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Social Cooling – How big data is increasing pressure to conform

socialcooling.com

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Re: Social Cooling – How big data is increasing pressure to conform

#111

Post by sixstringtheory »

Bartweiss wrote: post #81
sixstringtheory wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I've ever seen as much apathy in a classroom as my fellow CS majors displayed in our society and ethics course.

> society and ethics course How was the course? I didn't have one, but many other "engineering ethics" courses I've seen inspire apathy just because they're terrible. It's like school anti-bullying campaigns - even if you're vehemently anti-bullying, most of the campaigns are too ridiculous to feel anything good about. On the other hand, something like Canada's Iron Ring seems to get taken very seriously. It seems li…

It's true, it wasn't a mindblowingly exciting class or delivery. There were a handful of people who cared to ask questions beyond the prompts for group assignments or during lectures. A lot of people accepted as obvious fact that every household should have a humanoid robot, or e-government would make perfect decisions, or complete quantification of the individual couldn't possibly be abused. (These are just the ones that stand out in my memory.) Then you also have the garden variety folks playing minecraft, doing other coursework, etc.

I'll also grant that I'm not very visionary or even great working/leading large groups of people. How would you teach a class exciting enough that virtually all students would attend it, enthusiastically, even if it were elective? (It was required for us.)

At the end of the day, it's only going to be as exciting as the students make it by involving themselves and thinking. They are the ones creating tomorrow's startups, not the professors. As it stands, it seemed like quite the accurate litmus test for how many people care to think about issues in this way in our field.

Re: Social Cooling – How big data is increasing pressure to conform

#112

Post by qwtel »

kirykl wrote: post #94
bottled_poe wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Future employer can blow me.

"Thank you for applying to ProfitCorp. While you have excellent credentials and passed all levels of interviews, your web sentiment analysis score does not meet the threshold for hire. Best of luck in future endeavors"

> your web sentiment analysis score does not meet the threshold for hire

except you would be lucky if one well-meaning employee would tell you the above sentence off the record in violation of every contract he/she singed with ProfitCorp.

more likely, your life would be a mysterious series of surprise rejections with no or spurious reasons, the latter being especially insidious, since it would lead you to to believe there are aspects of your resume that need improvement, when in reality the missing piece is a "postitive comment generator" to flood every relevant online community with comments like "awesome", "let my know when it is finished" and "we should definitely have lunch sometime".

EDIT: okay i'm being sarcastic again, so in the spirit of improving my web sentiment analysis score, the points i wanted to make are * these systems are invisible * once you know about them, they can be gamed

Re: Social Cooling – How big data is increasing pressure to conform

#113

Post by Ygg2 »

kirykl wrote: post #94
bottled_poe wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Future employer can blow me.

"Thank you for applying to ProfitCorp. While you have excellent credentials and passed all levels of interviews, your web sentiment analysis score does not meet the threshold for hire. Best of luck in future endeavors"

More like "Thank you for applying to ProfitCorp. You didn't match our criteria for employment. Have a nice day.".

Re: Social Cooling – How big data is increasing pressure to conform

#114

Post by wolco »

_jal wrote: post #100
sr2 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's entirely possible that one day many years from now, a prospective employer/insurer/whatever finds such a comment and flags me for it This is why you should use pseudonyms and strive for anonymity. It's trivial to signup to Hackernews under an assumed name, or handle, and start venting on contentious issues. Hackernews might shadow-ban your throwaway account, so you might have to lurk moar and share some intere…

What you say is all true, but unfortunately misses the point of the article and discussion. Also, just a note, but you have some interesting tells in your text. 'anon iden' is a phrase I don't recall seeing, at least not very often. You used "it's" correctly, another signal, along with the 'moar' spelling, and a few other shorthand phrases. You might want to start thinking about methods for scrubbing your text if you…

He might have already and the personality you see may not be tied to reality

Re: Social Cooling – How big data is increasing pressure to conform

#115

Post by oliv__ »

captainmuon wrote: post #59
bicubic wrote: post #3

I was going to write at length about my concerns on this topic, and then I decided not to. Because it's entirely possible that one day many years from now, a prospective employer/insurer/whatever finds such a comment and flags me for it. That's the cooling effect in a nutshell.

I've been saying this for a while: We as a society have to stop taking everything that is said on the internet so fucking seriously. You shouldn't have to think everything perfectly though that you write. It's OK to say something dumb, or even offensive. It's not great, but no big deal either. I don't want to live in a world where we have to polish and double-check every thought that leaves our minds. It used to be t…

I feel like it's more of the way you respond to people trying to guilt trip you or make you ashamed of what you said. Most people tend to back down or apologize and end up playing their attacker's game.

Some people seem to be doing just fine with saying whatever is on their mind and getting away with it. Notable example is the current president...

Re: Social Cooling – How big data is increasing pressure to conform

#116

Post by zuminator »

kirykl wrote: post #94
bottled_poe wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Future employer can blow me.

"Thank you for applying to ProfitCorp. While you have excellent credentials and passed all levels of interviews, your web sentiment analysis score does not meet the threshold for hire. Best of luck in future endeavors"

Sure, but for ProfitCorp to effectively screen out anyone with a rebellious streak, anyone with a spine, anyone with strong genuine convictions, would this actually be profitable? Maybe another company will do better actively seeking out someone with bottled_poe's profile, someone who from an early age demonstrated (for the sake of argument, anyway) daring and individuality?

Re: Social Cooling – How big data is increasing pressure to conform

#118

Post by gedrap »

captainmuon wrote: post #110

This sounds like a self-fulfulling prophecy. Tell people that having data of them out there will change their behavior, and then they'll become aware of that idea, and will change their behavior. If they don't know about the concept, they might not. You could even say that this page, and people trying to raise awareness for this issue, are harmful! Imagine a few important people stepping up and saying, no, we will no…

>>> people trying to raise awareness for this issue, are harmful

Harmful for who? If, let's say, they make people actually aware of this, that might lead to change towards privacy. But if people are unaware, and they remain unaware, the probability of change is smaller.

Re: Social Cooling – How big data is increasing pressure to conform

#119

Post by wolco »

imron wrote: post #103
bottled_poe wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Future employer can blow me.

Best of luck with your future endeavours James.

James can use my future business where we create fake social media profiles targeted to specific employment. It will work so well it will make James seem like the perfect candidate.

Re: Social Cooling – How big data is increasing pressure to conform

#120

Post by Mz »

Oh. My. God. Fearmongering is everywhere.

We also might conclude that "meh, teens getting drunk occasionally" or "meh, people actually having a sex life" is pretty goddamn normal and get over a bunch of nonsense.

No matter what goes on around us, we still have a choice in how we interpret things and what kind of world we choose to build. There is zero inevitability here.

When Demi Moore posed naked on the cover of a magazine while pregnant, this was some sort of shocking dramatic thing. Now, it seems like every pregnant celebrity does the exact same pose and posts it somewhere. It has become prosaic.

Seriously, we can choose to be more humane to people. Things going to hell is not some inevitability.

Edit: Maybe a better example is that when 24 hour news channels became a thing, it changed the news. Before that, people were very straight laced and serious for the 30 minutes that they reported the news. This was not sustainable when reporters had to talk live all day, every day. They became less stiff and formal, more able to crack a joke and be human. They still had to treat some subjects with appropriate respect, but 24/7 news channels caused news to lighten up some. Geez.

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