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Zuckerberg is admitting that they throttled the Hunter Biden story. How is that "good" for Republicans? And to be clear, my personal perspective highly aligns w

Zuckerberg is admitting that they throttled the Hunter Biden story. How is that "good" for Republicans? And to be clear, my personal perspective highly aligns with your own and that of, benreesman. I think all these decisions are highly calculated and that partisanship and personal convictiom rank very low in CEO calculus. My firm belief which I've expressed elsewhere on HN is that if you want "good" bahavior out of corporations you must use the political system, preferably your functioning democracy, to compel it out of them.

benreesman 4y ago
"Good" is a bit tricky to define, but I take your meaning broadly. I think maybe the biggest obstacle to getting anything productive done in society is that we seem (in an almost fractal way, from like a nation-wide election down to an HN comment section) just so fucking committed to pretending that mechanism design doesn't work. It absolutely, 100% does. People as individuals, organizations composed of individuals, fucking viruses, the whole show: these things respond to incentives. Even the "higher" stuff is easily modeled as slightly more abstract incentives. These 2022 S&P 500 corporations are stupidly, absurdly, Ronald Reagan-spontaneous-hard-on "good" at cranking "shareholder value". Which is precisely the job we've set them and the executives tasked with running them. They're doing their job. That goal happens to align only coincidentally and peripherally with a more abstract goal I like a lot better: something like "the broader social good". Edit: On a second read, it might not have been clear that I was elaborating on your point, not arguing with it.