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It’s not that politics kinda don’t matter, it’s that they are so important, no one can be trusted to have the best, most clear, unbiased view of things. Most e

It’s not that politics kinda don’t matter, it’s that they are so important, no one can be trusted to have the best, most clear, unbiased view of things. Most everyone nowadays seem to wander around thinking their views are obviously correct, and the people who disagree with them are either ignorant, immoral, or arguing in bad faith. Rationally that doesn’t make sense. No one knows everything, and everyone has blind spots. Most people are doing their best to have decent opinions. So we have this kind of genius political and economic system that assumes everyone is going to be biased and small minded, and mostly just act in their own interests as they perceive them, and yet things mostly come out pretty ok. With that in mind, it follows that corporations should mostly just pursue profits, even though that doesn’t sound right. But certainly they should not take stances on the “issues of the day” ... especially if they are publicly held companies. Your scenario doesn’t make sense because our system is designed so that voting and legislating and regulating and so forth address the hypothetical Hitler problem. The corporation has a different role to play.

wizzwizz4 7y ago
I don't think your "with that in mind" follows. Corporations are emergent features of groups of humans, and there are things that they just don't do because none of the humans involved even consider them okay for long enough to think of how to do them. If corporations actually mostly pursued profits, there'd be nothing left but fire. Rather, corporations should (according to an extension of your argument, which I don't necessarily agree with) pursue the goals of the people who make up the corporation. Except that doesn't really happen; corporations are rather a power-multiplier for those in charge of them, subject to the constraints of the corporate structure that forces those people to prioritise profit over their own goals. Thus, it makes sense for people to lobby large companies en-masse; they can't use the corporations as force-multipliers, but they can use their ability to threaten the companies' profit sources (and so direct the companies' motivations) to their shared interest.
- whiddershins 7y ago
  Corporations act on the behalf of shareholders. They might employ people to do so, and those people in some sense might “make up” the corporation, but it is literally their job to pursue the interests of whomever owns stake in the corporation. I glossed over a lot of steps in my hacker news comment about a specific context. The context is some people trying to get github to take a stance, an opinion, about a department of the us government. It’s hard to be creative enough to imagine a more partisan or divisive topic, where moral consensus is effectively impossible. Within this context is is absolutely safe to describe the role of the for profit (public in this case) corporation - as opposed branches of the government, or non profit organizations, or unions, or groundswell movements or any of the various emergent structures you might want to throw in here - as seeking profit.

wizzwizz4 7y ago

I don't think your "with that in mind" follows. Corporations are emergent features of groups of humans, and there are things that they just don't do because none of the humans involved even consider them okay for long enough to think of how to do them. If corporations actually mostly pursued profits, there'd be nothing left but fire. Rather, corporations should (according to an extension of your argument, which I don't necessarily agree with) pursue the goals of the people who make up the corporation. Except that doesn't really happen; corporations are rather a power-multiplier for those in charge of them, subject to the constraints of the corporate structure that forces those people to prioritise profit over their own goals. Thus, it makes sense for people to lobby large companies en-masse; they can't use the corporations as force-multipliers, but they can use their ability to threaten the companies' profit sources (and so direct the companies' motivations) to their shared interest.

whiddershins 7y ago
Corporations act on the behalf of shareholders. They might employ people to do so, and those people in some sense might “make up” the corporation, but it is literally their job to pursue the interests of whomever owns stake in the corporation. I glossed over a lot of steps in my hacker news comment about a specific context. The context is some people trying to get github to take a stance, an opinion, about a department of the us government. It’s hard to be creative enough to imagine a more partisan or divisive topic, where moral consensus is effectively impossible. Within this context is is absolutely safe to describe the role of the for profit (public in this case) corporation - as opposed branches of the government, or non profit organizations, or unions, or groundswell movements or any of the various emergent structures you might want to throw in here - as seeking profit.