----- Forwarded message from Kragen Javier Sitaker <[email protected]> -----
Date: Thu, 18 Aug 2011 12:09:20 -0400 From: Kragen Javier Sitaker <[email protected]> To: Aaron Swartz <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Saying “Do no evil” excludes you from any serious conversation about Google User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.20 (2009-06-14) May I forward this and my reply to kragen-discuss? On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 07:32:36AM -0400, Aaron Swartz wrote: > What's wrong with impossible goals? In ethics, it seems only right to strive > for perfection (what's the alternative? to try to do a little evil?). This > doesn't mean anyone who fails should go to hell; fortunately hell does not > exist. Impossible goals are totally reasonable; I agree that we should all attempt to do no evil. But there are a couple of problems with adopting "do no evil" as a *motto*: - The context of being your motto implies that it's achievable for you, which is a statement of hubris. - If it's squeezing out a more achievable motto like "don't be evil", it can diminish your attention to the underlying goal rather than increasing it. Witness how Christians over the centuries have mostly ignored Jesus's apparently impossible injunctions to, for example, never work, abstain from violent self-defense, and give away all of their possessions. (Myself, I do occasionally intentionally do evil in ways I could avoid --- I'll eat a small chunk of leftover meat, for example --- in part in order to kill my pride.) > The paradigmatic example of DBE is that Google could succeed in the market > without selling result placement or pinch the monkey banner ads. This isn't > a claim about net good, as you suggest--it's easy to argue that if customers > flocked to a Google with bought results or annoying ads, they were getting a > huge net benefit, especially over competitors who had both plus no > intelligent ranking technology. DBE was meant to head net evil thinking off > at the pass. There were just some lines Google would not cross. > > It is different from DNE but not in the way you suggest. It was about how > power corrupts, not about individual mistakes. And power corrupts through > exactly the net benefit logic you claim the principle allows. I think they > knew that and thus the slogan was a reminder to be constantly on guard. That sounds plausible. So how do you interpret "make money without doing evil"? It seems to me that anyone taking actions in the world is going to do a little evil, so you can't really make money while doing *no* evil. Kragen ----- End forwarded message ----- -- To unsubscribe: http://lists.canonical.org/mailman/listinfo/kragen-discuss
