'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter • Hacker News Board

Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

#421

Post by badmash » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 9:23 PM UTC

totalZero wrote: post #392

impendia wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where does that leave people like doctors who earnestly help their patients? Not a doctor, but a college professor. I love my job, take pride in it, and work hard at it. But I think of myself as working for my students, my collaborators, and my immediate colleagues. I pay little attention to my university as a whole, don't view it especially positively, haven't learned how to work its bureaucracy, and feel little l…

If only all professors had this attitude.

Agreed!

Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

#422

Post by disabled » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 2:18 PM UTC

Loughla wrote: post #408

disabled wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry that you go through this. Next time, I will be more considerate when posting and tone it down. A lot of the issues you mention with young adults is a generational divide in the disabled community: the post-ADA generation and the pre-ADA generation. The post-ADA people never had to truly fight for their rights against people that had true actual contempt against their existence as disabled human beings. On s…

I had the privilege of working with one of the individuals who is featured in one of the iconic protest photos from the 1990 capitol crawl. I'm not as old as this person, and my personal experience with disability, and all of my professional experience are post ADA/AA. Listening to her story about life in the 50's and 60's and her experience with being (in her words) "institutionalized in hell" was just startling. It…

You're welcome! You are an amazing, kind, and generous person. I am glad to have "met" you. If for some reason you want to email me, my email is in my profile (no pressure, I am not expecting it and it will not hurt my feelings if you don't).

The previous post that you made reminded me of this post, so maybe you can see where I was coming from in the previous response (written by a disabled university professor): http://badcripple.blogspot.com/2013/04/shane-burcaw-laughter...

While I am not as "vocal" as the author of that blog, William Peace, I do agree with him 100% on the issues he brings up, along with his discourse. I say this as an adult in my early 30s, who has seen a lot.

It is definitely possible that I could be autistic (this is the first time that I have written such a statement ever, and I have never, not once, claimed that I am autistic ever), but it is not my place to claim that diagnosis or identity. Plus, it is fun to throw people off. Of course I have read books about females and autism (I am female) and books about autism in general. Such diagnoses are the responsibility of doctors, and it is not my place, nor appropriate, to make that claim, as there are professionals capable of making that assertation. (I did have a doctor who knows me really well ask me if I was autistic, though, kind of like a compliment.) From an accommodation standpoint, academically, I would need none for that disability as I am already on the record for 2 rare neurological diseases affecting my peripheral nervous system plus type 1 diabetes (autoimmune and insulin dependent), and I have enough help. One of those conditions is an autoimmune form of autonomic neuropathy that I have lived with since I was 3 or so, and it is believed that it caused the autoimmunity that caused my type 1 diabetes. The autonomic nervous system affects all sorts of things like even your propensity to socialize. Also, people with ASD often have autonomic dysfunction. Sorry to go off on a ramble, but I hope you found that interesting. This is the disease I am talking about, by the way: https://rarediseases.info.nih.gov/diseases/11917/autoimmune-...

As for the autistic identity, I don't see the point. I know who I am, so I do not need to claim it as an identity. So, those people who make an unnecessary huge deal out of it being their identity are taking it too far. Yes, it is part of who they are, but it is only a part.

Yeah, UDL is extremely difficult and I imagine that your specific type of UDL is really just starting to emerge. I guess for neuro-atypical people it comes down to UDL of curriculum, UDL of the physical spaces (arrangement and what is used physically in the space), and UDL of the environmental features of that space (ie temperature, lighting, humidity, etc.), which you likely all do. Also, how to deal with interaction utilizing UDL between neuro-atypical and neurotypical individuals is next-level difficult, which is probably the most crucial component.

But, you really are amazing! :-)

Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

#423

Post by kleer001 » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 4:06 PM UTC

seneca wrote: post #420

kleer001 wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You'll be surprised how far misinformation goes. Not a whit. It's been a hobby horse of mine for the last two decades. From Mk Ultra to Potempkin Villages to Contemporary Psyops, propaganda has provided nearly limitless dark entertainment for me. In fact I've sculpted my own aphorism: "Intelligence has the ability to construct reasonable sounding reasons for anything." It might have been pithier in an earlier itera…

I again find myself in agreement with you. As someone who has thought about this for some time, what's your take on what we actually ought to do about it? Is it simply intractable? Is it that from Odysseus to Bernays, the cunning will always fool the fool?

What I think should be done:

Less free stuff. Free online stuff does not feed quality. Money is the tie that binds. And free stuff binds us to advertisers. Youtube, twitter, facebook, etc, all go to paid tiers and registered accounts.

Eradicate the widespread use of comments. I hate to sound like an old, but go back to established gatekeepers for commentary like well educated editors at newspapers and magazines. Everyone doesn't need a publishing platform.

If that sounds class-ist I guess it kinda is, in a way. Everyone will still have access, but not everyone needs a voice because the structure to support that is corrosive as we've seen.

What I think is possible:

Like everything we learn mostly by making mistakes. Eventually we'll bang our heads against enough walls to find our way out.

In a generation or two people will discount online speech. Already the youngs are discounting facebook.

There will always be bullying, in person or online. There will always be fraud, in person or online. "Education" isn't a magic wand to sprinkle smart dust over the population. Again, even smart people make fundamental and sometimes existential mistakes.

The best we can do is make it harder for those shitty things to happen by performing tourniquets to the flow of free channels that feed online malignant cancer.

Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

#424

Post by kleer001 » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 4:12 PM UTC

BitwiseFool wrote: post #51

kleer001 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to a loose interpretation of Plato in The republic referencing the story of The Ring of Gyges anonymity basically ruins people. IMHO we'd need what we can't easily have, single-confirmed-identity-accounts for everyone. If Tim Berners Lee had been more of a pessimist, a historian, and a psychologist he might have baked in some end to end encryption with public/private key pairs and account centrality. But he…

I don't think verified identities would address the fakeness/authenticity problem because you could simply pay someone to shill with their verified account. Sure, you would know 'who' posted the opinion but you could never be sure if they were being compensated to do so. You also run into the issue of people being seemingly authentic with their views, but also being paid to promote them. Brooklyn Dad Defiant is a gre…

Yes, but it would cut down on the magnitude of promoted views. As it is now it's free. A motivated party can easily generate a seemingly honest and true and good faith crowd of thousands with some code and a bit of creativity. With verified accounts (again, it's nearly impossible to implement at this point) it would take a lot of money to get those thousand actual people.

IMHO getting rid of free twitter bots would be a good first step. And yes, I know lots of them do good. But does it balance out? Likely not. Maybe tie them to registered accts? There must be some way to clean house. And, no house is 100% clean, but 80% is better than 5%.

Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

#425

Post by banannaise » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 5:11 PM UTC

RileyJames wrote: post #396

natosaichek wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enforcement is the challenge. Without tracking down every reviewer, there is currently no way to determine whether a review was left by an employee of a covered/relevant company, or just a 'civilian.'

5% of revenue. Don't need to catch many, or often, to get the message across. The cost has to outweigh the risk. If it's still prevalent after 5 years, double it.

Don't take this as a serious criticism, but I look forward to the bizarro world where corporations compete to infiltrate and astroturf each other in ways that get their competitors fined into oblivion.

Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

#426

Post by banannaise » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 5:19 PM UTC

skohan wrote: post #3

I feel like authenticity of online communication is an unsolved problem. The web was supposed to be a democratizing platform: all you need to communicate with the world is an ISP and a keyboard. But if there's no way to control for authenticity, online sentiment will just be an arms race for who can pay for the best astroturfing.

The core problem of all of these things is basic financial inequality. Powerful corporations, whose views represent those of powerful individuals, can marshal absurd quantities of resources at a high level of coordination, neither of which can be matched by the less powerful. (This also applies to governmental bodies, which often function like corporations.)

Issues like astroturfing are just expressions of this imbalance of power.

You have to solve for the gross imbalance of power if you want to solve for anything else.

Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

#427

Post by SixDouble5321 » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 5:43 PM UTC

booleandilemma wrote: post #100

Why can't we just have a social network that requires you to sign up using your government ID? No bots, no fake accounts - problem solved. There won't be any anonymity on that network, sure, but there are plenty of other social networks where you can be anonymous.

Parler did this. When it was hacked, the reports said the copies of those IDs were in the exfiltrated data.

Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

#428

Post by rhizome » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 10:44 PM UTC

strken wrote: post #387

rhizome wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the corporate world "what it is" without the actions of these categories of employees? You may have the causation arrow pointing the wrong way, because to me, being more "reflective of reality," it's better worded as, "the corporate world is composed of the decisions, actions, and personalities of (sociopaths|opportunists), (the clueless|idealists), (losers|pragmatists)." Your choice of terminology is only a value…

The words absolutely do change the meaning of the principles. The idea that actual literal sociopaths are common in corporations is much more contentious than opportunists being common. Losers implies that going home at 5pm because you have other things going on in your life is morally wrong, in a way that pragmatists doesn't. Clueless implies that believing in the corporation is wrong, in a way that idealists doesn'…

The existence of "actual literal sociopaths" does not depend on the words used to describe them. If you use words other than "actual literal sociopath" to describe the actual literal sociopathic acts of a person, that doesn't mean they aren't an actual literal sociopath. I mean, if I understand your stance here, you're arguing for the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis to be true, which experimentation tells us is not[1]. See also: the "euphemism treadmill."[2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

2. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/euphemism_treadmill

Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

#429

Post by kleer001 » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 2:05 AM UTC

seneca wrote: post #420

kleer001 wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You'll be surprised how far misinformation goes. Not a whit. It's been a hobby horse of mine for the last two decades. From Mk Ultra to Potempkin Villages to Contemporary Psyops, propaganda has provided nearly limitless dark entertainment for me. In fact I've sculpted my own aphorism: "Intelligence has the ability to construct reasonable sounding reasons for anything." It might have been pithier in an earlier itera…

I again find myself in agreement with you. As someone who has thought about this for some time, what's your take on what we actually ought to do about it? Is it simply intractable? Is it that from Odysseus to Bernays, the cunning will always fool the fool?

What's your take on what we should do to thwart what can be thwarted?

Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

#430

Post by strken » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 11:54 PM UTC

rhizome wrote: post #428

strken wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The words absolutely do change the meaning of the principles. The idea that actual literal sociopaths are common in corporations is much more contentious than opportunists being common. Losers implies that going home at 5pm because you have other things going on in your life is morally wrong, in a way that pragmatists doesn't. Clueless implies that believing in the corporation is wrong, in a way that idealists doesn'…

The existence of "actual literal sociopaths" does not depend on the words used to describe them. If you use words other than "actual literal sociopath" to describe the actual literal sociopathic acts of a person, that doesn't mean they aren't an actual literal sociopath. I mean, if I understand your stance here, you're arguing for the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis to be true, which experimentation tells us is not[1]. See al…

I'm arguing that if you look at the actions of the group in question, "opportunist" is a better description of what they do than "sociopath". If you use the word "sociopath" then you've changed the meaning of the principle under discussion, because the language suggests "sociopaths" are real Antisocial Personality Disorder sociopaths, when that is observably not the case.

The research on linguistic relativity focuses on sensory perceptions that differ across languages. It's not applicable to the decision to claim that most of the managerial structure have a diagnosable mental illness when they clearly don't, by an English speaker in an essay read by other English speakers.