Comment by biophysboy 2 days ago
I like and read Ben's stuff regularly; he often frames "better" from the business side. He will use terms like "revealed preference" to claim users actually prefer bad product designs (e.g. most users use free ad-based platforms), but a lot of human behavior is impulsive, habitual, constrained, and irrational.
I agree - I think Ben tends to get business myopia. I read him with that in mind.
> It's like saying that Maximizing Shareholder Value is always the right thing to do. No, it isn't.
it is, for the agents of the shareholders. As long as the actions of those agents are legal of course. That's why it's not legal to put fentanyl into every drug sold, because fentanyl is illegal.
But it is legal to put (more) sugar and/or salt into processed foods.
you have to show this 'future-illegal' action is harmful first by demonstrating harm.
That's why i used the sugar example - it's starting to be demonstrably harmful in large quantities that are being used.
I am against preventative "harmful" laws, when harm hasn't been demonstrated, as it restricts freedom, adds red tape to innovation, and stifles startups from exploring the space of possibilities.
and if the actions are deemed immoral by society then a few years later you will see regulation, PR issues or legal action
See early 2000s Google as a model for a righteous company and public perception of it as evil and subsequent antitrust litigation today, or what happened to companies involved in Opioid trade and subsequent effect on shareholders value
Legality doesn’t define whether it’s good or bad for humans or their society.
> > It's like saying that Maximizing Shareholder Value is always the right thing to do. No, it isn't.
> it is, for the agents of the shareholders
Even if we care solely only about shareholders, in extreme cases it is not beneficial also for them
In this quote I don't think he means it from the business side. He's claiming more data allows a better product:
> ... the answers are a statistical synthesis of all of the knowledge the model makers can get their hands on, and are completely unique to every individual; at the same time, every individual user’s usage should, at least in theory, make the model better over time.
> It follows, then, that ChatGPT should obviously have an advertising model. This isn’t just a function of needing to make money: advertising would make ChatGPT a better product. It would have more users using it more, providing more feedback; capturing purchase signals — not from affiliate links, but from personalized ads — would create a richer understanding of individual users, enabling better responses.
But there is a more trivial way that it could be "better" with ads: they could give free users more quota (and/or better models), since there's some income from them.
The idea of ChatGPT's own output being modified to sell products sounds awful to me, but placing ads alongside that are not relevant to the current chat sounds like an Ok compromise to me for free users. That's what Gmail does and most people here on HN seem to use it.
To an MBA type, addictive drugs are the best products. They reveal people's latent preferences for being desperately poor and dependent. They see a grandma pouring her life savings into a gambling app and think "How can I get in on this?"
I think its more subtle; they fight for regulations they deem reasonable and against those they deem unreasonable. Anything that curtails growth of the business is unreasonable.
It's called life.
All life grows and consumes as much as it can. It's what makes it life. "Control" happens when there's more life contesting the same limited resources, and usually involves starvation, but if the situation persists on evolutionary timescales, then some life adapts to proactively limit growth. Then, if some of that adapted life unadapts itself, we call that "cancer", which I think is what you were going for.
To be fair, businesses should assume that customers actually "want" what they create demand for. In the case of misleading or dangerously addictive products, regulation should fall to government, because that's the only actor that can prevent a race to the bottom.
Because all people everywhere are psychopaths who will stab you for $5 if they can get away with it? If you take that attitude, why even go to "work" or run a "business"? It'd be so much more efficient to just stab-stab-stab and take the money directly.
> It'd be so much more efficient to just stab-stab-stab and take the money directly.
which is exactly what the law of the jungle is. And guess who sits at the top within that regime?
Humans would devolve back into that, if not for the violence enforcement from the state. Therefore, it is the responsibility of the state to make sure regulations are sound to prevent the stab-stab-stab, not the responsibility of the individual to not take advantage of a situation that would have been advantageous to take.
I'll indulge your straw man because it's actually pretty good at illustrating my point. 99.9% of people are not psychopaths. But you only need .1% of people to be psychopaths. In a world where you get $5 and no threat of prosecution for stabbing people, you can bet that there will be extremely efficient and effective stabbing companies run by those psychopaths. Even normal people who don't like stabbing others would see the psychopaths getting rich and think to themselves "well, everyone's getting stabbed anyway, I might as well make some money too". That's what a race to the bottom is.
And that's why the government regulates stabbing.
> Because all people everywhere are psychopaths who will stab you for $5 if they can get away with it?
Not all people everywhere, but most successful businesspeople.
> It'd be so much more efficient to just stab-stab-stab and take the money directly.
It isn't though? If you do that then you get locked up and lose the money, so the smart psychopaths go into business instead.
I agree that is what he is doing, but I can also justify adding fentanyl to every drug sold in the world as "making it better" from a business perspective, because it is addictive. Anyone who ignores the moral or ethical angle on decisions, I cannot take seriously. It's like saying that Maximizing Shareholder Value is always the right thing to do. No, it isn't. So don't say stupid shit like that, be a human being and use your brain and capacity to look at things and analyze "is this good for human society?".