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Mark in the Middle

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Re: Mark in the Middle

#101

Post by Traster »

_qulr wrote: post #87

Politics aside, many Facebook employees come across as rather childish, incapable of taking care of themselves. The big complaint is about lack of snacks! Zuck has to scold them by asking rhetorically whether they joined the company for the free food. And one employee asks if they can go live on an island by themselves, apparently like Lord of the Flies. Of course one may fairly ask whether Facebook's hiring process…

If you want to talk about childish, should we talk about the sort of answer Zuckerberg gave. Atleast the guy there for the snacks was getting snacks until recently, I'm worried about the guys who think they joined facebook because:

>you’re here for some combination of reasons around the mission of the company, the impact that we can have in the world, trying to make sure that that’s as positive as possible

Re: Mark in the Middle

#102

Post by charlesu »

ThomPete wrote: post #4

I will never understand the extreme intellectual fragility of cancel culture. A lot of kids must have grown up never facing and learning to to deal with disagreement or what is it that have created such a thin skinned generation of seemingly well educated people?

Like that time a professional athlete was blacklisted from his league for kneeling silently during the national anthem? Is that the cancel culture you're talking about?

Re: Mark in the Middle

#103

Post by _qbjt »

roenxi wrote: post #6
jsiepkes wrote: post #3

> "The community we serve tends to be, on average, ideologically a little bit more conservative than our employee base." If I had to pick one sentence of the article which sums up the entire issue it would be this one.

Although a follow up would be the comforting level of maturity in Facebook's leadership, acknowledging that it isn't their role to bring politics into the workplace. It is distressingly refreshing to see a company in the news for taking a stance like "In my work with Joel, I’ve found him to be ... very rigorous and principled in his thinking [and therefore I'm happy to work with him despite being a Republican]". It r…

[dead]

Re: Mark in the Middle

#104

Post by notacoward »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #93
notacoward wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Facebook is a company that uses its power to change what people think I don't think that's a helpful way to look at it. Facebook is a platform that other people use to change what people think, and that's dangerous enough. Without any ill intent whatsoever from Facebook itself, that still creates serious issues with unintentional bias (e.g. via algorithms trained with poor data sets) and manipulation. Those are the…

Doesn't Mark Zuckerberg have the final say on what Facebook algorithms show people?

Not really. Even the people who train the models and code the algorithms don't have a lot of control over how they respond to ever-changing inputs - and that's kind of the real problem IMO. There was a recent thing on Twitter, where someone discovered that it would consistently generate thumbnails focused on white faces when both white and black faces were present. At a gross level this is clearly because of inadequacies in how that algorithm worked, but literally nobody could say exactly what was wrong or how to fix it (especially without introducing new kinds of bias). Facebook has the same kind of problem, at approximately 10x Twitter's scale.

It's a machine that nobody knows how it works now, and therefore nobody knows how to fix it. Mark can influence it in very vague and general kind of ways, I suppose, but there is no fine control and often these gross adjustments bring their own unintended consequences.

Re: Mark in the Middle

#105

Post by shagie »

dx87 wrote: post #41
ThomPete wrote: post #4

I will never understand the extreme intellectual fragility of cancel culture. A lot of kids must have grown up never facing and learning to to deal with disagreement or what is it that have created such a thin skinned generation of seemingly well educated people?

I just finished reading "The Coddling of the American Mind", and it goes into the subject pretty well. A lot of it stems from parents not letting their kids be independent, so they never learn to deal with disagreements from dealing with other kids, then colleges cave to whatever demands they have because they just want to collect tuition money.

An article from four days ago: How Boomer Parenting Fueled Millennial Burnout -- https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/09/anne-hele...

The initial bit of the interview in the article:

> Anne Helen Petersen: There are two major factors. The first is conceiving of children as mini-adults—trying to cultivate behaviors, postures, and skills that are associated with adults, like being able to carry on conversations with adults or advocating for themselves when they feel something is unfair. I think we often admire that sort of precociousness without understanding what’s lost when you cultivate that in a child. The other component is thinking of childhood as a means to an end, and that end is getting into a good college. So instead of viewing childhood as simply childhood, parents are thinking, How can these various experiences—everything from playdates to piano lessons—lead to this larger résumé-building path to college?

> When childhood is treated that way, it can eliminate space for the formation of personality, independence, or confidence. Anything not oriented toward that goal of college—things like hobbies—gets lost. One of the saddest things I heard when talking to many Millennials is that when they reach a point of exhaustion with work, lift their head up, and look around them, they're like, What else is there? Do I have a personality? Do I know what I like? There's no there there, other than their ability to work, and I think that's really difficult.

Re: Mark in the Middle

#106

Post by misiti3780 »

verdverm wrote: post #94
pjc50 wrote: post #68

> "In my work with Joel, I’ve found him to be ... very rigorous and principled in his thinking [and therefore I'm happy to work with him despite being a Republican]" The set of people for whom this is true is shrinking by the day; remaining Republican requires an increasingly bizarre set of intellectual contortions. For example, you'd have to believe that appointing a Supreme Court justice right at the end of your te…

Historically this is pretty standard, I think 28 times there has been a vacancy in the SCOTUS in an election year. It has (almost?) always followed the pattern of: - when same party, nominate and confirm - when not same party, nominate no confirm We all really need to expand our historical perspectives on many issues instead of being short sighted politically.

I suspect this is very much one of the major problems facing the US populus today.

Re: Mark in the Middle

#107

Post by loxs »

Cederfjard wrote: post #49
loxs wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an outsider (from a different continent), it doesn't seem at all likely that there is a chance for Biden winning. It probably looks the same from where Zuck is sitting. We might, of course, both be wrong :)

I think that’s a take without merit. It’s certainly not clear-cut. Here’s The Economist and FiveThirtyEight both saying that they favor Biden to win (at the time of my posting this): https://projects.economist.com/us-2020-forecast/president https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/

Yeah, and probably Zuck has better data than both ;)

Re: Mark in the Middle

#108

Post by _qulr »

Traster wrote: post #101
_qulr wrote: post #87

Politics aside, many Facebook employees come across as rather childish, incapable of taking care of themselves. The big complaint is about lack of snacks! Zuck has to scold them by asking rhetorically whether they joined the company for the free food. And one employee asks if they can go live on an island by themselves, apparently like Lord of the Flies. Of course one may fairly ask whether Facebook's hiring process…

If you want to talk about childish, should we talk about the sort of answer Zuckerberg gave. Atleast the guy there for the snacks was getting snacks until recently, I'm worried about the guys who think they joined facebook because: >you’re here for some combination of reasons around the mission of the company, the impact that we can have in the world, trying to make sure that that’s as positive as possible

> Atleast the guy there for the snacks was getting snacks until recently

IMO destroying civil society for snacks is a worse reason than destroying civil society intentionally. The pettiness of the tradeoff makes evil people look good by comparison.

Re: Mark in the Middle

#109

Post by ezzzzz »

pjc50 wrote: post #55
loxs wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an outsider (from a different continent), it doesn't seem at all likely that there is a chance for Biden winning. It probably looks the same from where Zuck is sitting. We might, of course, both be wrong :)

My money is on Biden receiving the most votes in the popular vote, but Trump still being in power next year, and a huge amount of litigation and riots in the meantime. (Not sure why this got downvoted; Clinton won the popular vote last time, I see no reason that won't happen again?)

Yeah, chiming in from the Mid-West, the Trump base is out in full force. Lots of Trump signs in yards (with varying degrees of offensive slogans), seeing Trump flags flying from the back of pickup truck beds and yards everywhere... one gets the opposite impression. Whether the 'silent-majority' is truly the majority or actually the 'extremely vocal minority' will decide the election. However, there is no denying Trump has a very energized base out here. I have a feeling the Trump will lose the popular vote, but as 2016 has shown, mid America will be the deciding factor.

The other troubling thing, as related to the article, is the huge role conspiracy theories like Qanon will play in this election. Just as the article describes, through FB's algorithm, people engaged with traditionally left-leaning communities (non-GMO, alternative medicine etc) are getting sucked into this madness. FB's work to suppress this is not only too little, too late, it also creates a self-enforcing narrative that 'the elites' are actively engaged in a cover-up. It's pretty scary stuff. Not to mention, the cognitive dissonance is only amplified by civil-unrest and a global pandemic. The psyche of the body politic has been absolutely ravaged by the events of 2020, creating a perfect-storm for the unexpected to occur.

Re: Mark in the Middle

#110

Post by charlesu »

verdverm wrote: post #88
taylodl wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW here's my take: - No one voting for Hillary in 2016 is voting for Trump in 2020 - People voting for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein in 2016 are either not voting or voting for Biden in 2020 - Democrats who didn't vote in 2016 out of protest for Bernie Sanders not getting the nomination are either not voting again or they're voting for Biden in 2020 - People who voted for Trump in 2016 fall into three camps: they're e…

Your first point is off, people have switched camps to the right since last election, despite how hard this may seem to believe. They look at how childish the left has become and have decided the right is less evil.

> They look at how childish the left has become and have decided the right is less evil.

The left is childish? President of the United States literally tweets gifs of himself beating up CNN on Twitter.

We live in differently realities. I see one side that shows some semblance of decorum and another that is basically the political equivalent of the Joker but without the charisma and philosophical consistency.

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