Paul Buchheit:"Don't Be Evil"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22540

by gibsonf1 • 19 years ago

14 25 19 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

gibsonf13• 19 years ago

Hi Paul. Since you are the person at Google who came up with the "Don't Be Evil" motto, could you please explain what that means? I am genuinely curious and have no intention of badgering you about this. Thank you.

Sam_Odio2• 19 years ago

I'm not sure if this is right or not, but in philosophy class, I was taught that Google's motto was a manifestation of negative consequentialism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism#Negative_consequentialism

Basically, the ethical decision is that which avoids a negative outcome. The professor mentioned a number of interesting implications of strict negative consequentialism. The following actions would be morally wrong:

- For someone to stave off starvation by stealing a loaf of bread from Bill Gates.

- Any type of self defense that involves harming others. Ie: using pepper spray to prevent rape.

- Sacrificing one person's life to save the lives of a million others. Ie: killing Hitler before he started WWII.

BrandonM• 19 years ago

The 3 points you describe sound more to me like deontology than negative consequentialism. According to the entry you linked to, deontology judges actions based on the actions themselves, while consequentialism judges actions based on their consequences. Negative consequentialism, then, involves avoiding actions which produce consequences that are overall negative. In each case you described, the actions are typically considered deontologically wrong, but the overall consequences of those actions are not negative, so they don't seem to me to be wrong by negative consequentialist standards.

Getting back to the topic of the submission, I always presumed that the comment basically meant, "Don't be like Microsoft." Many people call Microsoft the "Evil Empire", so this falls in nicely with that theme. By aligning themselves opposite Microsoft, Google is able to attract that population of hackers which does not appreciate Microsoft's business tactics (things like the FUD campaign that is going on right now in regards to patents). Whether Google is actually committed to moral business practices or not is debatable, but the motto is a nice way to appear "hacker-friendly".

Tichy3• 19 years ago

What about tracking everything about people's lives, and pushing spyware onto their computers (Google Toolbar)? Would that qualify?

vlad3• 19 years ago

I'm pretty sure it was just about not being Microsoft (and their anti-trust problems), using popup ads, or spamming, the things that were major problems in 2001.

bootload• 19 years ago

'... I was taught that Google's motto was a manifestation of negative consequentialism ...'

Sam thats too much thinking for me (grin).

Are we missing the point of the quote? The best example I've found why pb added 'dont be evil' to the list, was a jab at "their competitors". Pb suspected ( unsubstantiated ) them of "selling search results and mixing them in with real ones" (Founders at Work, Paul Buchheit, p170). Commercial gain through deception.

It was after all meant to be a (serious) joke. Especially Amit Patel, who pb quotes as writing 'dont be evil' on whiteboards, 'all over the building'.

paul• 19 years ago

That's a good question. There's no simple (non-circular) answer, but I can try to give a few heuristics.

First, it's important to remember that any significant action is likely to have some negative consequences. One test is to ask, "Ignoring personal loss/gain, would the world be better if I stopped doing X?" For example, if a spammer stopped spamming, I think we'd all be better off, therefore spamming is probably evil. On the other hand, news.yc is a nice service that benefits a lot of people, so it's probably non-evil.

At the specific time that I made up the "Don't be evil" phrase, there were a number of topics in mind, including the spyware/scumware problem, and paid-inclusion, which was popular at the time among our competitors (you could pay to sneak your site in their regular search results). These are both examples of tricking your users for your own benefit, which is generally evil. Paid inclusion is hidden advertising -- none of their users knew which results were paid for. It would be similar to a reporter who takes bribes to write favorably about something. Spyware is evil not because it is spying on you, but because it is doing so without your consent and probably against your will. If users had actually knowingly given informed consent (not hidden in some EULA somewhere, or anything like that), then the "spyware" wouldn't be evil -- it's like the difference between justin.tv filming his own life, and someone else secretly doing so.

gibsonf13• 19 years ago

Thanks for the clarification. So the "evil" refers to the very narrow context of the specific functionality of the google product, rather than to a wider context which is usually understood by the idea?

With your broader point: "Ignoring personal loss/gain, would the world be better if I stopped doing X?", what standard would you use for judging what is better for the world?

To frame the rule in the positive action sense, if you were judging whether to take some action, you would think about the world minus yourself, and then see if the world is "better" after the action. How would you judge what "better" means here? Would it mean adding "value" to others? If so, how would you bridge the gap between those who value mystical pursuits divorced from real world evidence and modern media versus those who might want to increase their knowledge about the world through focused learning and induction? (Say between Pennsylvania Amish and tech startup founders) Some people value manipulating others, some controlling others, some killing others - the range between individual values is very large. In short, it seems impossible to approach "better" by looking at what each person in the world values as everyone values different things in spite of some similar things that people do value in common which is what we here are trying to provide, and of course it is impossible to know what everyone values anyway.

So without your personal value as a standard and other individual values as a standard for better, what do you use?

vlad3• 19 years ago

Popup ads, spam, integrating paid results with search results, and spyware/adware were the big problems during the dot com crash, when ethics went out the window, and the main community for nerds (slashdot) really liked to call companies evil for their behavior way before digg or redit existed. Once Google made that a slogan, Google was mentioned all the time in such threads for the slogan, and not just because they are a search engine.

Google's name still comes up when any evil corporate behavior is discussed in any nerd community (not so much non-nerd groups) because of that great catch phrase, especially when Microsoft is mentioned. I've always believed, as it sounds from your post, that the phrase has no philosophical or religious meaning beyond "enough is enough". If they teach otherwise in business school, they're making things up.

ralph• 19 years ago

Perhaps you could clarify something that's puzzled me. I thought when I first heard about it, the phrase was "Do no evil". Then "Don't be evil" became more prevalent. Was there ever a switch, or was it just mis-reported initially?

litepost3• 19 years ago

What about the whole NLP thing that NEGATIVE injunctions are ignored by the unconscious/subconscious brain.

In other words, this directive really serves to state "Be Evil" at the deepest level of our core consciousness?

litepost3• 19 years ago

ie because of this phrase, Google has become associated with (the word) "Evil" in a way few others throughout history have (ie with the possible exception of Hitler et al)

immad• 19 years ago

thats hilarious

edit: and probably not correct. The phrase has been thought about so much and repeated so often that I would think the negative would no longer be ignored, although on the first read it may have an affect of a Be Evil command. I never did get around to reading nlp books.

Paul Buchheit:"Don't Be Evil"

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