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Facebook’s war on free will

theguardian.com

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Re: Facebook’s war on free will

#221

Post by jamesjyu »

dabockster wrote: post #132
katzgrau wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FB's tentacles are so deeply embedded in everything that I'm not sure a classic tech death from a disruptor is possible. Only a long and slow decline over a period of 5, maybe even 10 years.

> I'm not sure a classic tech death from a disruptor is possible Well, FB's brand itself is super toxic these days, so you could probably build something on the whole "we're not FB" premise

(disclosure: I worked at FB for 3 years)

I don't agree that it's "super toxic." Any company that gets this big and is also a utility will get its fair share of complaints, and this fair share will seem huge because the base is huge. Think about Comcast, for example. For the most part, people will still use it b/c it's embedded in so many parts of our lives. It has a monopoly on the social graph. Heck, growth has been exceedingly strong even though its been around for over a decade.

Just building another company and saying "we're not FB" is not enough. For most people, FB is good enough, just like a utility. It will be exceedingly difficult for a company to just come in this one angle and win. In order to win, they need to play to a strength that isn't dependent on the existing social graph, because you are not going to win taking FB head on. It has to be guerilla warfare.

Re: Facebook’s war on free will

#222

Post by jpetso »

dperfect wrote: post #80

> By the time Zuckerberg began extolling the virtues of hacking, he had stripped the name of most of its original meaning and distilled it into a managerial philosophy that contains barely a hint of rebelliousness. Hackers, he told one interviewer, were “just this group of computer scientists who were trying to quickly prototype and see what was possible." No, Zuckerberg did not somehow give the word "hacking" new me…

Question: If you take an organization with the goal to make money, and you execute well on social media with the help of capable engineers, will the end result have been drastically different than what Zuckerberg came up with?

If the aims and initial circumstances are similar, and the methods of engineering people & data with code are known, and few errors are made to get there, how much is really left to the individual as opposed to the system itself?

Would there have been any way that Facebook did not become its evil current self, without accepting that it would eventually be replaced by an equivalent organization that did decide to "listen to the data" and let algorithms decide what's most effective in getting us to be a potent tool for shareholder enrichment?

It might have been Facebook's set of algorithms and engineering prowess that got us to the point we're at now, but I wouldn't refute the statement that the use of those methods would cause better long-term results in someone else's hands.

Re: Facebook’s war on free will

#223

Post by 0xBABAD00C »

athenot wrote: post #65

> The problem is that when we outsource thinking to machines, we are really outsourcing thinking to the organisations that run the machines. This is the money quote of this article, and it's been on my mind quite a bit as of late. More than ever, we live in a world where there are many forces ready to take full advantage of our laziness. It takes a bit of introspection to really understand the tradeoffs that are appr…

Previously we had outsourced thinking to:

- village elders and tribal leaders

- educators at all levels with various agendas

- workplace superiors with party lines and biases

- etc etc

People were never individual free-thinking agents like they think they were. Ever. In fact, I'd much rather have machines recommending me what to read next, even as a side effect of a company making money by showing me ads in the process.

Re: Facebook’s war on free will

#224

Post by JKCalhoun »

molteanu wrote: post #113
athenot wrote: post #65

> The problem is that when we outsource thinking to machines, we are really outsourcing thinking to the organisations that run the machines. This is the money quote of this article, and it's been on my mind quite a bit as of late. More than ever, we live in a world where there are many forces ready to take full advantage of our laziness. It takes a bit of introspection to really understand the tradeoffs that are appr…

This, from Dune: "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind." OCB

Re: Facebook’s war on free will

#225

Post by mrec »

ams6110 wrote: post #199
mrec wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Zuck does end up making a Presidential run, I think that'd have a very good chance of triggering a sizeable decline in its US userbase.

I'd be stunned if he did. The man has the personality of a lizard. No way is he an appealing candidate for the general public.

> “I’m visiting small towns in Iowa” is a normal sentence, said by many a billionaire who wants nothing.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2017/08/03/i...

Re: Facebook’s war on free will

#226

Post by jdhawk »

Woofles wrote: post #112
52-6F-62 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I left Facebook about two years ago now. I nearly immediately lost contact with all of the people I'd spent my time with in the city (outside of work). I don't chase them down for other reasons, but it is striking how much it supplanted everything else. After returning an old work phone I'd made the mistake of not copying all of their numbers over. I moved elsewhere within the city, and so I don't run into them in th…

I think the happy medium here, where you can still keep in touch with people but not get sucked into checking it all the time, is deleting the app from your phone. It used to be habit for me to unlock my phone and if I didn't have anything to do, just open the app and begin scrolling. Once that wasn't easily accessible I stopped completely. Now I only go on Facebook if I have a reason to, like looking someone up or c…

My happy medium was disabling notifications and putting the icon in a subfolder (iOS) so its not apparently visible.

The lack of visibility prevents me from opening the app out of habit, but its still there if I need to check a certain group or event.

Re: Facebook’s war on free will

#227

Post by staticfloat »

naravara wrote: post #172
Woofles wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the happy medium here, where you can still keep in touch with people but not get sucked into checking it all the time, is deleting the app from your phone. It used to be habit for me to unlock my phone and if I didn't have anything to do, just open the app and begin scrolling. Once that wasn't easily accessible I stopped completely. Now I only go on Facebook if I have a reason to, like looking someone up or c…

>I think the happy medium here, where you can still keep in touch with people but not get sucked into checking it all the time, is deleting the app from your phone. It used to be habit for me to unlock my phone and if I didn't have anything to do, just open the app and begin scrolling. Once that wasn't easily accessible I stopped completely. Now I only go on Facebook if I have a reason to, like looking someone up or…

I too don't use the app, but I use https://mbasic.facebook.com, which allows messenger use without an app.

Re: Facebook’s war on free will

#228

Post by Houshalter »

basch wrote: post #203
Noos wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think people outsource their thinking to machines. I think the algorithms just work well at finding similar things to what people choose to consume or like. They aren't perfect, but there's this need to explain things by this great conspiracy of fake news and invisible influencers in a paranoid style. I think this has gained traction due to a crisis of the knowledge class that happened due to the rise of popu…

it confuses what i liked in the past with what i might enjoy in the future. or what might feel familiar or what someone like me liked. how am i ever supposed to have new foreign experiences if recommendations are based on past experiences or grouping me into demographics to make me more like others? sure everyones a mimicry or pastiche of others, but its losing its randomness and becoming more uniform and standardize…

A perfect recommendation algorithm would be optimal in the exploration/exploitation tradeoff. Suggesting new things with some probability to see if you might like them or not. Most recommendation algorithms today are way too far on the exploitation side of the tradeoff, but it's not a requirement.

Re: Facebook’s war on free will

#229

Post by crpatino »

hughw wrote: post #81

The author mischaracterizes algorithms and ridiculously attributes their importance in computer science to a desire by programmers to polish their own images. He reveals ignorance of one of the biggest motivations for the earliest computers, which was to solve differential equations in several domains. Eigenvalue estimation algorithms existed long before Page Rank.

Humans are social primates. Being willfully unaware of how the other tribes of primates perceive your own tribe is both naive and stupid.

And given the fact that the other tribes are more numerous, have bigger and hairier and angrier primates with longer and sharper sticks, this particular stupidity may turn out to be of the suicidal kind...

Re: Facebook’s war on free will

#230

Post by naravara »

staticfloat wrote: post #227
naravara wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think the happy medium here, where you can still keep in touch with people but not get sucked into checking it all the time, is deleting the app from your phone. It used to be habit for me to unlock my phone and if I didn't have anything to do, just open the app and begin scrolling. Once that wasn't easily accessible I stopped completely. Now I only go on Facebook if I have a reason to, like looking someone up or…

I too don't use the app, but I use https://mbasic.facebook.com , which allows messenger use without an app.

Good to know! I had just trusted them to redirect me to a non-gimped mobile site.
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