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The point is that Google should not be held as moral entity. If it's held onto the moral standard, Ads should not be Google's business at all, as Larry Page st

The point is that Google should not be held as moral entity. If it's held onto the moral standard, Ads should not be Google's business at all, as Larry Page stated sometime in the early days of Google. (I cannot find the reference though, the statement is on the line of "advertising is fundamentally immoral). On the other hand, if you look at what search service is provided in China (Baidu would sell online groups to advertisers entirely and let the advertisers to pretend to be genuine community member and manipulate the content), by simply providing a censored Google search is a morally noble service to Chinese Internet users. I do not support or disapprove censored search on the human rights level. I do support censored search on the basis of providing a more normal search service, and make non-political high-quality information available to normal Chinese citizens.

gowld 8y ago
A source on the Page claim would be helpful. He may have said that then-current ads are morally flawed and that Google could do better, which is what Google did (yet saw degradation over the years)
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  Appendix A: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html Larry and Sergey contend that ads incentivize providing poorer quality search results so that users click on ads, that ad-funded search engines are inherently biased towards advertisers and against the needs of consumers, and that it's crucial that we have a transparent search engine in the academic realm. It's amazing how prescient Larry Page and Sergey Brin truly were at the time. If we ever invent time travel we should introduce college-age Larry and Sergey to their own ad-based corporate monopoly with a completely secretive search algorithm.
PavlovsCat 8y ago
> The point is that Google should not be held as moral entity. Any company is just a bunch of people doing stuff. Those people always remain morally responsible, there's just legal exceptions, but no moral ones. If one doesn't question something, or even seeks to remain ignorant of it, they could be argued to even be responsible even for something they didn't know about -- since it wasn't despite, but because of their efforts that they were ignorant of it. > simply providing a censored Google search is a morally noble service to Chinese Internet users There is nothing "noble" about slightly better product, any more than making a slightly thinner laptop is "noble". > "We could have taken a moral stand, but what good would that have done?" But the moral good of a moral act inheres in the act itself. That is why an act can itself ennoble or corrupt the person who performs it. The victory of instrumental reason in our time has brought about the virtual disappearance of this insight and thus perforce the delegitimation of the very idea of nobility. -- Joseph Weizenbaum, "Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment To Calculation" (1976) It's a disappearance of insight, not new insights. Some regressed into a moral stone age, but they didn't change the world as much as just themselves with that.
- justicezyx 8y ago
  > simply providing a censored Google search is a morally noble service to Chinese Internet users No, considering what Chinese consumer are getting, a US normal search product is morally more noble. People literally get gulled into spending their life's saving because of Baidu's fake ads. Just like giving African famine victims some amount of food is morally noble.
  - PavlovsCat 8y ago
    > People literally get gulled into spending their life's saving because of Baidu's fake ads. Then try this, in order of ascending difficulty: make link lists and web rings, make search engines, organize for consumer protection, actually demand the concentration camps be closed, for starters. You can't appeal to humanity, "mercy for the non-dissidents", while ignoring the dissidents as out of scope and irrelevant. That's like telling someone they should stop snoring while you are operating machinery at 500dB or something. You can't impress me by saying this person who burned 23089234 dollars needs my 50 cents or they will starve. And that's besides the point anway. It's not about the wellbeing of Chinese non-dissidents, it's about the potential complicity of companies in countries which so far are not totalitarian. I'm not going to feed someone who is starving if it means I wipe my whole intellectual heritage with some virus I bring home. To even bring up a sub-optimal search engine as something that could ever matter in such a context is staggering. > Just like giving African famine victims some amount of food is morally noble That "victim" is in turn currently brutalizing (and/or complicit with the brutalization of) someone else who is both starving and being brutalized. The only condition for "giving them food" is to stop with that, something they should have done already anyway. But even now, the actions show that the brutalization and/or the looking away is more important to even themselves than the "food". The appeal to compassion to normalize being not compassionate does not work. If you can't have sympathy for someone kidnapped or murdered for pissing off the wrong corrupt henchman, then don't talk about ads mixed with search results like some super tragic thing. Comparing the results of what humans are doing (or fail to do), with a famine, which basically just "happens", that is also duly noted, and fully rejected. At this point, I think I could make a totalitarianism rationalization bingo card.
kelnos 8y ago
> The point is that Google should not be held as moral entity. False. Companies are made up of people, who are morally responsible for their actions, which, by extension, are the actions of their company. You don't get to dodge moral responsibility just because you have a corporate umbrella over your head.

gowld 8y ago

A source on the Page claim would be helpful. He may have said that then-current ads are morally flawed and that Google could do better, which is what Google did (yet saw degradation over the years)

ocdtrekkie 8y ago
Appendix A: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html Larry and Sergey contend that ads incentivize providing poorer quality search results so that users click on ads, that ad-funded search engines are inherently biased towards advertisers and against the needs of consumers, and that it's crucial that we have a transparent search engine in the academic realm. It's amazing how prescient Larry Page and Sergey Brin truly were at the time. If we ever invent time travel we should introduce college-age Larry and Sergey to their own ad-based corporate monopoly with a completely secretive search algorithm.

PavlovsCat 8y ago

> The point is that Google should not be held as moral entity. Any company is just a bunch of people doing stuff. Those people always remain morally responsible, there's just legal exceptions, but no moral ones. If one doesn't question something, or even seeks to remain ignorant of it, they could be argued to even be responsible even for something they didn't know about -- since it wasn't despite, but because of their efforts that they were ignorant of it. > simply providing a censored Google search is a morally noble service to Chinese Internet users There is nothing "noble" about slightly better product, any more than making a slightly thinner laptop is "noble". > "We could have taken a moral stand, but what good would that have done?" But the moral good of a moral act inheres in the act itself. That is why an act can itself ennoble or corrupt the person who performs it. The victory of instrumental reason in our time has brought about the virtual disappearance of this insight and thus perforce the delegitimation of the very idea of nobility. -- Joseph Weizenbaum, "Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment To Calculation" (1976) It's a disappearance of insight, not new insights. Some regressed into a moral stone age, but they didn't change the world as much as just themselves with that.

justicezyx 8y ago
> simply providing a censored Google search is a morally noble service to Chinese Internet users No, considering what Chinese consumer are getting, a US normal search product is morally more noble. People literally get gulled into spending their life's saving because of Baidu's fake ads. Just like giving African famine victims some amount of food is morally noble.
- PavlovsCat 8y ago
  > People literally get gulled into spending their life's saving because of Baidu's fake ads. Then try this, in order of ascending difficulty: make link lists and web rings, make search engines, organize for consumer protection, actually demand the concentration camps be closed, for starters. You can't appeal to humanity, "mercy for the non-dissidents", while ignoring the dissidents as out of scope and irrelevant. That's like telling someone they should stop snoring while you are operating machinery at 500dB or something. You can't impress me by saying this person who burned 23089234 dollars needs my 50 cents or they will starve. And that's besides the point anway. It's not about the wellbeing of Chinese non-dissidents, it's about the potential complicity of companies in countries which so far are not totalitarian. I'm not going to feed someone who is starving if it means I wipe my whole intellectual heritage with some virus I bring home. To even bring up a sub-optimal search engine as something that could ever matter in such a context is staggering. > Just like giving African famine victims some amount of food is morally noble That "victim" is in turn currently brutalizing (and/or complicit with the brutalization of) someone else who is both starving and being brutalized. The only condition for "giving them food" is to stop with that, something they should have done already anyway. But even now, the actions show that the brutalization and/or the looking away is more important to even themselves than the "food". The appeal to compassion to normalize being not compassionate does not work. If you can't have sympathy for someone kidnapped or murdered for pissing off the wrong corrupt henchman, then don't talk about ads mixed with search results like some super tragic thing. Comparing the results of what humans are doing (or fail to do), with a famine, which basically just "happens", that is also duly noted, and fully rejected. At this point, I think I could make a totalitarianism rationalization bingo card.

kelnos 8y ago

> The point is that Google should not be held as moral entity. False. Companies are made up of people, who are morally responsible for their actions, which, by extension, are the actions of their company. You don't get to dodge moral responsibility just because you have a corporate umbrella over your head.