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Joined 2 天前
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Cake day: 2026年3月24日

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  • There is more to it I think. In a masters level course I took, our Instructor was a nearly retired Ph.D in Taxation. He had spent a lifetime in the halls of corporate power as an expert, conducting research and giving policy advice to corporations, governments and institutions.

    Among the friendly banter during breaks, some interesting conversations came up about ethics in business. He interjected and offered an explicit personal opinion. He was very clear he was speaking as a person eating his lunch, not as our instructor and in no way does what he was about to say reflect the course material in any way:

    If you want to understand how corporations’ executives and more importantly, how Boards of Directors, and a lot of high level civil servants and political actors really measure performance under these ethical scenarios, read Machiavelli’s “The Prince”. It explains everything.

    I read it the next day. Then I went on to read Xenophon’s “The Education of Cyrus” because Machiavelli referred to it in the book.

    Edit: Having read a few more of OPs responses, I think OPs subject is just saying they agree with/admire Machiavelli’s The Prince, and to the point of my story, so do a LOT of powerful people. You know, the types who tend to score high on the DSM’s dark triad and run global corporations.



  • I see. Good points all around. But I would not consider than an echochamber. That is just a diversity of respondants, many of which are poor quality and low effort.

    Some because they are low intellect. Some are children. Some are edgelords and shitposters just trying to provoke for shits and giggles. Some just find the questions so obviously out of whack, that they presume OP to be a shitposter, and respond in kind. Lots of reasons, similar results. I noted a few recent ask lemmy questions where the questions were so malformed, people couldn’t tell it it was a bot, esl, neurodiversity etc and made jokes about op. That’s a case of garbage in/garbage out. While not cool, if you can’t be bothered to make a quality question, you can’t insist on a quality answer.

    For reference: I go with the standard def:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_(media)

    That which reinforces bias from innapropriate confirmation or unduly limits discussion of counter views.