matters

Agreed. Lets change it.

[jackhack]

Unless you are sitting on a mountain of money, forget it. You must buy laws of any substance.

Laws represent power structures. Power structures are buttressed with money flows. If you threaten either, it will not end well.

Politicans know this. They profit from it, it is the product being sold. (Ever wonder how so many congressmen end their terms as millionaires?)

[moomin]

If the law is the only thing that matters, then it follows that more regulation will come.

Maybe try self-regulating before putting more power in the hands of the government?

[TeMPOraL]

One would wish.

The fact is, self-regulating against market pressures pretty much never happens - coordinating people against their perceived, short-term self-interest is hard. That's the very reason governments exist.

[wfo]

Sure this is true if we just let the market do as it wills.

But we have many tools to deal with this problem in our historical toolbox that we have mostly left behind as we hard embrace neoliberal ideology: regulation with fines, regulatory bodies (that can make judgements on unethical behavior not explicitly written into law and mete out serious punishment), a criminal justice system that could be applied to executives, a troubling but powerful system of asset forfeiture designed to seize "ill-gotten gains" (and what is money gained from unethical business practices but ill-gotten?), nationalizing or breaking up companies to prevent concentration of power that can be abused, organized labor and collective bargaining. If e.g. CEOs who ran unethical enterprises were afraid of their assets being seized and being jailed the fairly accurate picture you paint of our current reality -- the unethical businessman who crushes anyone with an ounce of human dignity, worker and competitor alike -- looks a little different.

I think it's pretty clear that voting with your dollar will never and has never worked, but some of the above tools might. Though they all of course come with their downsides.

>I understand it, lots of people have dreamed big dreams of how great the world would be if everyone else was just like them too.

Actually nearly everyone already is like me in this way: nearly every human being has a sense of ethics and sees a pretty clear difference between right and wrong that transcends a profit motive. It's just that it's not so easy to turn that ethical and moral sense we all share into actual power to change things, especially when power is concentrated in the hands of the unethical (for exactly the reasons you describe above). But that's the task before us, and that's why universities are making computer scientists take ethics.

[commandlinefan]

Well, lawyers can be and have been disbarred for behaving unethically - but that does depend on a few fundamentals: lawyers can't legally practice law without a license, ethics are well-defined, and there are hearings to determine claims of unethical behavior. To apply "ethics" to software, we'd have to have (at least) all three of these in place.

[frgtpsswrdlame]

Except the article mentions that they're targeting

>the next generation of technologists and policymakers

Sure tech workers in a bad system are coerced into unethical actions, but policymakers hold the power to alter the system itself so that they're not.

[hobofan]

> policymakers hold the power

The cynic in me tells me that the winning unethical companies hold the power over the policymakers.