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0 pointsblagie4y ago0 comments

"Google" is 100+k people. "Google" doesn't respond to incentives; individuals do.

A typical employee at any large company is incentivized to:

- Maximize their salary

- Maximize their future earnings potential (e.g. CV)

- Have fun

- Have work-life balance

... and so on. That goes all the way up to the CEO. Pretending a corporation thinks and responds to incentives is folly. Running a corporation like Google is like herding cats. If everyone marched in the same direction, Google would cut through SEO optimizers like a chainsaw through butter. There is no wayh to do that with 100+k people.

Google fundamentally has no financial incentive to fix any problem, since organizations aren't intelligent, sentient beings which act on incentives. They have dynamics from the interactions of 100k+ individual agents.

There is no magical fairy which makes large organizations act in their own best interests or even try to survive. The only reason they do survive is that's as true of their competitors as themselves.

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TheOtherHobbes4y ago· 1 in thread

Did you write that, or did your 85 billion (approx.) neurons?

Corporations are intelligent, sentient entities which act on incentives. They don't have a conscious sense of self, but then neither do many natural organisms. That doesn't keep them from responding to their environment as if they're aware of it, and acting in incentive-driven ways.

Corporations seeking to maximise profits are exactly like humans attempting to maximise income. The problem is that corporations - like humans - have the wrong incentives, further diminished by limited predictive ability and poor heuristics.

So maladaptive behaviours emerge and stick. Both humans and corporations find a nice local minimum and don't move from it.

More intelligent behaviour would be able to predict and avoid existential threats without having to experience them first. But it's a question of predictive ability, not a binary absence of all intelligence.

So it's not that Google can't do better because it has too many employees. It can't do better because its cultural heuristics - which include it internal culture and the external culture it operates in - don't allow it to.

blagieOP4y ago

A megacorporation doesn't act like my 85 billion neurons. A corporation acts like a forest of trees, or at best, an anthill. Corporations (and simple organisms) respond to their environment, but not necessarily in incentive-driven ways. Often, corporations move opposite incentives not because of some local minimum or whatever, but because it, for example, personally benefits the CEO, a few board members, or a group of employees.

I can set up "incentives" for an anthill, in the form of a mixture of sugar and borax. Emergent behavior takes over.

The behavior of corporations, at the scale of Google, Facebook, or similar, is almost entirely emergent dynamics. Same thing for countries, for that matter.

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