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How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

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211–220 of 443 posts

Re: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

#211

Does anyone else feel the slot machine effect here on HN is the karma displayed on the top-right? After a submission or comment, is that number the first thing you check when you come back to the site?

Nope. However, I used to be addicted to /leaders when it was in the header (and made efforts to post and comment here every day) but points mean absolutely zero to me unless they place me in a ranking compared to someone else's so I don't care much now.

Re: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the goal.

the goal is for google to tell you what reality is ?

Not necessarily Google, but yes some amalgamation of technology.

Your senses are staggeringly limited and your brain is a mess when it comes to determining what is "real" or not.

We use technology to fill the gaps. That's what technology is for - to allow us "see", interact with and influence the world through discrete and explicit measurement in ways our biological systems can't.

How is that not the dream? Augmenting and eventually replacing our biological capabilities with robust, high precision systems is the ultimate goal.

Re: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

#213

Kind of interesting idea about how our tools (generic) present us with limited menus, and effectively restrict our options. Facebook has expanded (barely) the options for basic responses to posts (no longer just like, but also a handful of emoticons to express laughter, anger, sadness, etc.). Not as full an option as when using the comment box, but for quick responses it allows for greater expressiveness. At least pe…

I wonder how much uptake Allo is going to have. Personally I'm going to stay away from it - why should I need to compete with a robot to provide authentic responses?

People are going to pick apart what you say on Allo. "Did he just click on the bot response, or did he really mean that?"

Re: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

#214
post #182

Kind of interesting idea about how our tools (generic) present us with limited menus, and effectively restrict our options. Facebook has expanded (barely) the options for basic responses to posts (no longer just like, but also a handful of emoticons to express laughter, anger, sadness, etc.). Not as full an option as when using the comment box, but for quick responses it allows for greater expressiveness. At least pe…

> the demo was with a graduation photo, and a few suggested responses like "You look great!" "Congratulations, so happy for you" or something similar). Don't know why anyone would actually use features like this. It's very impersonal and insincere

It makes for a cool demo, but impractical for real-world use.

It might be good for some laughs to have bot-only conversations.

Re: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

#215

> We need our smartphones, notifications screens and web browsers to be exoskeletons for our minds and interpersonal relationships that put our values, not our impulses, first. People’s time is valuable. And we should protect it with the same rigor as privacy and other digital rights. I think that the only way we can do this is for out technology to make our values impulsive.

The challenge is that there is no one set of "values" that we can agree on as a people.

That's not such a big problem. I think we can get good an inferring values from behavior and using values in marketing. Then if you download an app that has positioned itself with certain values, the designer can reasonably assume that you hold those values.

Re: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

#216
post #30

Wow, I'm glad this was posted. I think the way we use technology today will be looked back on the same way we look back at naive cigarette smoking in the 1950s. Modern app design isn't about creating things that are good for the user, but about creating want in the user. This is a problem. For example, there are several studies showing that using Facebook in general makes people less happy. User happiness just happen…

You couldn't be more right. Looking at apps on Apple's App Store, you will often see them bragging about their app being "Addictive," or in reviews, people will state how addictive the app is as if that were a good thing.

Re: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

#218
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a personal prescription, this is great, but as a societal one it's like saying "just don't smoke, it's as easy as that!" On a national or international scale, we don't get to deal with what ought to be, only what is. And it increasingly looks - Facebook averages 50 minutes of use per day - like the average person either doesn't know or doesn't manage to limit their consumption of these things. Super-satiation is a…

Yes, I completely agree. I have plenty of vices, and struggle with them all the time. I guess I was trying to convey my own current state of mind after thinking hard about this problem and where it leads...but you're right to characterize that as a personal viewpoint, and not something you can realistically prescribe for others. Everyone has to come to their own enlightenment, and I still have a long way to go.

It's not necessarily just a personal thing. We as a people haven't yet figured out how to value or not value this new deluge of distraction and information. Social rules are doing more to curb smoking now than any health warnings - everyone I know who's quit recently does so because it's seen as a bad thing to do by people. If overuse of media was treated the same way we tread people with any other addiction (social shame, professionals to help) it would be less of a problem. But a huuuge amount of people just spend their time tuning out and going down the information rabbit hole and not spending any time pursuing their goals (myself included)

Re: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The challenge is that there is no one set of "values" that we can agree on as a people.

That's not such a big problem. I think we can get good an inferring values from behavior and using values in marketing. Then if you download an app that has positioned itself with certain values, the designer can reasonably assume that you hold those values.

Disagree. People are terrible at aligning behaviors with stated "values."

Economists look at this dissonance as "revealed preferences." While it may be the best thing we have to describe behavior, it's not well aligned with self-image - which is really what stated preferences aka "values" are.

As a result, designing systems around revealed preferences might be advantageous in the short term - it conflicts with people's long term self concept.

This ends up being a normative economics (Some people in the AI safety community have explored this idea of consolidating values, as the seed goals for artificial general intelligence - but it proved to be impossible.

Re: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

#220
post #30

Wow, I'm glad this was posted. I think the way we use technology today will be looked back on the same way we look back at naive cigarette smoking in the 1950s. Modern app design isn't about creating things that are good for the user, but about creating want in the user. This is a problem. For example, there are several studies showing that using Facebook in general makes people less happy. User happiness just happen…

I think that these powers can be used for good. I'm building a subreddit for people who want to learn how to align the behaviors their apps construct with their users best interests.

https://www.reddit.com/r/behaviordesign

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