191–200 of 411 posts
Yep just deactivated my FB account and they tried to guilt trip me with "people who will miss me" (mainly kids) and whatnot. Also it asks why you are deactivating and shows a response for each reason.
I must say that emotional blackmail lost whatever power it had rather quickly.
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Well, it's not the smartphone that's the problem. The smartphone is just the delivery system. It's remarkable how well some of Richard Stallman's quotes have aged. "With software, either the users control the program, or the program controls the users..." The idea of a program controlling its users must have seemed very esoteric when that quote was first penned in 1985, at a time when home PCs (let alone ones with GU…
> The first thing most of us do when we wake up is roll over, grab our phone, and look at some software The danger of computers becoming like humans is not as great as the danger of humans becoming like computers. -- Konrad Zuse I recall Joseph Weizenbaum mentioning something like that in an interview before his death, too, about the difference between using technology to empower people, or to exploit them. But hey,…
The book addresses this same topic: to what extent is computer "thought" like human "thought", and what are the dangers of equating these concepts? Like any book about AI written in the 70's, there are some things that are obviously out of date or wrong, but overall it holds up quite well. There's also a section on "compulsive programmers" that may cause some self-reflection among this crowd: https://www.sac.edu/AcademicProgs/Business/ComputerScience/P...
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I don't think all of these are a problem per se. The problem is (and probably always was) people with empty minds. Sure, now they can fill it more easily with junk, but the whole point of technology is to make life easier after all. If you're learning or working on something you love and you want to have more time to do, its a perfectly reasonable choice to outsource "what I'm I going to eat next" or "how do you I ge…
> The problem is (and probably always was) people with empty minds. And of course you think you’re in the other camp, don’t you? How cute.
I don't buy the idea that smartphones are extinguishing the life of the mind. Sure, smartphones provide access to almost unlimited trash. But they also provide access to Wikipedia, perhaps the most successful encyclopedia ever developed by humans. They can show you newspapers from across the planet. They let you read Latin histories of the Norman conquest of Southern Italy in the middle ages. [0] C'mon folks, this is…
> But they also provide access to Wikipedia [etc] But let's be honest, most smartphone users spend their time confined in a limited number of domains: social media, games, shopping etc. In that sense, we can be called a bit zombie in the head.
As for shopping, I don't see anything wrong with acquiring resources needed for various things in your life.
127.0.0.1 facebook.com
If you can tear yourself from your phone for 3 Hours a day and work on career building projects, you should be able to get far ahead of others in your social circles who can't break the addiction.
You no longer have to wake up early to beat the world, just wake up and not Touch the phone!
I don't buy the idea that smartphones are extinguishing the life of the mind. Sure, smartphones provide access to almost unlimited trash. But they also provide access to Wikipedia, perhaps the most successful encyclopedia ever developed by humans. They can show you newspapers from across the planet. They let you read Latin histories of the Norman conquest of Southern Italy in the middle ages. [0] C'mon folks, this is…
How many wikipedia articles have you read on your smartphone vs. ones you've read on your laptop/desktop? "In your pocket" represents a world of difference.
Most of my mobile searches are related to a) things I'm learning right now, or b) things I've just read about and I don't know what they are.
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More on my laptop but that's only because I work on a laptop and have to look up (mostly) work-related stuff. I read a lot of 18th/19th century lit. Wikipedia is like having footnotes for anything you are reading. I use it regularly, almost exclusively on my iPhone.
The thing is that people like you are just a little minority respect to the whole. The vastly majority is destroing their screens by tapping here and there on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat....
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Competitive pressure. Gary Taubes in his books "The Case Against Sugar" and "Good Calories, Bad Calories" mentioned the competition between Kellogg's, Post and other cereal brands. While it's hard to believe today, Kellogg's was founded by a health nut who was eager on bringing healthy grains to Americans. Once his descendants took over, they noticed how enriching their product with sugar increased sales. Kids specif…
As a (currently) flagged comment absolutely accurately notes, a major concern of the Kelloggs was matters of mental and spiritual hygiene, including concerted efforts (including surgery) to avert masturbation. Medical historian Howard Markel addresses this in his recent book The Kelloggs , with some relevant aspects mentioned in this book-tour interview at KALW, Santa Monica: [Dr. John Haarvey Kellogg] also was very…
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Could you expand on what you feel the goal of their hacking was/is?
Another reply summarized my view: there doesn't need to be a goal other than optimizing for profit for this type of "hacking" to arise. I guess the word "hacking" conveys intentionality, or an explicit goal, but I'm using it in the sense that it's "exploiting bugs" in human brains. Human brains/bodies didn't evolve in a situation with unlimited supplies of fat, sugar, and salt. Likewise, human brains didn't evolve in…
But since you mean companies just following the market gradient - that is precisely what happens.
> So I guess my takeaway is that it doesn't hurt to treat current social networks and tech products like smartphones as adversaries. Just like it is reasonable to treat McDonald's and cigarette companies as adversaries. They were designed to deliver concentrated pleasure to your brain without regard to long term consequences.
This is the key. The goal of companies is to make money off you, not to do good to you. If doing good to you helps them make money, they will do it. If screwing you over lets them make more money off you, they will screw you over. This is obvious both in observational evidence and in theory (if you look at the incentive structures of the market economy), and yet some people still persist in the belief that companies do only what consumers want, and that consumers have any agency in this process.