Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy • Hacker News Board

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#711

Post by alentist » Thu, Oct 07, 2021, 8:00 AM UTC

NoGravitas wrote: post #564

kypro wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're being downvoted because historically anti-authoritarianism has been associated with the left and that was where I always found myself politically. However, these days I would agree that a lot of people who consider themselves "anti-authoritarianism" are on the right. I don't think this is what OC meant though, but I've certainly found over the last few years my anti-authoritarianism positions have had…

Edward Snowden is absolutely a leftist (see this recent Twitter post, for example: https://mobile.twitter.com/Snowden/status/144519346396045721... ). Russel Brand is a leftist, though he sometimes speaks in ways the cultural left would rather he didn't. Glenn Greenwald and Julian Assange both certainly used to be leftists, and may still be at heart, but they've both let personal grudges define their alliances for the…

> Edward Snowden is absolutely a leftist

On what basis do you claim that? Does the following paint the picture of a leftist in your mind?

> And he became furious about Obama’s domestic policies on a variety of fronts. For example, he was offended by the possibility that the new president would revive a ban on assault weapons. “See, that’s why I’m goddamned glad for the second amendment,” Snowden wrote, in another chat. “Me and all my lunatic, gun-toting NRA compatriots would be on the steps of Congress before the C-Span feed finished.”

> At the time the stimulus bill was being debated, Snowden also condemned Obama’s economic policies as part of a deliberate scheme “to devalue the currency absolutely as fast as theoretically possible.” (He favored Ron Paul’s call for the United States to return to the gold standard.) [...] He sent Ron Paul two contributions of $250 during the 2012 presidential primaries.

Ayn Rand seems to have inspired his personal philosophy. [0]

[0] https://fee.org/articles/snowden-s-muse-was-ayn-rand-s-john-...

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#712

Post by alentist » Thu, Oct 07, 2021, 8:13 AM UTC

NoGravitas wrote: post #541

ddoolin wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conservative fear-mongering, recommending Ben Shapiro...am I really on HN?

Techbros are notably far-right. The hacker ethos died out when computing became profitable. This is just a case of people's views coming to align with their material conditions.

> Techbros are notably far-right.

I'm sure everything looks "far-right" from your far-left perspective.

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#713

Post by alentist » Thu, Oct 07, 2021, 9:12 AM UTC

woodruffw wrote: post #609

Jon_Lowtek wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Georg Orwell Not sure about "left-coded in contemporary American society" but he was an anarchist / social-liberal / social-democratic - albeit in terms of early 20 century western europa.

Orwell is a fantastic example. He's also a profoundly amusing example, since quoting him is inversely correlated with (1) actually agreeing with his politics, and (2) familiarity with (dystopian) fiction outside of a 10th grade English class.

Despite being a socialist, Orwell was very critical of the socialists of his time (especially the Soviets and Spanish communists), to the extent that he gradually became a Labour reformist later in life. In all, his most significant contribution, as he himself perceived it, was opposition to totalitarianism and to the corruption of language and thought by the political Left. On that, one can certainly "agree with his politics" without agreeing with all of it.

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#714

Post by inanutshellus » Thu, Oct 07, 2021, 12:48 PM UTC

handrous wrote: post #637

inanutshellus wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fatalist comment from GP distracted entirely from the value-add content and I added to that distraction. Blurg. :-\

Sorry y'all. I am prone to thinking technological determinism's more right than not, and to seeing the stable outcome of "games" as inevitable unless the terms of the games themselves can be altered, and there's usually not much interest in doing that. Maybe that makes me part of the problem, but I'm pretty sure nothing in the actual world would change if I flipped around to a "we can, actually, realistically, fix th…

Yessir, understood. There's just no positive outcome from agreeing with one's adversary that "resistance is futile".

Just say the same thing, without the whinging at the beginning and then we can have a discussion, futile or not.

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#715

Post by Jon_Lowtek » Thu, Oct 07, 2021, 11:04 PM UTC

alentist wrote: post #713

woodruffw wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Orwell is a fantastic example. He's also a profoundly amusing example, since quoting him is inversely correlated with (1) actually agreeing with his politics, and (2) familiarity with (dystopian) fiction outside of a 10th grade English class.

Despite being a socialist, Orwell was very critical of the socialists of his time (especially the Soviets and Spanish communists), to the extent that he gradually became a Labour reformist later in life. In all, his most significant contribution, as he himself perceived it, was opposition to totalitarianism and to the corruption of language and thought by the political Left. On that, one can certainly "agree with his…

I would argue that he was in opposition to the corruption of language and thought period. It doesn't matter by whom. It does not matter if those who abuse other are fascists, communists or capitalists. Left and Right are not sane political words, they are the very thing he criticized.

Orwell was a well reflected critical thinker and he spent a lot of time studying propaganda, social-political-philosophy and the life and reality of the lower class. He was a social-liberal but not a free-market-libertarian. These words have far more meaning then left and right. But more even then a social-liberal he was against "ideological-identity-ism" for lack of a better word.

Those who believe he was primarily an author of dystopian fiction should probably read "The Road to Wigan Pier" for some dystopian non-fiction. Those who claim to know his political opinions should read his collected essays. Anyone who can think critically will not not agree with all of them, but the world would be a better place if more people agreed with some of them.

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#716

Post by kahmeal » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 6:46 PM UTC

themacguffinman wrote: post #685

pixl97 wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scale totally matters. Many places have laws that personal use amounts of marijuana are not a crime, meanwhile selling tons of will put you in prison for life.

I'm sure marijuana laws like that exist, but are you going to argue that they're actually reasonable? A law with exemptions for small amounts of weed sounds pretty stupid to me and serves better as an example of how politics can twist legislation into duplicitous shapes rather than an example of good scale-sensitive lawmaking.

How daft can you be to think that scale makes no difference? You can drink water and be hydrated or you can drink too much water and die. Scale is critical in determining appropriate rules.

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#717

Post by arbitrage » Fri, Oct 15, 2021, 7:51 PM UTC

InsomniacL wrote: post #245

arbitrage wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean it's fairly well laid out of a topic. Which part specifically are you having trouble with?

are you a bot? I gave a specific example in the post you're replying to.

i don't think i'm a bot. what makes you say that?

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#718

Post by davidmanheim » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 3:28 PM UTC

mgraczyk wrote: post #239

calrueb wrote: post #143

I like to imagine there are a bunch of Facebook Homefeed engineers out there who ran dozens experiments, tuning this-and-that, and found the ones that boosted revenue, and user engagement by X%. No one thought too deeply at _why_ some experiments were successful. Perhaps it was chalked up as "our new ML model is matching users to content they care about more efficiently". Then they shipped it, and everyone celebrated…

I worked on the things you mentioned at Instagram, doing the tuning this-and-that for about a year on a few different surfaces including the home feed. You are right that for the most part, people look at metrics and make decisions about what to ship, and only the best engineers and data scientists spend time thinking about the actual product. However, you're wrong about what metrics are important. Since at least ear…

Others pointed out that it's hard to measure subjective factors well. I'd point to a different issue - if you have a metric for, say, wellbeing which is correlated with what you actually care about, putting pressure on other parts of the system - like maximizing engagement - will systemically warp those metrics to be less accurate.

For an extensive discussion of how this can happen, see: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.04585

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#719

Post by mgraczyk » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 4:08 PM UTC

davidmanheim wrote: post #718

mgraczyk wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked on the things you mentioned at Instagram, doing the tuning this-and-that for about a year on a few different surfaces including the home feed. You are right that for the most part, people look at metrics and make decisions about what to ship, and only the best engineers and data scientists spend time thinking about the actual product. However, you're wrong about what metrics are important. Since at least ear…

Others pointed out that it's hard to measure subjective factors well. I'd point to a different issue - if you have a metric for, say, wellbeing which is correlated with what you actually care about, putting pressure on other parts of the system - like maximizing engagement - will systemically warp those metrics to be less accurate. For an extensive discussion of how this can happen, see: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.04…

That's a good point, and definitely happens in places where I've worked.

On the other hand, I think Facebook is pretty good about constantly reevaluating metrics and trying to make sure that they track what the company actually cares about. The mechanism for this is partially embarrassment avoidance. If there are obvious egregious examples of violations that are not tracked by metrics, employees loudly complain and the company culture expects those responsible to explain what went wrong and how it will be fixed (better metrics).

From what I've seen in practice, this usually results in changing the engagement metrics rather than the well-being metrics. For example FB changed most raw engagement metrics to "authentic engagement" metrics at some point while I was there. Instead of counting total likes, you count likes from accounts that are not deemed to have participated in "inauthentic engagement" (you can read FB's blog for definitions).