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His initial technology choices may be disagreeable, but he's still one of us. To be completely honest, I have no more affinity for Zuckerberg than I do for the

His initial technology choices may be disagreeable, but he's still one of us. To be completely honest, I have no more affinity for Zuckerberg than I do for the Winklevii. One is new money, one is old money, but they both share a severe lack of idealism and social responsibility.

strlen 16y ago
> One is new money, one is old money, but they both share a severe lack of idealism and social responsibility. Disagree strongly. Old money usually came through parasitic exploitation. New money was earned in fair and honest ways: by building something. We like to talk about how our society it's meritocratic, but extra ordinary wealth earned at a young age is still looked down upon in our society. Witness the hatred of Yuppies and (outside of the Silicon Valley) dislike of startups: you're supposed to join $big_corp and work your way up through the ladder; if you shortcut by getting a high paying job right out of college you're a hated yuppie; if you shortcut by leaving for a startup, you're a traitor and a job hopper. I barely use Facebook: I didn't enjoy high school (I have no desire to learn that the dude who slammed me into a locker just got engaged and is eating a sandwich) and I went to a small university where it's easy to keep in touch with classmates. I find other sites more interesting. Facebook is not just Zuckerberg. It's now a corporation. The only social responsibility of a corporation (thank you Dr. Friedman) is to generate profit for their shareholders: this profit will channel into mutual funds which individuals use to retire, to philanthropic endeavours. The engineering work that goes on at Facebook (they're now endowing research fellowships) will go towards better machine learning algorithms, more efficient data centres, etc... It's almost certain that the work Facebook has put into Hadoop, for example, is helping make protein sequencing an easier task (e.g., HDFS RAID-node means being able to use a smaller replication factor, which means being able to store more data on less physical hardware!). That's the beauty of capitalism. Capitalism is sometimes horribly unfair and inefficient, but it's far better than the other systems (an immigrant from a communist country speaking here...). Would the Winklevii had any interest in building our such a business? Their plan was to use hired help (what they think of you and I) to perhaps build it into a $100mm acquisition target that would rot at Yahoo, Microsoft or Newscorp; their plan wasn't to build a world class technology company.
- michaelchisari 16y ago
  The only social responsibility of a corporation Legally, yes. But that's an ethical black hole if we stop there. My expectations of an institution increase as their resources increase. The greater the resources, the greater my expectations on their social responsibility. I'd rather not simply acquiesce to power just because Milton Friedman (or anyone) considers it a good idea.
  - strlen 16y ago
    > I'd rather not simply acquiesce to power just because Milton Friedman (or anyone) considers it a good idea. You're confusing is and ought here. It's not that they consider it a good idea, it's just it's empirically observable that the society is better off as a result. You can challenge Friedman and a propose a new economic theory. Indeed others have modified his theories to take account of externalities such as pollution: if you want to make such an argument here, I'm ready to listen. I don't mean it in a polemic way, I am curious about research into externalities of social networks and economics-conscious ways of dealing with them e.g., equivalent of pollution credits.
    - michaelchisari 16y ago
      Plenty of people have challenged Friedman's economic theories. In fact, the Austrian school of economics is in no way unchallenged, and in many circles is not considered empirically sound. I'd rather not get into a big political or economic debate, but the idea that Friedman's views are an objective truth is simply not true.
      - strlen 16y ago
        > In fact, the Austrian school of economics is in no way unchallenged, and in many circles is not considered empirically sound. Friedman isn't Austrian school (he was against the Gold standard and he suggested Income Tax withholding!). If you want a horrible analogy, think of Austrian school as Haskell, Chicago school as OCaml (Hayek being a link between the two, just as HM type inference is the link between ML and Haskell), Keynes as Smalltalk and more modern theories as something like Scala.
dschobel 16y ago
How you conclude "a severe lack of idealism and social responsibility" for Zuckerberg, a guy who turned down $1.4B in the early days of FB and has already pledged to give away the majority of his fortune, is beyond me.
- michaelchisari 16y ago
  I'll admit that I probably have a higher standard of social responsibility and idealism than most. For instance, the various privacy issues that have plagued the company from the beginning, to start. Also, Facebook has been in a really good position to push for an open, distributed social networking protocol, but instead have focused on maintaining a closed, walled garden. So it's instead up to us in the open source world, severely under-funded and overworked, to build an alternative. A socially responsible CEO wouldn't sell out their user's privacy for the sake of advertisers, and set a strong, positive precedence right from the beginning of the rise of popular social networking. An idealist would help build an open, decentralized protocol, document it well, and push for it to be adopted as a standard by the W3C. What Zuckerberg does with his billions doesn't really change any of that for me.
  - ebaysucks 16y ago
    Facebook is a business. You can not open source everything. Facebook controls the social graph. Apple controls the App Store. Google controls the search and ads alghorithm. Heck, even open source companies making money through consulting control the list of consultants. In short: Businesses will control their business model. They'll be for "open source" or "competition" in anything else, especially complementary markets. E.g. Google ("don't be evil") will push open standards for Android and net neutrality, but only because content and internet access are the complements to their search business, which they will keep closed. Don't waste your skills being too idealistic. Facebook, Google, Apple, even Microsoft and Yahoo bring huge net value to society.
    - michaelchisari 16y ago
      That's short-sighted. They could have easily opened up the social graph, while maintaining the largest node within the graph. Instead, the social graph will open without them, and they'll find themselves clamoring to catch up, just like AOL did with e-mail and the web. So, long term, not being idealistic, and keeping their users within a walled garden, will show itself to also be a bad business decision. Businesses will control their business model, but that means we must critique their business model and build open alternatives (which I've been doing), instead of just accepting their actions uncritically. And sure, they bring huge net value to society. With that kind of money and success, it'd be hard not to. My argument is that they don't bring nearly enough net value to society as they could, given their resources.

strlen 16y ago

> One is new money, one is old money, but they both share a severe lack of idealism and social responsibility. Disagree strongly. Old money usually came through parasitic exploitation. New money was earned in fair and honest ways: by building something. We like to talk about how our society it's meritocratic, but extra ordinary wealth earned at a young age is still looked down upon in our society. Witness the hatred of Yuppies and (outside of the Silicon Valley) dislike of startups: you're supposed to join $big_corp and work your way up through the ladder; if you shortcut by getting a high paying job right out of college you're a hated yuppie; if you shortcut by leaving for a startup, you're a traitor and a job hopper. I barely use Facebook: I didn't enjoy high school (I have no desire to learn that the dude who slammed me into a locker just got engaged and is eating a sandwich) and I went to a small university where it's easy to keep in touch with classmates. I find other sites more interesting. Facebook is not just Zuckerberg. It's now a corporation. The only social responsibility of a corporation (thank you Dr. Friedman) is to generate profit for their shareholders: this profit will channel into mutual funds which individuals use to retire, to philanthropic endeavours. The engineering work that goes on at Facebook (they're now endowing research fellowships) will go towards better machine learning algorithms, more efficient data centres, etc... It's almost certain that the work Facebook has put into Hadoop, for example, is helping make protein sequencing an easier task (e.g., HDFS RAID-node means being able to use a smaller replication factor, which means being able to store more data on less physical hardware!). That's the beauty of capitalism. Capitalism is sometimes horribly unfair and inefficient, but it's far better than the other systems (an immigrant from a communist country speaking here...). Would the Winklevii had any interest in building our such a business? Their plan was to use hired help (what they think of you and I) to perhaps build it into a $100mm acquisition target that would rot at Yahoo, Microsoft or Newscorp; their plan wasn't to build a world class technology company.

michaelchisari 16y ago
The only social responsibility of a corporation Legally, yes. But that's an ethical black hole if we stop there. My expectations of an institution increase as their resources increase. The greater the resources, the greater my expectations on their social responsibility. I'd rather not simply acquiesce to power just because Milton Friedman (or anyone) considers it a good idea.
- strlen 16y ago
  > I'd rather not simply acquiesce to power just because Milton Friedman (or anyone) considers it a good idea. You're confusing is and ought here. It's not that they consider it a good idea, it's just it's empirically observable that the society is better off as a result. You can challenge Friedman and a propose a new economic theory. Indeed others have modified his theories to take account of externalities such as pollution: if you want to make such an argument here, I'm ready to listen. I don't mean it in a polemic way, I am curious about research into externalities of social networks and economics-conscious ways of dealing with them e.g., equivalent of pollution credits.
  - michaelchisari 16y ago
    Plenty of people have challenged Friedman's economic theories. In fact, the Austrian school of economics is in no way unchallenged, and in many circles is not considered empirically sound. I'd rather not get into a big political or economic debate, but the idea that Friedman's views are an objective truth is simply not true.
    - strlen 16y ago
      > In fact, the Austrian school of economics is in no way unchallenged, and in many circles is not considered empirically sound. Friedman isn't Austrian school (he was against the Gold standard and he suggested Income Tax withholding!). If you want a horrible analogy, think of Austrian school as Haskell, Chicago school as OCaml (Hayek being a link between the two, just as HM type inference is the link between ML and Haskell), Keynes as Smalltalk and more modern theories as something like Scala.

dschobel 16y ago

How you conclude "a severe lack of idealism and social responsibility" for Zuckerberg, a guy who turned down $1.4B in the early days of FB and has already pledged to give away the majority of his fortune, is beyond me.

michaelchisari 16y ago
I'll admit that I probably have a higher standard of social responsibility and idealism than most. For instance, the various privacy issues that have plagued the company from the beginning, to start. Also, Facebook has been in a really good position to push for an open, distributed social networking protocol, but instead have focused on maintaining a closed, walled garden. So it's instead up to us in the open source world, severely under-funded and overworked, to build an alternative. A socially responsible CEO wouldn't sell out their user's privacy for the sake of advertisers, and set a strong, positive precedence right from the beginning of the rise of popular social networking. An idealist would help build an open, decentralized protocol, document it well, and push for it to be adopted as a standard by the W3C. What Zuckerberg does with his billions doesn't really change any of that for me.
- ebaysucks 16y ago
  Facebook is a business. You can not open source everything. Facebook controls the social graph. Apple controls the App Store. Google controls the search and ads alghorithm. Heck, even open source companies making money through consulting control the list of consultants. In short: Businesses will control their business model. They'll be for "open source" or "competition" in anything else, especially complementary markets. E.g. Google ("don't be evil") will push open standards for Android and net neutrality, but only because content and internet access are the complements to their search business, which they will keep closed. Don't waste your skills being too idealistic. Facebook, Google, Apple, even Microsoft and Yahoo bring huge net value to society.
  - michaelchisari 16y ago
    That's short-sighted. They could have easily opened up the social graph, while maintaining the largest node within the graph. Instead, the social graph will open without them, and they'll find themselves clamoring to catch up, just like AOL did with e-mail and the web. So, long term, not being idealistic, and keeping their users within a walled garden, will show itself to also be a bad business decision. Businesses will control their business model, but that means we must critique their business model and build open alternatives (which I've been doing), instead of just accepting their actions uncritically. And sure, they bring huge net value to society. With that kind of money and success, it'd be hard not to. My argument is that they don't bring nearly enough net value to society as they could, given their resources.