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How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

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Re: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

#431

Post by ljk »

floatboth wrote: post #418
ljk wrote: post #161

Very eye-opening read. few random thoughts: > Hijack #7: Instant Interruption vs. “Respectful” Delivery... By contrast, Apple more respectfully lets userse toggle "Read Receipts" on or off Unfortunately iPhone has a new feature to reply to messages immediately even in the lock screen, looks like everyone is guilty of this > “now that you know I’ve seen the message, I feel even more obligated to respond.” always tried…

Replying from the lock screen is good though?? You reply from the lock screen, so you don't unlock the phone, so you don't start doing other things than replying?

oh yeah that feature is definitely very useful it just reminded me of what the author mentioned about replying

Re: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

#432

Post by chiaro »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #73
rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the more apt metaphor is lead in Roman pipes. They knew lead exposure made you crazy but they still used it in their pipes, on their plates - and it drove them mad. After the planet has warmed beyond a point of no return, after antibiotic resistant bacteria make routine surgery a life-or-death decision, after we have squandered away our resources and used what little we had left to wage futile wars, we will f…

Besides actual lead concentration in water being disputed (per comments in the parallel subthreads), I think this analogy isn't good for another reason - Roman aqueducts were meant to solve a problem, to get fresh water into towns, improving comfort as well as sanitation. Most apps made today are not about solving problems, they're about bundling a minimum amount of features that would trick the users into doing some…

I think the majority of app developers still, at least nominally, believe that they are providing something of value.

Re: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

#433

Post by tunap »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #420
tunap wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Former merchandiser here. Staples are always furthest from entrance and then separated(ie: bread one back corner, milk opposite) to make most people walk the entire store to get what they need. And that 'convenience' case in the front... take a look at the expiration dates on the products in said case, that product needs to be sold faster than the stock in the back. Edit: PS: That economist, it's his job to rationali…

Its startling to see how evil insinuates itself into normal people gradually so they don't even notice. The store managers probably think this is a standard practice so its ok. Not a pointless waste of customers' time and energy in the cynical hope to manipulate them into buying what they don't want. I plan on resenting my local mega market in future every time I make the hike to the back of their block-long store fo…

Sadly, the store/department managers have no say in the matter. It's all laid out at corporate. Most managers inside the brick & mortar roll with it no matter how nonsensical some edicts are, some were/are bitter. They all know they are ultimately expendable.

Re: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

#434

Post by collyw »

cpt1138 wrote: post #68
rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, yeah. It's like talking to climate "skeptics" - people who believe climate change is real but disagree on the level of human agency. You can show them graph after graph of greenhouse gas emissions being pumped into the atmosphere at alarming rates and they'll say "I'm not that alarmed, we don't know how much of an impact it will have." Meanwhile, coral reefs are bleaching, Florida is flooding, and we are experie…

But what? The problem with the constant doom is that we get exhausted. At least in the US all we truly care about is war and old people (looking at where the money goes; http://whatwepayfor.com/ ). The problem with the doom sayers is they have no solutions or actionable items that we can say yes or no to. Its just lions and tigers and bears 24/7.

Adjust our economy to a resource based economy. The Zeitgeist movie a few years back came up with some decent proposals. Sure they might not be perfect, but they seem to be looking in the right direction.

Re: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

#435

Post by Aissen »

guard-of-terra wrote: post #10

When people are given a menu of choices, they rarely ask: “what’s not on the menu?” “why am I being given these options and not others?” “do I know the menu provider’s goals?” “is this menu empowering for my original need, or are the choices actually a distraction?” (e.g. an overwhelmingly array of toothpastes) It's so much more about politics (elections of all levels) rather than about technology!

It's actually more about philosophy: free-will and the illusion of choice.

Re: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

#436

Post by collyw »

grey-area wrote: post #388
smitherfield wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that really ought to be stressed about Chernobyl is that it was a really shitty reactor design (probably just about the most unsafe reactor design ever) manned by poorly-trained and incompetent people. With the outlier of Chernobyl, nuclear energy has a very good safety record. Shoddy and dangerous Soviet engineering has a very bad safety record. The operative variable here is shoddy and dangerous Soviet en…

With the outlier of Chernobyl, nuclear energy has a very good safety record. Fukushima is another example showing that fission power is dangerous and expensive - because of the safety precautions, insurance, disaster recovery and cleanup costs, and worse it shifts those costs and dangers from the power plant to the host country and surrounding countries. It's far more expensive in those terms than most other ways of…

Come one, way more people died in the earthquake. Its not great what happened at Fukushima, but it was hardly a disaster.

Re: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

#437

Post by collyw »

refurb wrote: post #345
rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of a comic I see floated around Facebook from time to time of an auditorium of scientists seated beneath a banner reading "Climate Change Conference," and someone raises their hand and says something to the effect of "But what if we're wrong about climate change and we make a better world for nothing?"

What happens if we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on reducing CO2 emissions and it turns out it was all for naught? That money has to come from somewhere. It could be spent on healthcare, getting people clean water, etc. To me that would be a tragedy.

The reduced pollution would probably reduce at least some of the health care costs. Plus we spend way too much on wars and killing people ("defense"). Use some of that money first.

Re: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

#438

Post by GantzGraf »

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #119
rickdale wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just looking at your first point, She dispelled rumors left and right: "fracking causes earthquakes!" - actually it's poorly built injection wells and wastewater storage that causes earthquakes In your mind fracking is separate from building injection wells and wastewater storage? All of your examples are the reasons why fracking is dangerous. Just because people get confused about whats being pumped in, doesn't make…

Dangerous doesn't mean too dangerous. Nuclear energy is dangerous but any projection of energy use that accommodates growing population and energy usage AND expects carbon reductions AND doesn't include growing nuclear use is simply impossible. EDIT: Also worth noting that there is a clear correlation between the increase of electronics/battery recycling in the West and lead poisoning cases in Kenyan children where t…

Source for American recycling being done in Kenya leading to lead poisoning?

I live here and this is the first I'm hearing of it.

Re: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

#439

Post by grey-area »

collyw wrote: post #436
grey-area wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the outlier of Chernobyl, nuclear energy has a very good safety record. Fukushima is another example showing that fission power is dangerous and expensive - because of the safety precautions, insurance, disaster recovery and cleanup costs, and worse it shifts those costs and dangers from the power plant to the host country and surrounding countries. It's far more expensive in those terms than most other ways of…

Come one, way more people died in the earthquake. Its not great what happened at Fukushima, but it was hardly a disaster.

Accidental deaths is a very poor measure of cost to society. For example coal kills far more with pollution than with accidents, and fission disasters render huge swathes of land uninhabitable for decades.

Re: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

#440

Post by kragen »

kragen wrote: post #405
rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have come a long way from Chernobyl. Most of the people posting here probably weren't even alive when it happened. Nuclear power is so well-controlled (unless you build reactors on earthquake hotspots or tsunami zones, I mean c'mon Japan) that you can't even use regular statistical models because the only probable risks are human. Reactors are really, really well-designed these days to seal themselves off in the (…

> how do we provide energy ...? Renewables might work - if people stopped having kids for a while It seems like you haven't done the math. I have. You're ridiculously wrong. US marketed energy consumption per capita is 9.5 kW (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_co... ). That's 9.5 square meters of sunlight. If we pessimistically assume that we can only site solar panels on land (29% of Eart…

Erratum: that's US$0.50 per peak watt. Although capacity factors vary by latitude and mounting (electronics are now cheap enough that some new utility-scale solar PV boosts its capacity factor with heliostats), a typical capacity factor is 20%, which means:

- US$24000 of panels per person, or

- US$800 per person per year, assuming 30-year lifespan, which is

- 8% of nominal world GDP of US$10k per year per person.

Worse, though, is that this reduces the carrying capacity calculation to some 12 billion, which is a number we might actually reach, although not soon. We're projected to reach 10 billion in 2083 by the UNFPA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth

What's actually going to happen, though, is that PV prices will start dropping again; the majority of marketed energy consumption will be from photovoltaic cells starting sometime in the 2020s; energy prices will drop well below where they are now; we'll increase our per capita marketed energy consumption far above current rich-world usage, but much of that will be thermal, not electrical; and we'll use a lot more than 10% of the land area for solar energy gathering.

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