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The article kind of contradicts itself: Earlier: "Of course, this doesn’t mean put up false testimonials... create fake real-time activity" Later on advocatin

• sahillavingia 16y ago
  It doesn't mean you should, but many startups do anyways. Yeah, it is lying, and it is bad. But if that's going to increase your conversions by a significant amount, that benefit may outweigh the moral cost. Note: I've never done anything like this (lying to users about numbers or what-have-you).
  • lukeqsee 16y ago
    > But if that's going to increase your conversions by a significant amount, that benefit may outweigh the moral cost. It's never right to do wrong to get the opportunity to do right. Morals do not budge.
    • derefr 16y ago
      You mean, your system of virtue-based ethics do not budge. My system of consequentialist ethics do.
      • lukeqsee 16y ago
        You may disagree, but I mean what I say. My morals do not budge; this is due to the Originator thereof never changing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immutability_(theology) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immutability_(theology)
        • derefr 16y ago
          And what I meant is that the word "morals" an empty node (http://lesswrong.com/lw/nm/disguised_queries/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/nm/disguised_queries/) in objective-definition-space, and needs to be broken down into its constituent definitions—which, in your case, means virtue-based ethics. There is no property of "morality" that you have that cannot be explained by your being a virtue ethicist; thus, you must dissolve the idea altogether.
          • lukeqsee 16y ago
            I believe you are missing my point: I am not a virtue-based ethics. Edit: Forgive me if I'm missing your point. I am a Bible-based ethicist, the Bible originated with God, Who never changes; ergo, His morals (or ethics, as you wish) are immutable. Those ethics have been revealed to us via the Bible and our consciences. That's where my ethics originate. (That doesn't mean or imply my execution of them is perfect.) Call it deo-ethics, if you will, but it doesn't fall into virtue-based ethics (as defined by the Wikipedia article, if you want another definition, please provide it).
            • derefr 16y ago
              Virtue ethics and consequentialism form a one-dimensional spectrum; all ethical beliefs exist at some point along it (not to imply that ethical beliefs don't have other dimensions—just that this is one of them.) Pure virtue ethics mean, basically, "I am doing things for reasons." Even if the the reasons don't help you to get what you want, they're still your beliefs. Pure consequentialist ethics is the classic "the ends justify the means"; that it is the results that are important, and any reason you believe is simply a proxy that increases your likelihood of obtaining the result. Whether a system of ethics is deontologically derived is orthogonal to this: you can take your beliefs from God as an a-priori fact about yourself (like in Descartes' argument for the existence of God), and therefore have them be virtue-based; or you can act so that god will reward you, or won't punish you, or so that your peer-group of religious people will identify with you, etc. Morality, in the classic definition, refers to an objectively-true ethics—e.g., one where people who don't believe those ethics are wrong for doing so. As far as I am aware, there is no modern religion that actually still supports moral, rather than ethical reasoning, at least when it comes to prescribing the actions of others, rather than our own internal deisions. This is what "tolerance" truly means: the sacrifice of a belief in the existence of objective morality for the consequence of cultural co-operation and empathy. Of course, there is another, more modern definition of morality, which people think of as "personal morality"—the way you believe the world should be, whether or not anyone else believes it. Rather than overloading the word like that, it's easier to just use a piece of economics jargon to refer to this: this is your utility function (a combination of what could be called "conscience" and what could also be called "desire"—it is simply the part of your mind that tells you whether or not a given thing is "good", for any definition of the term.) One of the most useful things to come into a discussion with is a set of clearly-defined terms; they're like sharp chisels for chipping off useless argument and getting to the point where you can say something that's provably true. :)
  • tommi 16y ago
    Well that trick is certainly not what the earlier introducing paragraph tells: "Rather, you can engineer your appearance to give off a sense of size."
• lukeqsee 16y ago
  Not a contradiction. In first case he's give what it should be, in the second he's giving a real example of what does happen. By simply using an example he's not condoning the example.
• samtp 16y ago
  Fake activity (posts, comments, uploads) is different from fake statistics of activity (# of users online)