Earlier quoted context omitted.
Future employer can blow me.
I understand the sentiment, but future you might be pissed at your current cavalier attitude.
[deleted]
Social Cooling – How big data is increasing pressure to conform
31–40 of 204 posts
Re: Social Cooling – How big data is increasing pressure to conform
#32Re: Social Cooling – How big data is increasing pressure to conform
#33> People are starting to realize that this 'digital reputation' could limit their opportunities. (And that these algorithms are often biased, and built on poor data.) That's interesting of itself, but the bigger underlying issue is that opportunities are becoming more concentrated. When only a few companies dominate hiring in many fields, their mistakes get seriously amplified. Back in the day you were fine if Google…
[deleted]
Re: Social Cooling – How big data is increasing pressure to conform
#34I am not saying there is nothing to this, but this is just a catchy concept with a convincing narrative. The sources are news articles and YouTube videos, not scientific papers specifically addressing the issues mentioned, for example showing a link between self-censorship and online monitoring or quantifying that effect.
Author of the website here:
The website does link to a lot of scientific studies actually. Both throughout the page and at the bottom.
But I purposefully didn't want to link directly to the PDF's of those studies too much. By pointing to accessible news articles about those studies in the "further reading" section I was hoping to keep things accessible to a wider audience.
This article that appeared in The Guardian today about Social Cooling has some more sources you may like. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/18/google...
And you may also like "Postscript op societies of Control" by philosopher Deleuze, that greatly inspired this view. https://www.qwant.com/?q=Postscript+op+societies+of+Control
We need catchy concepts to reach a wider audience.
Re: Social Cooling – How big data is increasing pressure to conform
#35I agree with the general premise, but I think privacy is not the perfect weapon here: if someone is making a public statement (e.g., a personal view expressed on a weblog) they cannot claim that it is a private statement. The goal (I think) is to prevent them being hounded for it outside the channel where it was expressed. One option is to bring back anonymity so people can make public, anonymous comments. Anonymity…
What stops hiring managers and potential colleagues?
Re: Social Cooling – How big data is increasing pressure to conform
#36> People are starting to realize that this 'digital reputation' could limit their opportunities. (And that these algorithms are often biased, and built on poor data.) That's interesting of itself, but the bigger underlying issue is that opportunities are becoming more concentrated. When only a few companies dominate hiring in many fields, their mistakes get seriously amplified. Back in the day you were fine if Google…
Worse still-- past employment at the majors is seen as a strong "social proof" indicator by many including other employers and investors.
I saw an angel.co drinking game once. I think you had to chug two drinks for "worked at X" (where X is any major) being put forward as the sole qualification of a founder or key early employee. This is starting to edge out "went to X" where X is a top-tier school.
China is supposedly deploying their own horrific state-sponsored "social credit score" system, but we're doing it too. We're just doing it in a less centralized way. In a way that's worse. In China everyone will know of this system and its existence and I'm sure people will figure out so many ways to game it it'll become irrelevant. In the West people will remain blissfully ignorant as ours has no name or formal identity.
Ultimately I am still more creeped out by what our private sector is doing than what our NSA and CIA are doing. Neither is good, but the latter has some oversight and regulation. The former has absolutely no regulation or oversight whatsoever, and in any case the private sector is very often better at such things than the public sector is. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Facebook's data analytics are far superior to the NSA's.
Re: Social Cooling – How big data is increasing pressure to conform
#37Our species is hardwired to mix among multiple social groups, each having different norms and hierarchies. We have positively proven that we evolve over time by allowing repugnant minorities the ability to publicly speak. Out of 100 reprehensible social opinions, one turns out to be the next Martin Luther King, Jr. Our perception of something as being "good" or "bad" for public discourse is notoriously fallible and broken.
The things I say in a social group of former college buddies and the things I say in a group of the local clergy are two different things. That doesn't make me two-faced: it makes me human. In fact, the ability to converse and trade with drastically different social groups is probably the essence of humanity.
Yet our current overlords that program the internet are convinced that the entire world should run as if it were just a huge version of their favorite social group. Joe tells racist jokes? Maybe we let Joe continue, but we definitely ought to score that. After all, Joe could offend somebody -- and then they would be mad at our platform, not Joe.
We are instrumenting a terrible evil on our species, even more evil than the security and surveillance state, if such a thing could be possible. SkyNet has finally attacked, and because there are no T-1000s leading the way the vast majority of the population doesn't even know it's at war.
Re: Social Cooling – How big data is increasing pressure to conform
#38 You better watch out
You better not cry
Better not pout
I'm telling you why
Big Data is coming to town
It knows when you are sleeping [0]
It knows when you're awake
It knows if you've been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake.
Re: Social Cooling – How big data is increasing pressure to conform
#39I really feel that engineers need to wake up to this kind of thing. I'm not saying we should stop (although that's what might happen), just that we pause and consider what this is doing to the world. It is the undercurrent for so many profound changes going on right now. Are we really comfortable as individuals building systems which predict someones mental (ill) health, personality traits or ethnicity just so we can…
It's like any other thing in capitalism. You'll have a contingent of folk that won't do the work, based on ethical reasons, and you have folk that will, for financial reasons.
Anecdotally, the few folks I know that work for data collection companies are all "tinfoil hat" types. They have flip-phones, they have no online presence, they smile like a Cheshire Cat when you ask them about it and you generally get the impression they've just decided to categorize it as "us" and "them". :-\
Re: Social Cooling – How big data is increasing pressure to conform
#40I really feel that engineers need to wake up to this kind of thing. I'm not saying we should stop (although that's what might happen), just that we pause and consider what this is doing to the world. It is the undercurrent for so many profound changes going on right now. Are we really comfortable as individuals building systems which predict someones mental (ill) health, personality traits or ethnicity just so we can…
I don't think there's any risk of that. As I pull out my favorite quote for the last few months:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
Very few people in the upper echelons of society (like highly-paid Silicon Valley engineers) truly believe they're doing something wrong, or could even be convinced they are doing something wrong. Above a certain level on Mazlowe's hierarchy, people have selected where they work in part because of the mission. They have bought the company line because in part, the company line is what they're there for.
People at Google don't work there because they really love advertising and really love putting banner ads in front of people. They work at Google because they believe they're 'making the world a better place'.
And good luck convincing anyone that their purpose in life is a lie and that they're part of the problem. I've convinced exactly zero people so far.
I mean, I'm sure Uber employees feel they're empowering people to work for themselves and helping people make a decent living who might otherwise be stuck unemployed. Maybe it took that many blatant scandals and fiascos for Travis Kalanick to come to terms with the fact that he wasn't making the world a better place?