[biophysboy]

I like and read Ben's stuff regularly; he often frames "better" from the business side. He will use terms like "revealed preference" to claim users actually prefer bad product designs (e.g. most users use free ad-based platforms), but a lot of human behavior is impulsive, habitual, constrained, and irrational.

[RoddaWallPro]

I agree that is what he is doing, but I can also justify adding fentanyl to every drug sold in the world as "making it better" from a business perspective, because it is addictive. Anyone who ignores the moral or ethical angle on decisions, I cannot take seriously. It's like saying that Maximizing Shareholder Value is always the right thing to do. No, it isn't. So don't say stupid shit like that, be a human being and use your brain and capacity to look at things and analyze "is this good for human society?".

[biophysboy]

I agree - I think Ben tends to get business myopia. I read him with that in mind.

[chii]

> It's like saying that Maximizing Shareholder Value is always the right thing to do. No, it isn't.

it is, for the agents of the shareholders. As long as the actions of those agents are legal of course. That's why it's not legal to put fentanyl into every drug sold, because fentanyl is illegal.

But it is legal to put (more) sugar and/or salt into processed foods.

[dozerly]

No, it’s not. The government, and laws by proxy, will never keep up with people’s willingness to “maximize shareholder value” and so you get harmful, future-illegal practices. Reagan was “maximizing shareholder value”, and now look where the US is.

[chii]

you have to show this 'future-illegal' action is harmful first by demonstrating harm.

That's why i used the sugar example - it's starting to be demonstrably harmful in large quantities that are being used.

I am against preventative "harmful" laws, when harm hasn't been demonstrated, as it restricts freedom, adds red tape to innovation, and stifles startups from exploring the space of possibilities.

[auggierose]

I can understand that stance. The trouble is, with more power and more technology, more harm can be done, much quicker. This will become a freedom vs. survival issue, and by definition, freedom is not going to survive that.

[WalterSear]

> starting to be demonstrably harmful

Starting?

[testdelacc1]

Some say there is a link between calorie consumption and weight gain but we don’t know for sure.

[andrepd]

Yeah, so the shareholder-value-maximisers will bury the studies that link smoking to cancer for decades, using whatever dirty tactics they can.

What a way to look at the world...

[breppp]

and if the actions are deemed immoral by society then a few years later you will see regulation, PR issues or legal action

See early 2000s Google as a model for a righteous company and public perception of it as evil and subsequent antitrust litigation today, or what happened to companies involved in Opioid trade and subsequent effect on shareholders value

[Andrex]

> it is, for the agents of the shareholders

Shareholders are still human beings and the power they wield should be subject to public scrutiny.

[matkoniecz]

> > It's like saying that Maximizing Shareholder Value is always the right thing to do. No, it isn't.

> it is, for the agents of the shareholders

Even if we care solely only about shareholders, in extreme cases it is not beneficial also for them

[BriggyDwiggs42]

Legality doesn’t define whether it’s good or bad for humans or their society.

[Cheer2171]

[flagged]

[biophysboy]

I think its more subtle; they fight for regulations they deem reasonable and against those they deem unreasonable. Anything that curtails growth of the business is unreasonable.

[sph]

There is a term in biology for things which decide to grow uncontrollably, to the detriment of the surrounding ecosystem.

[mykowebhn]

The non-biological term would be "billionaire".

[AnthonyMouse]

The non-biological term would be "publicly-traded corporation". If anything their behavior is worse when there is no controlling founder.

[breppp]

This thread is an exaggeration. Disney could have operated Micky Mouse themed casinos on its premises with probable success, it could also lobby to change regulation that is associated with that.

However companies have balancing factors which are other than maximizing short term profits, such as moral image

[TeMPOraL]

It's called life.

All life grows and consumes as much as it can. It's what makes it life. "Control" happens when there's more life contesting the same limited resources, and usually involves starvation, but if the situation persists on evolutionary timescales, then some life adapts to proactively limit growth. Then, if some of that adapted life unadapts itself, we call that "cancer", which I think is what you were going for.

[wubrr]

Which is entirely unreasonable, and there's no need to make excuses or explain away this borderline psychopathy.

[bloppe]

To be fair, businesses should assume that customers actually "want" what they create demand for. In the case of misleading or dangerously addictive products, regulation should fall to government, because that's the only actor that can prevent a race to the bottom.

[gmd63]

The folks who succeed most in business are the type who have an intuition for what's best. They're not some automaton reading too far into and amplifying the imperfect and shallow signals of "demand" in a marketplace.

[baobabKoodaa]

Because all people everywhere are psychopaths who will stab you for $5 if they can get away with it? If you take that attitude, why even go to "work" or run a "business"? It'd be so much more efficient to just stab-stab-stab and take the money directly.

[chii]

> It'd be so much more efficient to just stab-stab-stab and take the money directly.

which is exactly what the law of the jungle is. And guess who sits at the top within that regime?

Humans would devolve back into that, if not for the violence enforcement from the state. Therefore, it is the responsibility of the state to make sure regulations are sound to prevent the stab-stab-stab, not the responsibility of the individual to not take advantage of a situation that would have been advantageous to take.

[wewtyflakes]

This is gross; I would not want to live in a society of these kinds of people.

[chii]

> I would not want to live in a society of these kinds of people.

of course not. Nobody does.

However, what happened to your civic responsibility to keep such a society to make it function? Why is that not ever mentioned?

The fact is, gov't regulation does need to be comprehensive and thorough to ensure that individual incentives are completely aligned, so that law of the jungle doesn't take hold. And it is up to each individual, who do not have the power in a jungle, to collectively ensure that society doesn't devolve back into that, rather than to expect that the powerful would be moral/ethical and rely on their altruism.

[bloppe]

I'll indulge your straw man because it's actually pretty good at illustrating my point. 99.9% of people are not psychopaths. But you only need .1% of people to be psychopaths. In a world where you get $5 and no threat of prosecution for stabbing people, you can bet that there will be extremely efficient and effective stabbing companies run by those psychopaths. Even normal people who don't like stabbing others would see the psychopaths getting rich and think to themselves "well, everyone's getting stabbed anyway, I might as well make some money too". That's what a race to the bottom is.

And that's why the government regulates stabbing.

[runarberg]

In the behavioral science (of which economics should be a sub-field of) this is called perverse intensives. A core-feature of capitalism, is that if you don‘t abandon your morals and maximize your profits at somebody else’s expense, you will soon be out-competed by those who will.

[GrinningFool]

*incentives

I tried to let it stand because it was clear what you meant, but ultimately could not.

[lmm]

> Because all people everywhere are psychopaths who will stab you for $5 if they can get away with it?

Not all people everywhere, but most successful businesspeople.

> It'd be so much more efficient to just stab-stab-stab and take the money directly.

It isn't though? If you do that then you get locked up and lose the money, so the smart psychopaths go into business instead.

[mistrial9]

To be fair, organized predatory behavior is to be expected?

joke- The World Council of Animals meeting completes with morning sessions with "OK great, now who is for lunch?"

[jomohke]

In this quote I don't think he means it from the business side. He's claiming more data allows a better product:

> ... the answers are a statistical synthesis of all of the knowledge the model makers can get their hands on, and are completely unique to every individual; at the same time, every individual user’s usage should, at least in theory, make the model better over time.

> It follows, then, that ChatGPT should obviously have an advertising model. This isn’t just a function of needing to make money: advertising would make ChatGPT a better product. It would have more users using it more, providing more feedback; capturing purchase signals — not from affiliate links, but from personalized ads — would create a richer understanding of individual users, enabling better responses.

But there is a more trivial way that it could be "better" with ads: they could give free users more quota (and/or better models), since there's some income from them.

The idea of ChatGPT's own output being modified to sell products sounds awful to me, but placing ads alongside that are not relevant to the current chat sounds like an Ok compromise to me for free users. That's what Gmail does and most people here on HN seem to use it.

[ElFitz]

> to claim users actually prefer bad product designs

One could argue many users seem to prefer badly designed free products over well designed paid products.