[gilbert_vanova]

I have a recent counter razor: "Never attribute to malice or stupidity what is better explained by self-interest"

Many of these orgs laying off thousands have fallen into the depths of a moral maze -- where rational thinking is just impossible and all that's left is self-preservation.

[kerkeslager]

I'm not sure that there's a pragmatic difference between harming people out of malice and harming people out of self-interest.

If someone causes harm out of ignorance (a better word than stupidity, in my opinion), then they can be educated and they'll likely stop causing harm.

If someone causes harm out of self-interest or malice, it can be assumed that they'll continue causing that harm and there's no simple remedy. I do think that selfish or malicious people can change, but the solutions take time, and in the mean time they continue to cause harm if not removed from the situation.

[gilbert_vanova]

If someone is motivated out of self-interest to behave in one way or another, you can likely use that same motivation to bring about a different behavior. The complexity of the remedy is dependent more on the rigidity of the system incentivizing the harmful behavior than on the individual.

If someone in your life is motivated out of malice or stupidity -- it is these situations that would seem to require time to remedy. Unlearning abusive behaviors that exceed rational self-interest takes time. Experts report education seems to take 25 years (and more and more all the time)

[kerkeslager]

> If someone is motivated out of self-interest to behave in one way or another, you can likely use that same motivation to bring about a different behavior. The complexity of the remedy is dependent more on the rigidity of the system incentivizing the harmful behavior than on the individual.

Sure, you can change the behavior, but it's not solving the fundamental problem that the person can't be trusted. The next situation that arises where doing harm is incentivized, they'll do harm again. In the worst case, this just allows sociopaths to move on to the next loophole as soon as you close the previous loophole.

This isn't normal. Normal people have a moral compass and can be trusted to try not to do harm even when there are incentives to do harm.

The reason corporate culture pushes this "incentives solve everything" narrative is specifically because it allows the people at the top to move from loophole to loophole. The vast majority of people involved aren't at the extreme of the sociopathy spectrum, but there's a mix of naivete, denial, and kool-aid drinking which keeps this ideology alive.

It's telling that putting people in jail, seizing personal assets, etc., are incentives, but never get brought up when people are pushing this "incentives solve everything" narrative. Limited liability is sacrosanct, allowing the sociopaths to hide behind corporations. For example, someone at Ford made the decision to literally kill people for short-term profits with the Ford Pinto, but if that person's name was ever exposed to the public I can't find it--they certainly didn't go to jail or pay any real cost. Instead, the damages were paid by Ford shareholders and workers unrelated to the crime, and those actually responsible likely just moved on with their careers.

> If someone in your life is motivated out of malice or stupidity -- it is these situations that would seem to require time to remedy. Unlearning abusive behaviors that exceed rational self-interest takes time. Experts report education seems to take 25 years (and more and more all the time)

I have no idea what experts you're citing here, but I suspect that they're describing a formal education which prepares people for working, which is not what I'm talking about when I say "education". If a person is causing harm out of ignorance, the education needed to correct it usually comes in the form "Hey when you do this, it's causing <description of harm>, could you do <way to avoid harm> instead?"

In any case, we don't get to choose solutions based on how easy they are: we have to choose the solution based on the problem.

If someone is causing harm out of ignorance it can usually be solved with education. If someone is causing harm out of malice or because they're following incentives, it can usually solved by removing their power to cause harm.

Changing incentives for a person who's causing harm out of ignorance might cause them to re-analyze the situation and learn that they made a mistake, but it's not the most direct way to solve the problem. And changing incentives if a person is malicious or simply following incentives, doesn't solve the more fundamental problem that they can't be trusted to try not to cause harm, as described above.

Changing incentives simply isn't the right solution in either case.

[jack_riminton]

Exactly, the incentives will explain the behaviour, they always do. I suspect managers being judged on their number of direct reports explains some of the over-hiring.

[kerkeslager]

> Exactly, the incentives will explain the behaviour, they always do.

Who cares? "I was following incentives" is no different from "I was following orders." It doesn't become suddenly okay to do harm just because there's an incentive to do harm.

Hacker News and startup culture in general are toxic because of people blaming market conditions instead of taking responsibility for their own actions.

If it's really about incentives, would you support docking executive pay proportional to layoffs, to incentivize against future over-hiring? Or do incentives only apply when they excuse harming workers?

[pmarreck]

I think that's an excellent incentive proposal, that even the boardmembers would probably agree with (as overhiring is not only costly in feelings, but in cash)

[kerkeslager]

Okay, but that's because you're well-intentioned and believe that changing incentives will actually fix the problem.

The predictable response from the top whenever cutting executive pay is proposed as an incentive, however, would actually be that they need to maintain competitive executive pay to retain talent.

The reality is that board members and executives are drawn from the same pool of oligarchs, and the "incentives solve everything" narrative is just a marketing ploy for the "close a symbolic loophole and move on to the next loophole" strategy. People who do harm just because there's an incentive to do harm can't be trusted not to do harm, because there's always another way to gain benefit by doing harm.

[pmarreck]

When business takes a downturn and you have to choose whether you get to eat or the person you're paying gets to eat, do "morals" really come into play, here?

> I have a recent counter razor: "Never attribute to malice or stupidity what is better explained by self-interest"

My modification: "Never attribute to malice or stupidity what is better explained by rational self-interest"

The key observation being that even people at odds often act in rational self-interest given the situation they are in with its associated needs and challenges, and the information they are aware of. The only way to bridge this is via communication.

[kerkeslager]

It seems like you might have a more nuanced view of what the phrase "rational self-interest" means to you than the average person, but given how people actually use that phrase most often, I think that phrase isn't an effective way for you to communicate what you're trying to communicate.

The phrase "rational self-interest" as it's most often used is just a euphemism for "acquiring as much money as possible" which is neither rational nor what most people are interested in for themselves. There are lots of people who make the choice to take less money in exchange for more time with their families, more fulfilling work, etc., and that's a rational choice. And we have ample evidence that beyond a certain point, making more money doesn't make you happier.

[widowlark]

Vanova's Razor

[asciii]

-sigh- I google Vanova's razor and then realized you were quoting OP. :)

[widowlark]

It worked!

[kerkeslager]

Vanova's Fallacy