The idea that interrogating someone will provide any insight into their moral character is pretty naïve. Look at someone's actions, nothing they say is of account.
What questions can tech CEOs be asked, to guage their moral trustworthiness?
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Re: What questions can tech CEOs be asked, to guage their moral trustworthiness?
#22Being a CEO is already the ultimate answer to the question "Do you care about money or morals". There is a reason that psychopaths are massively overrepresented as CEOs.
My answer would be to check their technical background to see how they ended up as CEO. Was it circumstance, or raw machiavellian ambition?
If you must ask one question I would probably ask, "Do you hate being a CEO?". If they answer "Yes" it likely means they are doing it out of responsibility rather than pathalogical persuit of the unattainable.
Re: What questions can tech CEOs be asked, to guage their moral trustworthiness?
#23Part of the problem with CEO's and corporations in general is that they are legally obligated to make decisions in the best interests of their shareholders, which also typically is highly aligned with their own incentives. What looks like an immoral decision from the rank and file POV is highly rational and maybe at worst amoral when considered in their fiduciary context.
Re: What questions can tech CEOs be asked, to guage their moral trustworthiness?
#24[flagged]
Your comment is kind of a low key way of saying that people who don't 'fear' a God are immoral people.
Does that include religious people who don't have view their creator as malevolent?
Re: What questions can tech CEOs be asked, to guage their moral trustworthiness?
#25There are a bunch of mundane questions that can help gauge how much they care about general well-being... none of these are gotchas, just questions companies generally don't like answering.
What are your views on unionization? Would you voluntarily recognize an union formed by your employees?
Why don't our job postings have salary ranges?
Remote work?
Open-source?
Climate change?
How do you think our new office will impact the local community and housing affordability?
What philanthropic activities do you engage in? What about our company?
How will our culture change once our company achieves success?
What can we get in writing, in revised bylaws, rather than a verbal promise?
Re: What questions can tech CEOs be asked, to guage their moral trustworthiness?
#26I do this for a living and I don’t have a great answer. There’s a gut instinct involved. I try to understand how execs are compensated or otherwise incentivized, and then ask myself if there’s a reason they would screw over their stakeholders embedded in their incentives or enabled through some governance loophole. Many are trained to be great at deflecting (anyone with media training should be) so indirect questions tend to be your ally.
This kind of approach would mean you also look at governance structures, which in the case of OpenAI would have focused on the issues with their board structure.
Re: What questions can tech CEOs be asked, to guage their moral trustworthiness?
#27[flagged]
If you look back in history "fear of god" and religion are responsible for more of the most evil acts in it than almost anything.
Things done in the name of God or religion are not the same as being motivated by the fear of God. Plus, even so, your sentiment is generally not true - the modern western world was built on Judeo-Christian values.
Re: What questions can tech CEOs be asked, to guage their moral trustworthiness?
#28Part of the problem with CEO's and corporations in general is that they are legally obligated to make decisions in the best interests of their shareholders, which also typically is highly aligned with their own incentives. What looks like an immoral decision from the rank and file POV is highly rational and maybe at worst amoral when considered in their fiduciary context.
Just to clarify, IANAL, but the "legally obligated to maximize profit" is a misinterpretation of Dodge vs. Ford[1]. It was a very radical decision for the time and hasn't been rescinded but still allows executives a wide degree of freedom in decision making. Acting morally is often highly rational and, whether a maximally efficient decision or not, is, IMO, the correct decision - whether there are clear consequences for acting immorally or not.
Re: What questions can tech CEOs be asked, to guage their moral trustworthiness?
#29[flagged]
Can you think of any times when a sincere fear of god might have motivated folks to perpetrate acts of evil?
I suspect for this particular heuristic to feel sensible, the god needs to be one you happen to believe in. I would take precisely zero comfort in knowing that someone fears an invisible, likely bronze age supernatural authority with dozens of permutations of subjectively interpreted doctrine and morality.
Re: What questions can tech CEOs be asked, to guage their moral trustworthiness?
#30This is kind of a meaningless question to raise in a vacuum.
For most people who get the chance to talk with "tech CEOs", the basic context of the conversation is usually built on a profit-seeking foundation -- Should I invest in you? Should I sign a commercial deal with you? Should I work with you as an employee? On that basis, morality is often orthogonal to profit (sometimes opposed, and rarely aligned with).
Most people, most of the time, if they are evaluating tech CEOs for any semblance of "morality" or ethics, it is usually most pertinent to consider business ethics -- Will you uphold the terms of a contract? Will you sincerely work to create shareholder value (above personal goals or benefits)? Will you be a good leader for your employees, treat them fairly according to professional standards and company policies? This level of ethics is necessary in order to conduct good business; trust is currency and if you cannot trust a CEO to uphold standard business and professional ethics, then the cost of doing business in an environment of mistrust usually becomes exceedingly high.
Anything beyond that, like is this CEO a "good person", are they working for the betterment of mankind, etc., is usually not worth evaluating for 95% of people -- not because it's unimportant, but because (a) capitalism is amoral and grafting morality on to it is kind of an exercise in futility, and (b) most people are not equipped to evaluate the answers in any kind of serious or logically rigorous way.