> The self righteousness of Google, I thought nothing could be worse than Google's hypocrisy. I wasn't very suspicious at the time, but learned to be. My take

> The self righteousness of Google, I thought nothing could be worse than Google's hypocrisy. I wasn't very suspicious at the time, but learned to be. My take on this is different though. I don't think it was a case of self-righteousness as much as extreme naivete of some postdocs that were just entering the business world. naivete in thinking a statement such as that couldn't be twisted to the point it meant less that it already does ("evil" is not well defined), and naivete to think they wouldn't be the ones twisting it, whether on purpose or subconsciously, as business needs slowly changed and they had to justify keeping their business afloat and profitable, and people in jobs, and shareholders happy. You either set up your business such that it's incentivized to align with your morals, or your business (the market) will incentivize you to change your morals to align with it. If nothing else, we've learned that practices that seem mostly benign one decade at low scale can become very troubling the next decade when done at a much larger scale and/or when additional consequences of the practice become known. Choices made that align with your morals at one time may have consequences that mean you were wrong, even if you couldn't really have known it, but now your business relies on this prior decision. Running a business is hard, making overreaching statements you can't live up to later is easy.