Egoism has a bad reputation, but I think that doesn’t do it justice. Some degree of egoism is likely very helpful, as it’s a form of ensuring available local knowledge is taken into account. If people were not at least mildly egoistic, a great deal of local knowledge would be ignored, leading to everyone supposedly helping others in not-actually-helpful ways.
What I think is much more harmful overall is the distinction between valuing public goods[1] at least somewhat vs not valuing them at all in their decision-making. This is something I’ve in particular seen in some B2C companies I’ve been involved with: when things are going well for them, they’re proud of the value they produce for the public (as in, typically, their paying + non-paying users). But when the market gets tough and their growth/existence is at risk, they often very quickly stop caring about public goods entirely and start making very one-sided trade-offs that are (supposedly) beneficial for them while often being incredibly annoying to many users, when other, similarly-beneficial-to-them solutions might exist that don’t come at the expense of users. Two examples:
A software company I once worked at noticed that there was some account sharing between paying users. Their solution was to aggressively limit active logins to a single device / browser, so whenever you log in somewhere, you are logged out everywhere else. My best guess was that this may have increased sales by perhaps 0.3% at best, while being annoying to a large fraction of users. (Ultimately, I think it was even net negative for the company itself, as annoyed users are more likely to churn, but that’s a topic for another time)
Staying a bit vague here, but in another instance, a feature that was frequently used by hundreds of thousands of non-paying users, and which caused negligible maintenance effort, was entirely removed because it didn’t measurably drive conversions
So, the problem in such cases is not so much that the company cares about their own growth, the problem is when they completely disregard the (potential for positive) externalities[1], compared to only mostly disregarding it, but at least having it represented in their model with a non-zero weight.
There are surely different reasons for why such absolute disregard for public goods can occur. Some speculation:
zero-sum thinking where one implicitly assumes that the only variable in question is “benefits me” vs “benefits the public” and not seeing that these can move independently
valuing something a bit vs not at all can increase the complexity of your decision and add to mental exhaustion[2]
diffusion of responsibility, where individuals inside the company may care about providing value to the public, yet nobody feels entirely responsible to defend this perspective in big decisions
and, of course, Goodhart’s law and optimizing what you can measure, which often does not include the real value you provide, but instead mostly easy-to-hack superficial metrics and costs/benefits to yourself
I don’t pretend to have any solution for this. But my impression is that some of the decision-making, at least in the companies I’ve seen, tends to be highly path-dependent, and a good argument or suggestion made to the right people at the right point in time can make a huge difference. So I guess, even if this approach doesn’t scale all that well, having well-meaning individuals within companies occasionally speak up and make productive proposals could move some needles.
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I can imagine that I’m not using “public goods” and “externalities” in precisely the ways they’re usually used. I hope the post makes some sense anyway. If you know of any simple ways to phrase things more precisely, please let me know.
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I suspect this is why even many people who care about animals and dislike factory farming prefer to not think about the topic at all rather than making decisions case by case and trading off their comfort vs how much harm is caused. E.g., when you eat at a restaurant with a lot of veggy offers, it would (for most people) be very easy to eat something without meat. Whereas when friends invite you over and cook something with meat, it would be much more costly/unpleasant to refuse eating it. Still, I know only few people who are “vegetarian when it’s easy”, yet I know many people who dislike factory farming, but give it practically 0 weight in their decisions nonetheless.
Yeah, fair enough. My impression has been that some people feel guilty about caring about themselves more than about others, or that it’s seen as not very virtuous. But maybe such views are less common (or less pronounced) than the vibes I’ve often picked up imply. :)