
Google will always do evil - gnanesh
https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/24/google-will-always-do-evil/
======
mlthoughts2018
I’ve always loved David Mitchell’s take on Google’s motto:

“There’s something fishy about Google’s motto, “Don’t Be Evil.” I’m not saying
it’s controversial but it makes you think, “Why bring that up? Why have you
suddenly put the subject of being evil on the agenda?” It’s suspicious in the
same way as Ukip constantly pointing out how racist they’re not”

~~~
some_account
Because Microsoft were (are) evil, and they tried to market themselves as
being different.

They are not.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
But going out of your way to say you are definitely not evil just makes you
come across like this:

<
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_YmDcCpD1gc](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_YmDcCpD1gc)
>

So in a sense, if you get past an age of naivety and if you don’t want a
Google job purely for self-interested gain, then Google’s approach has always
fallen on deaf ears. I guess their recent actions have just made it more
obvious in the mainstream.

~~~
timrichard
Going out of your way to say it?

People act as if it's always been a tagline below the corporate logo on every
Google webpage and communication.

From what I've read, it was a half-joking contribution from Paul Buchheit in
the early days, when they were brainstorming about what the company ethos
could be. It apparently caught on internally with staff.

I'm personally glad that it's been dropped, because it's overblown and it
feels like the whole thing has been tedious forever.

Any large and highly profitable company will be doing something 'evil' in the
estimation of someone who's looking for it.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
You’re suggesting that a big multinational corp just leaves phrases in its
public-facing motto, or in heavily vetted handbook materials, by accident, or
as a joke, or on a whim?

In my experience, absolutely nothing gets into a handbook or a code of conduct
unless you go waaay out of your way to put it there, through legal &
compliance, HR, senior leadership teams, etc.

There’s zero chance Google treats this like a cheeky wink.

------
redm
While I'm no fan of Google, the premise of this article annoys me. Good and
Evil are such a simple concept and have no place in reality. Good and Evil are
always subjective to the viewport. I don't disagree with the facts of the
article, just that its cast in the simplistic light of "Evil" for dramatic
effect.

Maybe Google removed the Don't Be Evil because of articles like this pushing a
Good vs. Evil narrative.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
I don’t agree. While Good and Evil are certainly relative, normative social
constructs, in any given place and time there are a lot of behaviors that are
widely accepted as “good” or as “evil” — and most of them (e.g. don’t commit
cold-blooded murder) are not even near any gray area and are fairly universal
and serve important, widely valued pragmatic interests.

It seems overly pedantic to me to act like just because deep, technical moral
philosophy can be quite tricky, it means we should abandon big, first-order,
obviously pragmatic notions of good and evil.

~~~
bb88
> In any given place and time there are a lot of behaviors that are widely
> accepted as “good” or as “evil".

Philosophically that's a loaded topic, and gets to the subject of "objective
morality". I could bore you with arguments I suppose, but the key is, that's
not a given -- even on the "big, first-order" good and evil definitions.

But what's worse is when you're judging and using those judgments for your
argument, when you could just be supplying facts and letting us come to our
own conclusions.

E.g.:

A: Nuclear weapons are very, very evil.

B: The US used Nuclear weapons to end a long, protracted, brutal, and deadly
war.

A is a judgement, which I may or may not agree with. B is a fact, which also
seems to diminish the power of A.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
> Philosophically that's a loaded topic...

I don't agree. I think the existence of widely accepted notions of "good" and
"evil" is actually an empirical claim. It says nothing about whether society
_is right_ , just whether you could list off some claims and get an
unambiguous majority to agree with statements like "Murder is evil".

Also, nuclear weapons seems exactly like choosing a topic already known to be
in a gray, contentious zone but then acting like it's a high leverage and
useful example for widely held beliefs about morality. We tend to
sensationalize and focus so much on these gray zone topics, that we forget
just how huge the space of basically agreed moral principles is.

There certainly are great moral philosophy problems. I remember when I first
read Derek Parfit's _Reasons and Persons_ and thought about "The Repugnant
Conclusion" it was eye opening. It would definitely be useful for people
choosing large-scale policies or facing real problems of humanitarian crisis
or population ethics.

But on a day to day basis, it's childish and useless to point at that kind of
academic moral philosophy and argue that we should just treat "good" and
"evil" as relative fictions. No way. There's big, obvious, widely shared views
that define what our linguistic constructs of "good" and "evil" generally mean
in a day to day context, and serve super useful, pragmatic functions in the
operations of society.

~~~
bb88
> I think the existence of widely accepted notions of "good" and "evil" is
> actually an empirical claim.

Quit moving the goalposts. Objective morality is not the same as whether
lexical definitions of "good" and "evil" exist in all the world's languages.

My real point which you left out is that judgements about such things should
really be left to the reader. Saying such things like "x is evil" really
doesn't help the conversation.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
> Quit moving the goalposts. Objective morality is not the same as whether
> lexical definitions of "good" and "evil" exist in all the world's languages.

What are you talking about? I was only ever talking about the lexical part,
which was what the original parent of these comments was talking about (e.g.
removing the lexical part just because the objective part doesn't exist in
complex moral philosophy terms). No goalpost moving (I'm really not sure what
you're talking about with that.)

> My real point which you left out is that judgements about such things should
> really be left to the reader. Saying such things like "x is evil" really
> doesn't help the conversation.

What? Again I am not seeing a connection either to your earlier comment or my
original point. But regardless, I disagree with the claim that "Saying such
things like "x is evil" really doesn't help the conversation".

It absolutely does help when there is a commonly understood lexical (as you
call it) notion of evil that's widely accepted.

~~~
bb88
As I quoted:

> In any given place and time there are a lot of behaviors that are widely
> accepted as “good” or as “evil".

That's objective morality.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
No, it’s not. It’s just a set of widely accepted heuristics.

------
awat
Geniune question is anyone at liberty to comment on Google culture? Google has
always been a sort of grass is always greener aspirational employer to me but
lately I have to admit externally they don’t look as good.

------
cateye
No company should have the choice between being evil or not.

~~~
praptak
That would require a law system that perfectly captures all ways of being
evil. In reality, the law can only play catch up at best. In campaign donation
reality even this will not happen.

~~~
Steltek
A minimal of fair labor practices for imported goods, enforcing secure data
practices, and things like mandatory arbitration aren't too much to ask
though. It's not rocket science.

------
erikerikson
The motto "don't be evil" forces every brain hearing it to process "be evil".
This is made particularly ponient by research showing that people don't
process negation well. This is why the transition, ignored by the article, to
a positive statement of the desired outcome was adopted. Regardless of whether
Google attains the behavior it lasts out for itself, this is probably a good
change.

~~~
jrs95
Similarly the whole “Love Trumps Hate” thing was probably a poor choice,
considering it literally starts with “Love Trump”

------
grosjona
I think that over time, big corporations like Google and Facebook tend to
attract increasingly evil (greedy, financially motivated) people - It creates
an environment where non-evil people feel uncomfortable and it causes them
leave the company at a higher rate which makes the problem worse. Even the
people at the top slowly become more evil (via osmosis) without realising it.

------
hashkb
Was this really just last month? I feel like I participated in outrage over
the removal of "don't be evil" last year or the year before.

And it's not like it ever meant anything. I agree terrible companies are
terrible... but there hasn't been a turning point recently or ever.

~~~
randomdata
There are articles on the internet going back many years claiming that they've
quietly removed it. Perhaps they remove it occasionally to generate buzz or as
part of some kind of A/B testing?

As I write this, it is currently included:
[https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-
conduct.html](https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct.html)

~~~
HillaryBriss
i like the idea of A/B testing that particular statement

i mean, what were the alternatives? did they test against "Be evil" or "Don't
be good?" or "Remove the headphone jack" or something?

