I used to think that people who felt Microsoft was “evil”, or that Microsoft took pleasure in fucking people over were abnormally stupid. Microsoft is a corporation. It’s not a sentient being. It doesn’t feel pleasure. When I say these people were stupid, I really do mean “stupid” and not “ignorant”: If they were merely ignorant, then after I educated them, they’d no longer be making this dumb mistake. But they keep making it. They have this emotional attachment to the idea that Microsoft is evil, and they refuse to consider rational arguments. I’m trying to make this blog post short, so I won’t get into my arguments why Microsoft is not evil (not anymore evil than any other corporations, or even not anymore than the concepts of “gravity” or “thermonal dynamics”, at least), but if you want to try to work it out for yourself, I recommend you read up on: the Buddhist concept of “dharma” or “nature”; Joel Bakan’s “The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power”.

Now this might sound like a non-sequitur, but I’ve been reading this blog “Overcoming Bias”, which I absolutely adore. I’m quite arrogant and I’ve been heard claiming that it’s very rare for me to meet someone smarter than me. Well, Eliezer Yudkowsky is one of the writers for that OB blog, and I am just in awe at how smart this guy is. Lately he’s been writing about cognitive biases from the perspective of evolutionary psychology. Fascinating stuff.

Then, a few days ago, I read an article in which fans of Linux were trying to figure out what devious scheme Microsoft had when it started embracing open source. It made me roll my eyes. Having read Joel Bakan’s book, I had made the (no-brainer) prediction a few years ago that Microsoft, as a corporation, would embrace open source as soon as it became profitable to do so. Corporations are basically profit-maximizers. They are not “idealist”. Microsoft is not in the business of fucking Linux over. Microsoft is in the business of making money. If they can make more money selling Linux than selling Windows, they will sell Linux. If they can make more money curing cancer than selling Windows, they will cure cancer. If they can make more money raping your grandmother than selling Windows, they will rape your grandmother. There is no concept of “good” or “evil” in their actions; it’s all about what brings about the most profit. This is true for all corporations, and the bigger the corporation, the more true it is. That means IBM, Google, Apple, SourceForge, Apache, RedHat, Sun, Exxon, McDonalds, etc.

Having seen similar “Microsoft is evil” arguments before, my mind auto-recited the responses I had come up long ago (incidentally, this is something I want to do less frequently, because as Overcoming Bias has pointed out, I’m not actually “thinking” when I merely recite pre-formulated responses, and thus I am not learning). One of these responses was the rhetorical question “Why do these idiots keep anthropomorphizing Microsoft?” and as these words echoed through my mind, I finally realized why. I made the connection with something I had read earlier on.

The reason they do this is because their minds are evolutionarily wired to anthropomorphize. The monkey which realizes that all monkeys basically had the same needs and wants, and thus could imagine, model and predict various scenarios involving other monkeys and the outcomes of those scenarios had a huge advantage over monkeys that were not able to do this. “Is it a good idea to go punch that buff-looking guy in the face?” if you couldn’t anthropomorphize, there you wouldn’t see any reason not to punch him, ‘cause it’s like punching a rock that’s in your way. Rocks don’t have any feelings, right? I think most monkeys could figure out that if they got punched, they’d be pissed, and would punch back. The important cognitive leap was to realize that other monkeys probably felt the same way you did, and to therefore conclude that “No, it’s not a good idea to punch that guy, since he looks stronger than me.”

Anthropomorphosis and its related skill empathy are very strongly ingrained in our minds now, because we are continuously using this skill when competing with each other. Natural selection keeps on reinforcing this skill. Whenever you lie to someone, you need to be able to accurately model their mind in order to construct a convincing lie. Whenever you lay a trap for someone, you need to be able to accurately model their mind in order to predict what activity they will perform in the future which may trigger the trap.

The reason so many people believe that God feels love or anger or other human emotions is this drive to anthropomorphize everything. The reason people find it intuitive to say “My computer doesn’t want to start up” and expect others to understand what this figure of speech means is because of this drive to anthropomorphize. And the reason so many people believe that Microsoft “wants revenge”, “is envious”, “hates things”, is because of this drive to anthropomorphize everything.

I was wrong when I said these people are abnormally stupid. They are actually perfectly normally stupid. Everybody suffers from this cognitive bias. Anyone who didn’t would have died off long ago via natural selection, because they couldn’t lie or trick or otherwise predict the behavior of other people accurately enough. Overcoming Bias has [link href=" http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/08/anthropomorph-1.html"[/link]a post[/link] about some of the brightest minds in the field of evolution, and even they made the mistake of overly anthropomorphizing natural selection itself.

The Tragedy of Group Selectionism (as previously covered in the evolution sequence) was a rather extreme error by a group of early (pre-1966) biologists, including Wynne-Edwards, Allee, and Brereton among others, who believed that predators would voluntarily restrain their breeding to avoid overpopulating their habitat and exhausting the prey population.

The proffered theory was that if there were multiple, geographically separated groups of e.g. foxes, then groups of foxes that best restrained their breeding, would send out colonists to replace crashed populations. And so, over time, group selection would promote restrained-breeding genes in foxes.

The reason I can’t show people that they are wrong about Microsoft (and other corporations) is that these erroneous beliefs are essentially hardcoded in their brains. To try to convince people to change their stance of Microsoft is just as difficult as trying to convince people to change their stance on religion. I mean this literally: in both cases, you are fighting against the same mechanism which is enforcing this belief in the first place: the desire to anthropomorphize.