Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook’s war on free will

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 284 posts

Re: Facebook’s war on free will

#231

Post by hughw »

crpatino wrote: post #229
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...

Baffled how you get "willfully unaware" out of my comment, and how I earned "naive and stupid" epithets from you.

At least I know how to find an eigenvalue. Can't be all that stupid.

Re: Facebook’s war on free will

#232

Post by crpatino »

firmgently wrote: post #126
raverbashing wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, you making this comment has been inevitable?

Modern mainstream science does not allow for the existence of free will. Materialism (everything is physical) and Determinism (everything that ever happens is an inevitable and ultimately predictable consequence of The Big Bang) reign in contemporary thought. Free will is largely considered to be an illusion or psychological trick (see eg. Daniel C. Dennett 'Freedom Evolves') and several studies have shown that decis…

Even if you are right, your comment is pointless.

Let's assume Buddism was the ultimate truth of how the Universe work. Would it be Ok for a Buddist to interrupt a debate about criminal law with the remark that, given reincarnation, all murders are an illusion???

People feel inside like they have free will, and they are not going to change that opinion because of your argument. If a men in a white labcoat tells them to disregard their own feelings and surrender to the BigBadCompany, they are not going to do so... they are going to label people in white coats as "manipulative enemy". Furthermore, they are going to label everyone that oppose people in white coats, - antivaxers, prolifers, climate change deniers, etc, - as "potential ally".

So, you want to stop Donald Trump from taking over the world??? Why don't you stop preaching to the choir while alienating everyone else?

Re: Facebook’s war on free will

#233

Post by megamindbrian »

I'm unable to believe that anyone running a product with over a billion active users has anything less than altruistic intentions. Who is to say any of us have free will? Who is to say any of us deserve free will after all the wars we've caused and damage to the environment? If your going to get theological don't bother, you are out of date.

Re: Facebook’s war on free will

#234

Post by wslh »

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."

We cannot forget Momo [1] by Michael Ende with greymen buying the time of people: why are you wasting your time talking with your neighbour when you can profit from it?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momo_%28novel%29

Re: Facebook’s war on free will

#235

Post by reaperducer »

onewaystreet wrote: post #171
makomk wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, in the pre-internet age we were forced to outsource our thinking to the press instead, it's just that you're less likely to see them running articles about how they themselves are waging a war on our free will.

And before the press it was the church, the community and the family.

Back then it was the passed down wisdom and morals of the elders that guided society. Now it's a bunch of 20- and 30-somethings who haven't experienced enough to develop morals, let alone wisdom. But that's OK, because they've farmed it out to an algorithm. And when that fails, they shrug their shoulders and declare themselves blameless for the damage they've done.

The public cries out because of the way its treated by Facebook. There's a simple solution: stop hiring children. Or at least stop putting them in positions of power.

Re: Facebook’s war on free will

#236

Post by gerbilly »

crpatino wrote: post #232
firmgently wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern mainstream science does not allow for the existence of free will. Materialism (everything is physical) and Determinism (everything that ever happens is an inevitable and ultimately predictable consequence of The Big Bang) reign in contemporary thought. Free will is largely considered to be an illusion or psychological trick (see eg. Daniel C. Dennett 'Freedom Evolves') and several studies have shown that decis…

Even if you are right, your comment is pointless. Let's assume Buddism was the ultimate truth of how the Universe work. Would it be Ok for a Buddist to interrupt a debate about criminal law with the remark that, given reincarnation, all murders are an illusion??? People feel inside like they have free will, and they are not going to change that opinion because of your argument. If a men in a white labcoat tells them…

>Would it be Ok for a Buddist to interrupt a debate about criminal law with the remark that, given reincarnation, all murders are an illusion???

Maybe not but would it be ok for a Buddhist to interrupt a thread to point out that Buddhists don't believe in reincarnation?

https://www.thoughtco.com/reincarnation-in-buddhism-449994

Re: Facebook’s war on free will

#237

Post by ivm »

feelin_googley wrote: post #169
ivm wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A better search was inevitable. Google achieved it first and snowballed into a monopoly. Same with Facebook – many social networks went extinct just because it was spreading faster. These companies appropriated the natural course of evolution of information exchange between humans.

"A better search was inevitable." I see it this way too. As usual, most of this confused brain dump by yet another technology-challenged journalist could be reduced, per the "engineering mindset", to few lines: Facebook is a website protected by a password. There is a backend database. It contains photos, among other things. (Including personal data no web user would have shared with some random website in the 1990's…

> But today's "search" is also manipulated to an extent not seen in the early 1990's

Exactly, it's so spammy for many keywords that more and more curated resources appear, i.e. Link Directories 2.0.

For example, if I need some software then I'm going to check Hacker News, Product Hunt, AlternativeTo but not Google's results.

Re: Facebook’s war on free will

#238

Post by ameister14 »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #212
ameister14 wrote: post #11

This was written so disrespectfully and dismissively of programmers, hackers and engineers that I have a hard time reading it, despite my extreme distaste for Facebook. >In the labs of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) during the 60s and 70s, they broke any rule that interfered with building the stuff of early computing, such marvels as the first video games and word processors. Also, Calling a 33 year…

Ascribing ulterior motives to the author and thus constructing a straw man argument makes it difficult for me to take your comment at face value.

That's not an example of a straw man argument.

I'll clarify, for the downvoters: I don't think the statement I made is an example of any common fallacy, but it is definitely not a straw man. If I were to say that he was arguing something he was not and then attacked that argument, or if I used him as a representation of all people making his arguments that would be a straw man. Maybe you could argue that it is ad hominem, but I'm not really attacking his character, merely his choice of words.

Re: Facebook’s war on free will

#239

Post by unclebucknasty »

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…

>when we outsource thinking to machines, we are really outsourcing thinking to the organisations that run the machines.

And the people who run the organisations.

Likewise, when we outsource our reality to machines:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/kFrnMacxz5E/maxresdefault.jpg

Re: Facebook’s war on free will

#240

Post by deathgrindfreak »

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.

Exactly. To me he mistakes concepts like page ranking (which I think are much more akin to heuristics) with the purely mathematical concept of computation.
Post reply on HN