[bhousel]

I really think that you're completely missing the point in defending Google and maybe Goldman Sachs by saying that their decisions are ok because they are made rationally.

Rationality is emotionless and mechanical. It's about making a reasonable decision based on whatever information is available to you. However, rational decisions do not involve morals, culture, or feelings. This is exactly what companies like Google and Goldman Sachs are being criticized for.

When game theory is baked into your corporate culture, this is what you get. The company starts an inevitable slide from "Do No Evil" into "Make the Best Decision You Can With the Information You Have".

If I look down into my wallet and see no money there, and I'm hungry for lunch, and I decide to steal some money from a little old lady, that may be a perfectly rational decision to make. An outside observer may say I'm being evil, but they don't have a complete information picture about how hungry I am, or how long the line at the ATM is, or that everyone else is eating lunch so I have a duty to my shareholders to do the same.

[JumpCrisscross]

Rationality doesn't necessarily exclude "morals, culture, or feelings". That would imply that having a rational discussion about culture, e.g. anthropology, is impossible.

Gus Levy, a former senior Goldman partner, coined the firm's then philosophy of being "long-term greedy". Taking image, "headline risk" in finance parlance, impact on recruiting, etc. into account is part of rational decision making.

What makes a seemingly terrible decision rational is usually that the time-frame invoked is too short. If a decision looks rational in the long-term but conflicts with our value system it generally means that our value system needs to be re-evaluated.

[bhousel]

>Rationality doesn't necessarily exclude "morals, culture, or feelings". That would imply that having a rational discussion about culture, e.g. anthropology, is impossible.

No I am not implying that the process of making rational decisions has anything to do with the process for holding rational discussions about stuff (the stuff may be rational or not).

[khafra]

Rationality can serve whatever values you have. You can rationally optimize the amount of love, happiness, and fuzzy puppies in the world if you want to. You can also rationally strive to keep a company efficient and non-evil. But the bigger it gets, the harder that gets, modulo economies of scale.

[thwest]

Agreed. At certain scales, it no longer makes sense to give primary mover status to humans within institutions. It is important to realize that there are several mechanisms within institutions that alter the values they serve. It makes more sense to treat them as black boxes and reason about outcomes rather than intentions.

[marshray]

> If I look down into my wallet and see no money there, and I'm hungry for lunch, and I decide to steal some money from a little old lady, that may be a perfectly rational decision to make.

And that reasoning is the very definition of the term unethical.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics

[jongraehl]

Rational decisions correctly apply information and resources to optimize values that the decider cares about. (meta level: you can also be rational in deciding how much effort to allocate to MAKING a particular decision - deliberating or gathering more info).

Those values can include morals, culture, and feelings.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StrawVulcan

[akkartik]

You can't talk about rational decisions without asking, "across what timeframe?"

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/EWD1175... (search for 'buxton index')

[cma]

The guy never made a moral criticism that wasn't immediately followed by "plus it will end up costing the bottom line in the long run".

[Daniel_Newby]

You miss the point, which is that good intentions are not transitive. It it not enough that a series of acts be individually kind. The interfaces between the acts must provide end-to-end kindness, or the results may well be ghastly. In giant projects this is a hard problem to deal with.