[[email protected]: Re: Sayin g “Do no evil ” excludes you from any serious conversation about Google]

----- Forwarded message from Kragen Javier Sitaker <[email protected]> -----

Date: Fri, 19 Aug 2011 18:14:38 -0400
From: Kragen Javier Sitaker <[email protected]>
To: Aaron Swartz <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Saying “Do no evil” excludes you from any serious conversation about
	Google
User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.20 (2009-06-14)

On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 12:43:32PM -0400, Aaron Swartz wrote:
> > May I forward this and my reply to kragen-discuss?
> 
> Of course.

Thank you!

> > That sounds plausible.  So how do you interpret "make money without doing
> > evil"?  It seems to me that anyone taking actions in the world is going to
> > do a little evil, so you can't really make money while doing *no* evil.
> 
> I think the solution lies in a proper understanding of the word evil.
> In no way is "eating a small chunk of leftover meat" evil, as you
> suggest. Evil doesn't mean wrong -- it's a much higher bar than that.
> I agree it's hard to live in the world, let alone make money, without
> doing anything harmful to anyone, but I do think it's possible without
> doing anything that's fundamentally evil, which they seem to define as
> systematically hurting their users in order to increase their profits.
> 
> There are lots of companies that you could say do evil in this sense:
> Printer manufacturers who put DRM on their toner cartridges, for
> example. Apple's requirement that companies not sell ebooks through
> their iOS app. Web publishers who break articles up into 20 pages to
> increase their ad impressions. AFAIK, Google has never done anything
> like that, which is pretty remarkable if true.

Would you say, then, that Google really does aspire to "do no evil"?

I think you could make the argument that eating meat systematically hurts the
poor (by putting them in economic competition with cows and sheep for the food
they need to survive) and the environment (via runoff and increased
cultivation).  Is that less evil than hurting my users by breaking up articles
into 20 pages?  Why?  (I'm not even going to bring the welfare of the cows into
it.)

I don't want to start thinking that I'm somehow purer than other omnivores, and
the occasional bit of suet helps with that.

Kragen

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