alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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Cheer2171 • yesterday at 5:31 PM
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?"
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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?".