Yeah, but Silicon Valley doesn't need their love. It needs their dollars. And they love giving Silicon Valley the dollars.
Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you
131–140 of 491 posts
Re: Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not loyalty at all, it’s just people using the best product available to them. If someone creates something better than Facebook people will use that thing and won’t feel any remorse in switching. Until that happens, people will continue to use Facebook, because despite what Hacker News thinks, Facebook adds a huge amount of value to peoples’ lives.
I strongly disagree especially in the case of social networks. First movers in such spaces have incredible advantages and one of them is a lock-in effect. Countless follow-up social sites have come and gone that either had feature parity or better offerings than Facebook, but failed to get a foothold because of the fact that everyone already had Facebook. Why switch when everyone can already talk and plan? SV really…
>I strongly disagree especially in the case of social networks. First movers in such spaces have incredible advantages and one of them is a lock-in effect. Countless follow-up social sites have come and gone that either had feature parity or better offerings than Facebook, but failed to get a foothold because of the fact that everyone already had Facebook. Why switch when everyone can already talk and plan?
Sure, and that applied to Friendster and Myspace and others as well, until Facebook came along.
Re: Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you
#133Middle America is not too keen on your "basic income" solution to all the problems you are creating. It brings to mind a future of living in a 300 square foot government apartment in some hideous Brutalist concrete block of a building, eating our daily Amazon rations, knowing that's just how life is going to be, forever, no need to have dreams anymore. There will be torches and pitchforks coming for you.
It reminds me of the endless ghettoes of William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer, etc.) where people are basically warehoused and left to jack into "simstim" and rot. In reality the pitchforks will come out as you say and this endless ghetto will be paired with a total surveillance police state to contain the angry aimless masses. Perhaps not coincidentally this is exactly what Silicon Valley seems to be buildin…
Interesting that you come along with a hopeful vision for the future where there's interesting and lucrative work for people to do, and your comment is turning grayer and grayer.
Re: Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mostly agree, but the media (and a slew of other industries) are pro-minority , not anti-minority, so if the media are undermining minority confidence, it's not necessarily intuitive. Further, even the implicit bias theory has a lot working against it; chiefly, it is utterly dependant on the principle tool for measuring implicit bias, the IAT, which fails to actually predict bias or even return consistent results (…
I can't see why you would be skeptical about bias given studies (not relying on IAT) showing that -- all else being equal -- people with minority names on their resume get significantly less callbacks? The same goes with subtle class cues and identification. If IAT is broken, it's a broken tool. Not every bias test uses it. The idea that the media is pro-minority when we still have the media pissing themselves over k…
> I can't see why you would be skeptical about bias given studies (not relying on IAT) showing that -- all else being equal -- people with minority names on their resume get significantly less callbacks
Studies like that generally tend not to replicate, including at least one specifically about race and names on resumes.
Re: Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
" there is no a priori reason for women and ethnic minorities to be less prevalent in our high-paying fields." Sure there is: racist and sexist white males making decisions and developing a workplace culture that prevents them from attaining those positions. And the sooner people accept this, the better for everyone.
>developing a workplace culture that prevents them from attaining those positions Some who make this argument (and I'm not necessarily saying you're in this camp) are essentially saying that "nerd culture" is some oppressive sexist force. That's sort of ironic given that it's basically a subculture formed by social rejects. There are of course aspects of workplace culture which do this, but an appreciation of science…
It's a bit ironic that SV nerds are dealing with rampant racial/gender issues, while NFL jocks are protesting for racial justice in policing. It's like all those 80's movies flipped the nerd/jock paradigm.
Re: Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you
#136Middle America is not too keen on your "basic income" solution to all the problems you are creating. It brings to mind a future of living in a 300 square foot government apartment in some hideous Brutalist concrete block of a building, eating our daily Amazon rations, knowing that's just how life is going to be, forever, no need to have dreams anymore. There will be torches and pitchforks coming for you.
I notice that some of the biggest proponent of basic income are work-aholics, not middle america that’s supposedly at the greatest risk of the incoming AI apocalypse. It’s the same people who eat soylent milkshakes because they don’t have any desire or time to cook for themselves. It’s no wonder they’d love it if the government came by and took away one more obstacle that keeps them from burying their heads in their…
Or - it's that the work-aholics know that they're never going to get ahead.
Middle America thinks they'll get ahead soon. That it's their gumption and attitude that got them to where they are.
Which of course is a load of horse shit, and they're being used and abused as much as any SV work-aholic, if not more because of their lack of compensation.
Re: Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you
#137Middle America is not too keen on your "basic income" solution to all the problems you are creating. It brings to mind a future of living in a 300 square foot government apartment in some hideous Brutalist concrete block of a building, eating our daily Amazon rations, knowing that's just how life is going to be, forever, no need to have dreams anymore. There will be torches and pitchforks coming for you.
I just thought of the trailer parks from the Ready Player One book after reading your comment.
Re: Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If someone creates something better than Facebook people will use that thing and won’t feel any remorse in switching. "If you don't want someone doing cocaine, make a better cocaine!" > Facebook adds a huge amount of value to peoples’ lives. https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/185/3/203/2915143/Assoc... "Face-to-face social interactions enhance well-being. With the ubiquity of social media, important questions hav…
>For example, a 1-standard-deviation increase in “likes clicked” (clicking “like” on someone else's content), “links clicked” (clicking a link to another site or article), or “status updates” (updating one's own Facebook status) was associated with a decrease of 5%–8% of a standard deviation in self-reported mental health. >Facebook is toxic. Or alternatively mentally ill people like Facebook.
If Facebook is filled with mentally ill people then it would be surprising if it weren't toxic.
It's a vicious cycle, so correlation becomes causation!
Re: Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you
#139Middle America is not too keen on your "basic income" solution to all the problems you are creating. It brings to mind a future of living in a 300 square foot government apartment in some hideous Brutalist concrete block of a building, eating our daily Amazon rations, knowing that's just how life is going to be, forever, no need to have dreams anymore. There will be torches and pitchforks coming for you.
It reminds me of the endless ghettoes of William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer, etc.) where people are basically warehoused and left to jack into "simstim" and rot. In reality the pitchforks will come out as you say and this endless ghetto will be paired with a total surveillance police state to contain the angry aimless masses. Perhaps not coincidentally this is exactly what Silicon Valley seems to be buildin…
It all depends on who's allowed to evolve/reproduce, I guess.
All those goals you mentioned, a lot of people are uninterested, and surplus for it anyway. There's no problem allowing them to vegitate happily until their death, if that ever comes, because the costs of production for those people are approximately 0 in a short enough amount of time.
Already most of the west is mostly just wasting it's time as a ways of rationalising what's effectively basic income.
(also, a basic income is not the same as a shitty income, or a shitty lifestyle, for almost everyone it will only mean being more free in choosing your lifestyle and less worried about crime)
Re: Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you
#140People generally do love Silicon Valley and what it creates. It’s the media that doesn’t. Ask the average person what brands and products they like and use the most (or just look at the data on where and how they spend their time and money) and you’ll see that Silicon Valley is doing just fine in the eyes of the populace. In fact, Silicon Valley has never been more influential. Ask people to go to a world without iPh…
> As an aside, I’ll never understand why people get so upset for rich people making bad bets and losing a bunch of money. Me neither. Sometimes people get upset that the pensions of teachers and firemen are being spent on subsidizing growth of meal delivery and transportation in San Francisco. Actually I live in a state that has spent a bunch of taxpayer money on a alt-coin currency based company that recently had an…
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