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Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

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Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#651

Post by Hammershaft »

imgabe wrote: post #372
djabatt wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "lean in" people and incentives have made society suffer for profit. Perhaps we can define a better set of incentives that reward companies of people building products.

We can. It's called pay directly for the services you use. It is a time-honored system where you give providers money in exchange for goods and services. In response, their incentive is to keep you happy and healthy and prosperous so you can continue to give them money.

> In response, their incentive is to keep you happy and healthy and prosperous so you can continue to give them money.

Their incentive is to find a way to get your money; we can see in the world around us that many of them have no problem if you're insecure, addicted, and indebted.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#652

Post by burnished »

wpietri wrote: post #373
burnished wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may be missing the point if you think your point is orthogonal to theirs. Mark Zuckerberg doesn't have to be painted as a reptiloid in order for his actions to be bad, or for those actions to cause harm. More than blaming shit needs to get fixed right? We can still hold people culpable, but we don't need to do that, don't need to indict anyone before trying to fix a problem that is self perpetuating due to indivi…

The senior execs are the ones who set up the incentive systems there. They are the ones who are richly paid to provide oversight. So either this is exactly what they want or they're hopelessly incompetent. And yes, I think we should change the incentives. We should change them such that executives face direct personal punishment for negligent or intentional harm. We should have learned that lesson during the 2008 fin…

Again, this

>>We should change them such that executives face direct personal punishment for negligent or intentional harm. We should have learned that lesson during the 2008 financial crisis, but instead nobody did time

does not contradict anything else.

But this

>>So either this is exactly what they want or they're hopelessly incompetent.

is incorrect. Those are not the only two options. Reality is typically more complex, and more boring than that. Doing harm does not require willful malice or profound stupidity and trying to reduce it down to that does no one any good.

Not that after investigation we could find that it was really one of those two cases for many people! But 'negligent harm', which is something you want people to be held accountable (me too!), does not require gross incompetence. It can be as simple as ignoring a couple inconvenient truths and being insulated from the consequences of ones decisions, or the cumulative outcome caused by the group.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#653

Post by kraf »

> Facebook and subsequently Instagram thrive on interaction. The company is only profitable if it keeps you on its platform and it will do anything to keep you there, even at the cost of your own health.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#655

Post by solveit »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #576
trhway wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And who is going to break up TikTok or whatever comes next/instead? The social media is like tobacco, and FB increasing the engagement at all costs is like when Big Tobacco were increasing addictiveness of the cigarettes. Like with tobacco, the way to deal with the issue is to wean the population off by in particular educating the population about the damage it does to them . Btw, "Statement from Mark Zuckerberg" - t…

To be fair to the guy, he was 19 then. Who amongst us hasn't said something (many things, in my case at least) stupid at 19?

Also, he was right. People shouldn't have sent Zuck their private info even if Zuck were a saint, because there was no way they could have known Zuckerberg was a saint.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#656

Post by Yoric »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #491
intended wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The base problem isn’t really solveable, and its as much of a public discussion on what we want to do with speech first, before its a question of how we want Social Media firms to act. In the end, there is no algorithm which can match the scale of bad content, no robust definition of bad content which can work without creating a flood of false positives. Every false positive is now someone who had something valid to…

its hard to say the problem isn't really solveable when nobody has really tried to begin with.

There are academic researchers and private teams all over the planet attempting to find solutions to disinformation, bullying and even spam.

Of course, it's pretty clear by now that there isn't going to be a magic bullet that is going to make everybody happy.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#657

Post by Yoric »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #590
zestyping wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the point Frances Haugen is making, and it's why this is so different and so much more significant than the other Facebook scandals and leaks in the past. Haugen repeated over and over again her testimony today that Facebook is full of smart, thoughtful, kind, well-intentioned people, and that she has great empathy for them, even Mark Zuckerberg. Her point is that they have created a system of incenti…

> they have created a system of incentives that are inexorably leading to harmful outcomes If the people inside are "smart, thoughtful, kind, well-intentioned people", they would have tried to work around the incentive, influence them, denounce them, or quit. It rarely happened. Most of the time, the just take the money, and goes with the flow.

A long time ago, I worked in a startup full of smart, thoughtful, kind, well-intentioned people. Of course, there was also a CEO who was a ruthless manipulator and managed to make everyone believe that they were working for the greater good. In truth, in the course of lining his pockets, he was in the process of destroying several employees and former employees.

Getting past the illusion was hard.

Taking a stand against said CEO while nobody else was aware of the problem? Really, really hard.

Now, instead of a few dozen employees, Facebook has tens of thousands. I assume that all of them are subject to permanent propaganda, as in many tech companies, and that the semi-official word is that they are being misunderstood by the rest of the world, because of course they are doing the right thing but the problem is harder than people think (well, that last part is true, at least). I suspect that it's even harder to go against the flow.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#658

Post by Yoric »

luckydata wrote: post #455
zestyping wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the point Frances Haugen is making, and it's why this is so different and so much more significant than the other Facebook scandals and leaks in the past. Haugen repeated over and over again her testimony today that Facebook is full of smart, thoughtful, kind, well-intentioned people, and that she has great empathy for them, even Mark Zuckerberg. Her point is that they have created a system of incenti…

By the way let's give a name to that system, it's called "PSC". Google it. It's the most absurd and ineffective performance management system I've ever witnessed. It creates a Hunger Games mentality within teams and makes doing anything that actually matters virtually impossible, generating an infinite sequence of half assed 6 months projects that get systematically abandoned as soon as the people responsible manage…

The descriptions of PSC I've seen don't look that bad. Do you have details about what's wrong with it?

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#659

Post by fshbbdssbbgdd »

BobbyJo wrote: post #654
fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the equivalent of geoengineering for Facebook?

Offering every user a free Zoloft prescription.

It’s a fun idea!

Although if this plan were viable, one can imagine the Zoloft marketing department would have already purchased the ad space. The limiting factor is probably the need for a psychiatrist to approve a prescription for every patient. Most users in developed countries are already eligible to get the itself drug for free, or at least cheaply.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#660

Post by Yoric »

ashtonkem wrote: post #619
pmp11pmp wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zuckerberg is simply over his head and I think he knows it(I certainly wouldn't want to be in his shoes). I don't think he's evil I think he was enamored of this toy he built, he pushed it in very logical "business" directions, and now it's been adopted by so many people and its so big, its business model is having real world impact where I'm sure he'd prefer, from an intellectual perspective, that it acted totally p…

Nobody is forcing him to keep doing this. He’s waking up every day and making the choice to keep running FB today the same way he ran it yesterday. He could just quit

Sure, but... what would that change?
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