"Engagement" is the "paper clip maximizer"[1] of the modern software industry, or more generally an example of "instrumental convergence."
Optimizing engagement without regard for negative externalities is a catastrophic ethical failure of the major players in the software industry, and we are finally seeing a backlash both from mainstream advertisers and widespread public outcry.
Engagement can also ultimately at odds with retention. We see people leaving Twitter and Facebook all the time due to exhaustion with the toxic conflict. So they become self-reinforcing cess pools of thought that (hopefully) gradually lose relevance.
>So they become self-reinforcing cess pools of thought that (hopefully) gradually lose relevance.
You've referenced engagement first, but then, you've ignored about it in your conclusion. That is, as long as the inflow counters the outflow of participants, the situation will not improve or will even worsen - just as we've experienced in the last decade.
People leaving is not necessarily a problem, if the new ones come faster. If you are small, you can grow exponentially even if literally all users left in a month. But this becomes a problem once you grow so large that there is nowhere to grow. Which is probably the case with Twitter -- everyone already heard of it, and everyone who was tempted to try it already did.
On Facebook, I think the only reasonable way to use it is to create groups and only debate within them. Also private messages, but only 1:1.
Capitalism is the paper clip maximizer, non-metaphorically.
Science fiction is pretty much always just about things that already happened. “What if we maximized a non-human value?” is just a subconsciously repressed way of asking “Did anyone notice we’ve been maximizing non-human values for a couple hundred years?”
It happens in capitalism, and it happens in socialism, because it happens everywhere. It is like saying "entropy increases in capitalism"; technically true, but misleading.
Things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law happen regardless of political regime or economical system. In different situations they take different forms: in capitalism, companies try to maximize (short-term) (perceived) shareholder value; in socialism, they try to maximize the favor of the ruling party. In capitalism, your values are important proportionally to how much money you have; in socialism proportionally to how good political connections you have. In capitalism, sometimes people starve to death; in socialism, sometimes people starve to death.
The world has many problems, but lack of military dictatorships controlled by a communist party is not one of them.
Of course, unless you meant "actually, true socialism has never been tried yet". In which case, sure, as a rule of thumb, imaginary countries do not suffer from real problems (unless the plot demands it).
>The world has many problems, but lack of military dictatorships controlled by a communist party is not one of them. //
There's N.Korea, but that's not controlled by a communist party. It's notionally controlled by people who call themselves Communist, but they don't appear to do anything ideologically communist.
World politics isn't my strong point, where did you have in mind?
I note that your structure was "in capitalism, {capitalist ideological outcome, those with capital own the means of production and leech off the value of others labour}; in socialism, {activity directly opposed to socialist ideology}".
I'd say 99%, at least, of companies are run under capitalist ideology; to accrue wealth for the owners. So why blame socialism for the upshot of capitalist activity.
Capitalism's a loaded word. Most people who would call themselves pro-free market aren't in favour of rent-seeking monopolies, just like how most people who would call themselves socialists aren't in favour of putting dissidents in gulags.
I have no idea if https://dprktoday.com truly is[1] DPRK or someone else's black propaganda (nor do I read korean) but the pictures on it are congruent with those from former communist countries.
[1] traceroute is useless these days, and its whois registrar appears to be chinese.
Bonus /r/fullcommunism: "let's study"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukBcC-sK3wQ
Unless they're trolling hard with the english subs, the chorus is about studying for a better future. I know grades were important for early selection in the Young Pioneers, but can't immediately think of such a swotty song in the soviet catalogue (choreography and backing band, however, is spot on). Closest I manage at the moment is the educational background of the main characters in the movie "Three Plus Two."
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. If it's "DPRK is communist", you're not really doing that because nothing you mentioned has anything to do with communism.
I'm not trying to say "DPRK is communist", especially because I believe the Warsaw Pact countries considered themselves to be socialist, on the way to communism. What I am trying to say is that, of things that strike me as having been different between western and eastern europe in photographed culture, today's DPRK shows the same differences. So I'd consider it firmly in the "second world", insofar as that old cold war trichotomy makes any sense in the twenty-first century.
For instance, I consider "Девушки фабричные" to have been a soviet trope (an image search reveals factory girls existed in the west as well, but don't seem to have been so frequently propagandised) and sure enough, here they are in the DPRK, even clasically at textile machines:
This doesn't work because humans are the consumer. Humans purchase things based on their own person values. Capitalism has the instrumental goal of maximizing human values. In addition, humans engage in every stage of the process. Some of the biggest failures of capitalism are actually the results of human values: racism, sexism, nepotism. I can think of some issues with unregulated capitalism, but none of them seem to be a paperclip maximizer unless you're taking the phrase to be so non-specific that it essentially just means "unwanted side-effect."
There's definitely something of the paperclip maximizer to capitalism. It's due to corporations having the instrumental goal of maximizing shareholder value - which usually translates in making as much money as possible. If there is a way to convince people that paperclips in excess is what they most need, that's what they will have to do.
Sexism, nepotism, and xenophobic predate capitalism, but racism does not. Racism was created as the explanation for why African slavery, which was much more brutal than prior slavery, was okay after all. African slavery in turn was because of mercantilism/capitalism. They were getting out of debt by ruining people’s lives. It was quite inhuman.
... and may have a charter or mission, or even an established culture which sets guiding principles.
Various forms of legal power (ownership, right to collectively bargain, fiduciary/oversight responsibility, first rights to assets on liquidation), social power, market power (price negotiation), and individual intention (everyone, even bankers make decisions based on something other than just money) form, a kind of dynamic equilibrium.
So a company is going to end up being or doing whatever the combined weighted intentions of those forces imply.
It's not 'shareholders' that can do anything willy nilly. Sometimes customers have all of the power and indirectly dictate everything. Inversely maybe buyers do: Apple is a dictator to many of its suppliers. Sometimes Unions run the show or have incredible influence (auto industry, government), sometimes the debtors. Sometimes the 'CEO' particularly a founder even without 'majority shares' has considerably more influence than anyone else, with the board afraid to replace them.
A non-profit is almost the same minus shareholders.
Like altruism, ethical behaviour is ultimately an expression of enlightened self-interest. People know this on an individual scale, and it's just as true on a corporate scale. When a company acts unethically, it is almost always paying a high price later for a small immediate win. We see this kind of behaviour a lot in companies that have been taken over by short-term MBA-style management, who temporarily boost quarterly revenues by burning years or decades of accumulated reputation and good will.
> Like altruism, ethical behaviour is ultimately an expression of enlightened self-interest.
I somewhat disagree on a generalized form of "altruism is in the individual's interest" (as in "always"), but for ethical behavior, this essentially means that their is no ethical behavior for companies, only a mirroring of the perceived values of customers.
You need very different actions to not tarnish your reputation when you're dealing with very different customers. Since large companies typically do, there would only be very localized ethics, and they could be diametrically opposed (e.g. "expose & hunt down gays" in Riad, "expose & hunt down bigots" in Berkeley). Ethics is the wrong term here, as the company's actions are not based on principles but on the expectations and principles of the environment, their values are reactive.
>Ethics is the wrong term here, as the company's actions are not based on principles [...] //
The principle "do anything of any moral values that brings me value from others' labour" is still a position wrt ethics, though one can't really call it "ethical" without confusion.
Complete moral plasticity according to what "sells" seems to define our age quite well.
Since this is a widely held view, it is worth debating. I would argue for a contrary position: 1) every organization has an ethical responsibility, and 2) corporations not only do have an ethical responsibility but have a higher one. A few, abbreviated reasons are as follows.
Every member of a physical grouping (e.g. neighborhood, community, city, state, etc.) has an ethical responsibility to other members of that group. Organizations, like individuals, are members of a physical group. Therefore organizations have an ethical responsibility to other members of that group.
Those who are granted special privileges by the group have a higher obligation to the group as a result. Ethical responsibility represents one of those obligations. Corporations are granted special privileges such as limited liability, hence they have a higher obligation.
Similarly, those organizations that are granted disproportionate political and economic power, assume disproportionate obligations. With, again, ethical responsibility being one of those obligations. This is the "to whom much is given, much is required" principle. Also, since an organization with disproportionate political and economic power necessarily has a disproportionate impact on a given society, it is entirely reasonable for those granting that power to expect it to be used benevolently.
This shouldn't have been voted down. It is actually a sound question and one that should be examined.
Edit: I looked at the previous replies. All of this talk of 'society' this and 'we' that is of no use whatsoever when you are talking about global phenomena and companies like Facebook/Twitter/etc. Under the given circumstances, the ethical questions are much larger. The problem is probably totally intractable.
In a world of pure capitalism without ethical considerations at all... these sorts of issues can be "resolved" through assassination markets against the owners and operators of enterprises that become too great a public nuisance.
Is that what you want, or would you instead prefer that ethical considerations be back on the table?
Because we live in a society with social norms and a moral code. If anything, we should expect more morality from institutions that avail themselves of limited liability legal forms.
This "corporations should be cynical sociopaths" idea is even newer than the limited liability corporate form, which is itself a modern invention.
Before the current era of hyper-institutionalization and hyper-legalism there was a concept called "natural law". It basically meant morality, as understood at the time.
When society is prejudiced against a group (not the fake prejudice that society complains about - major broadcasters like Fox and CNN are both probably championing groups who have plenty of support from society, but maybe other groups are actually marginalised but it wouldn't be broadly OK to say it if they were) then it's not society's moral code that helps them (if anything it hurts them), it's businesses that only care about money who will still deal with them.
Latinos and people with mental illness (and fat people) are kinda still acceptable targets. Poor whites. Men in some contexts. Asians in some contexts. One of the biggest issues with the whole anti-discrimination movement now is that it is inherently reductionist - it has to be some grand intersectional operatic fight with clear goodies and baddies who are always winners or losers in some deep conspiratorial structure of society, they can't appreciate that discrimination isn't always so black and white and that often context can matter because for the "theory" to work it always has to be about some imagined power struggle.
What? That isn't the argument most anti-discrimination people make.
Most argue that subconscious bias and wealth inequality due to historical reasons are a significant part of discrimination. I've not met someone 'anti-discrimination' who believes there is a deep conspiracy of people working to instill discrimination across society.
In modern times in the western world, conspiratorial sort of discrimination seems to me to occur more in pockets or if the culture of an organisation goes bad and festers. But it's rarely overt or widespread.
More subtle and nuanced forms of discrimination are still everpresent of course, but everyone I discuss and work with in these issues knows this all too well.
Oh I've definitely encountered rhetoric that suggests middle class white-appearing males have intentionally and in bad faith created discriminatory structures because their power complex is what gets them off at night. I did go to a very liberal college though. I hope that stance is not becoming mainstream...
Because externality is everywhere, and a society where organizations pay attention to this is preferable to one that suffers a thousand cuts by ignoring it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence#Paper...