Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

> I cannot believe that everyone is ethicality challenged

The difficult ethical discussion probably never happens. The decisions being made in those meetings are usually seen as small/inconsequential. The problems caused by those "small" decisions are ignored. Eventually those problems become normalized allowing another "small" decision to be made. Humans seem to be very bad at recognizing how a set of "small" decisions eventually add up to major - sometimes shocking[1] - consequences that nobody would have approved if asked directly. Most of the time, nobody realizes just how deviant their situation had become.

For a good explanation of the mechanism underlying the normalization of deviance (as an abstract model), I strongly recommend this[2] short talk by Richard Cook.

[1] https://blog.aopa.org/aopa/2015/12/07/the-normalization-of-d...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGLYEDpNu60 ("Resilience In Complex Adaptive Systems")

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

I've been there at Google a few times and can imagine exactly how this went :/. The one time I can tell about is the blogger disaster [1]. The top leadership, spearheaded by chief of legal was basically ignoring everyone's logical arguments at the meetings, the town halls, etc. We kept coming to the mic and telling them that their ideas of what is and isn't sexual are arbitrary, as are anyone else's. They said "no, we have experts and we have a clear definition" (they didn't). We explained that post-facto removing content people wrote is cruel and unnecessary. They claimed "nobody would care or miss it". (of course they would). We told them that this will hurt transgender people, who used to find support in blogs of others going through the same life challenges and blogging about it. Those blogs would be banned under the policy. They said they had data that impact would be minimal. (They had no data). Normal rank-and-file people at google all knew the idea was a bad one. We fought hard. They scheduled a 8-am townhall and announced it the day before at 9pm! We showed up anyways en masse! There was a line to the microphone!

They had microphones in the audience. I walked up and directly asked for the "data" they claimed to have showing no impact will be had. They claimed and I quote "we have no hardcore data" (audience was laughing at the word choice given the topic). I said that "well, then how can you claim to be making a data-driven decision?" Drummond answered that "we know this is right and we are sure." The town hall was a waste of time. Nothing we said was heard and all they did was recite lines at us from the stage that made it look like either they did not understand what we had to say, or they were trying very hard to appear to not understand. Both sides were talking, but nothing we said seemed to change their mind, They came there to deliver a policy, not to collect feedback on it, despite claiming this was a meeting to discuss it. That was clear.

We did not give up. Google's TGIF was the next day. A number of people came there early and lined up and the microphones, ready to bring this up again and again. In front of the whole company and the CEO as well (Larry and Sergey were not at the town hall and claimed to have not heard of the policy until "the ruckus started").

I guess they saw the large line of people and relented. Before the scheduled TGIF began they announced they will reverse the policy.

This was a rare victory, for this sort of a situation. I am willing to bet that there are lots of good people at facebook who also fought as hard or harder against this. They just probably lost. Having seen how this plays out internally, I am not surprised, just sad.

To anyone at FB who fought against this, I send you my thanks!

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/23/google-bans-sexually-expli...

> And Facebook somehow tapped into that human behavior and (inadvertently or purposefully)

It's not just that they tapped into it, it's the entire mission statement in a sense. 'to connect the world' if you want to treat it like a sort of network science basically means to lower the distance between individuals so much that you've reduced the whole world to a small world network. There's no inhibition in this system, it's like an organism on every stimulant you can imagine.

Everything spreads too fast and there's no authority to shut anything down that breaks, so the result is pretty much unmitigated chaos.

The vaccine is the thing people complain about all the time, the much maligned 'filter bubbles', which is really just to say splitting these networks into groups that can actually work productively together and keeping them away from others that make them want to bash their heads in.

If someone does not make specific and testable predictions which turn out to be right, they are useless alarmists. If you want to read about how to assess predictors (and improve predictions), I suggest you read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superforecasting:_The_Art_and_...