Something someone on a podcast I watch recently(?, though I forget how recent) said something I think was interesting and fits in this discussion here somewhat.
He was talking about a charity event he ran and how he was getting very annoyingly scrutinized for the event. He made a comment about how people are more-or-less ok with for profit stuff. They don’t care much. Your fans will accept you taking on a shady/crappy sponsor because it’s all about getting that money. You could probably scam someone in a for profit venture and people will be cool with it. Which I think is kinda true. I think charitable scams feel worse to people then regular scams. Maybe it’s because people view charity as sacred or something? Idk.
Regarding the bleached and deodorized beef tallow:
In the past, I’ve wondered whether anti-fraud laws would require nutritional labels.
Some capitalists might argue that as long as the company doesn’t outright lie (e.g., sell vegetable oil disguised as olive oil), then let the market determine if companies with minimal nutritional labels lose customers to companies with detailed nutritional labels.
I think principles like win-win and informed consent require that companies disclose any information that could alter the purchase decision of a reasonable customer. IOW, don’t hide info that—if disclosed—could cause reasonable customers not to want to buy the product.
But I’m not sure to what extent anti-fraud laws overlap with principles such as win-win and informed consent.
Does anti-fraud just mean to avoid outright lies? Or does it mean fully informed consent?
In another post, ET said:
I imagine that even if fraud (in the sense of no outright lies) were well-policed, companies that practiced discriminatory pricing wouldn’t advertise it on “big signs up in every store”. They couldn’t lie about it if fraud were well-policed, but they wouldn’t advertise the fact on “big signs” either (IMO). So even if fraud were well-policed, it mightn’t necessarily be stark clear to prospective customers.
Unless one equates criminal fraud not merely with outright lies but with less-than-fully-informed consent (in the sense of failing to disclose information that a reasonable customer would consider relevant to their purchase decision).
Now that I’ve thought about it, I’ve decided: I think that anti-fraud laws should require companies to disclose information that a reasonable customer would consider relevant to their purchase decision. (Or something like that. Obviously articulating an exact law would require volumes more thought.)
Applying my new “reasonable customer” standard to stuff I wondered about before:
Discriminatory Pricing: Companies could have a label/disclaimer on price tags or checkout or wherever saying that the price is based on one’s purchase history or “dynamic pricing in effect” or something like that
B2B & Bulk Buying: What about Microsoft secretly charging OEMs different prices or 19th century railways giving better deals to Rockefeller? Should that be disclosed? What about bulk buying in general? Idk.
Nutritional Labels: I think reasonable people would consider this relevant. Many reasonable people wanna know how many calories, etc. It could be balanced with burden/practicality. E.g., small restaurants (i.e., not a large chain restaurant like McDonald’s) could be exempted if it places undue burden on them or isn’t practical.
Actually, now that I try to apply it, it seems a little trickier. Hmm. I guess it’s a pretty complex issue. Now I’m back to not being sure. Haha.
Imagine Walmart was doing a bunch of price discrimination while not making any claims about it. Target or some blogger would find out. What happens IRL when they point it out? Walmart sues them for defamation, which involves lying that they aren’t doing it, since you can’t sue over true statements.
If Walmart wouldn’t sue people for exposing them, and also wouldn’t contradict anyone who exposed them, saying only “no comment”, then I think they’d just get exposed fast, so their own silence wouldn’t matter much. Silence would matter for a small company but not for Walmart.
You know who else would find out? Walmart employees. If Walmart did nothing to retaliate against whistleblowers, and no one else was exposing them, then their own employees would expose them. Whistleblowers are stopped by things like fear of being fired, fear of not being believed (a lot less of an issue if Walmart never calls you a liar, just says “no comment”), fear of other nasty responses. If the response would just be nothing, no comment, then people would whistleblow way more.
I think freedom of association (and at-will employment) would mean that a company could fire whistleblowers. (Assuming there were no long-term employment contract.)
Though perhaps a company wouldn’t fire whistleblowers because firing them would almost be tantamount to admitting that the whistleblowers were right. Besides, the company couldn’t lie about the reason why they fired a whistleblower. The company could just say “no comment” about why they fired a whistleblower though.
Incidentally, I made up my mind about this stuff (even before reading ET’s post):
I don’t think companies should be required to have nutritional labels, disclose discriminatory pricing, etc. The reason why is because requiring that feels way too intrusive and anti-freedom. I think prosecuting only outright lies and not requiring affirmative disclosure is better. At least, that’s my current opinion. I’m not super confident about it though.
Good video about a bad situation. I worked for a large corporation with slow growth for many years (not Amazon). Nothing he says seemed incompatible with my experience. Lots of it explains things I didn’t understand at the time like periodic reorgs that didn’t seem to improve anything, people who got promoted despite lack of apparent merit and vice-versa.
Unfortunately his two proscriptions for avoiding some politics (Roughly: work in an area where sheer skill is so valuable it shields you from politics, or work for a company that’s growing really fast) would have had the downside of requiring me to move to a city with no family support and high cost of living. The company I worked for put the highest value projects in coastal cities with in-person requirements, and no fast growing companies in my field existed in the city where I lived & wanted to stay.
He talks about polite fictions and subtle wording differences being important in how you talk to your boss.
That system is implicitly classist, racist and misogynist. People who are most culturally similar to their boss have the best chance. Their take on good wordings is more likely to be similar to their boss’s.
I think it should be seen as part of the job of managers to translate things and form reasonable positive interpretations so small wording differences don’t make much difference. The boss is the more senior person who is supposed to have people skills. (S)he should be able to deal with diverse communication styles. If your boss made it OK for you to communicate imperfectly (according to his/her cultural tastes), that would help make things more merit based and fair. But it seems like a lot of corporate culture is accepting of bosses implicitly punishing diversity and differences by basically just reacting to communication styles based on their personal likes and dislikes. A lot of stuff seems to be about getting along with others instead of merit at the actual job, and the job of managers perhaps should be – but isn’t – to help everyone get along and lessen the impact of culture clash.
Besides people saying the subtly wrong thing (which also punishes people who aren’t native English speakers btw), there’s also the issue of people not saying anything and being punished for that. Some cultures see asking for certain things as too pushy and get underpaid and underpromoted.
Another related issue is that sometimes women use the identical words as men but are perceived differently.
It is, but also other things that don’t necessarily have a convenient “-ist” word to describe them. Like, it discriminates on how a person intellectually approaches polite fictions. Accept them consciously as a valid tool, reject consciously but accept unconsciously/self delusion, honest moral objection and attempt to actively suppress, and legitimate cluelessness are all modes someone might come to polite fictions with in the workplace (there are probably more I’m not thinking of). I think those intellectual modes make a big difference to outcomes, and are mostly independent of both productive capacity/value and commonly discussed diversity markers.
Yes. Anti-neuro-divergent is another bias here. And pro-conformist and accepting of authority. And others.
I’ve talked about making things more intentionally and explicitly merit-based (or less biased, or similar things), by design, in articles like Fallibilism, Bias, and the Rule of Law but I haven’t found many people very receptive. It’s hard to tell exactly what they don’t like. I think “it’d take too much time and effort” (one of the most common responses) is basically an excuse, not the real reason, or else they’d be more open to considering my ideas for protecting time and brainstorming others and trying to make it work instead of just saying “takes too much time” then giving up and not wanting to think or talk about it anymore (which to me indicates they aren’t that into the goal, rather than being deeply disappointed by the potential blocker and eager to fix it).
That articles brings up more general issues and connects them to EA, but workplace social hierarchy issues are one of the major areas where fallibilism, bias and rule of law ideas are relevant.
