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Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco

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Re: Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco

#271

Post by danielmarkbruce »

vasco wrote: post #268
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are an oil company entering the futures market to reduce your risk on oil prices, you aren't gambling. If I enter the market and short oil for fun, I'm gambling. The stock market isn't gambling if you are just buying equities - you are literally purchasing a small stake in a company. The fact that prices move around a lot doesn't make it gambling per se. If I offered a new price on your house every day, it doe…

Reducing risk is a form of gambling. You're just betting on the "please don't" rather than the "please do". The point is always the same, you want to end up better off than others that didn't buy what you bought. If the oil futures purchase turns out to have been worthwhile because price went up due either to production going down or demand up, that doesn’t somehow create new oil. You just get to buy it cheaper than…

No, it isn't. That's just not the definition that is used by people who gamble and are in financial markets. Words have definitions. No one uses the word "gambling" when they buy insurance on their house. They payoff is contingent, but it's not creating risk for it's own sake.

Re: Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco

#272

Post by nonameiguess »

notsirius wrote: post #141
throwyawayyyy wrote: post #74

I do wonder about intent. Meta has spent 20 years paying its engineers and others vast amounts of money to Increase Engagement, and punishes those who fail to find ways to do so (over the past few years, by firing them). And it's worked! Engagement has increased greatly over the years, Meta survived the effective end of Old social media (you know, the stuff from your friends) and thrives in the new world of infinite…

have worked in analytics for a while. Engagement is a very broad category. Not all engagement metrics are toxic. For example, daily active users is healthy for a business to measure and is engagement. Commenting on Hackernews is engagement. Meta also has a wide range of engagement metrics - not all of which are problematic

Interesting to choose Hacker News as an example. I'm sure they measure every metric that can be measured, but it'd be interesting to see what measures they actually care about doing well on. The stated goal of the site is pretty explicitly not to be as engaging as possible. It's to satisfy intellectual curiosity. They make plenty of design choices for the express purpose of not being addictive. No infinite scroll. No personalized feed. No ability to subcribe to or follow particular users or topics. No visual or audio content. No previews. Automatic editing of clickbait titles to be less clickbaity. Built-in ability to temporarily ban yourself if you're spending too much time here.

It's not the measurement that is toxic. It's what measures you optimize for that can become toxic.

Re: Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco

#273

Post by hgomersall »

gloryjulio wrote: post #265
hgomersall wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you think they are gambling?

Because investing conservatively is not gambling. Your definition of gambling is weirdly associated of how money is made, instead of risk making. Nobody uses this word in this way. Gambling is about of risk. It's not about how you are making the money For example, it's also possible to be actively taking part in the money making activity while taking unnecessary risk. A person can run his own company but recklessly m…

That's the point. Most financial investment is really putting money into something higher risk to get a (hopefully) higher return. Most "investing conservatively" is just being a bit more wary as to what risks are acceptable.

Re: Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco

#274

Post by Groxx »

Aurornis wrote: post #125
Groxx wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like you don't have to rule it out completely? "You might also like this show" is rather different than YouTube's "OMFG SHORTS WATCH THEM NOW" experience. Even if the line is fuzzy, I think many can agree some things are closer than others, and that's enough for some laws (there are plenty of other not-perfectly-testable laws out there as counterexamples).

> Seems like you don't have to rule it out completely? This is what I was talking about in the second half of my comment: Every time I bring up the fact that these proposals would be overbearing, people start brainstorming infinite carve outs and exceptions that would exempt the products they use, but harm the products they don’t want other people using. If these laws hit the books they’re not going to be neatly shap…

That seems inevitable for laws that try to address private behavior, yes. It'll waffle around and strike randomly as it gets tested more and more in court to narrow the definition, and that gradually causes a chilling effect around the whole concept. The only real consideration worth having is "will things be better after", not "will my life be unchanged".

Re: Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco

#275

Post by skinfaxi »

StilesCrisis wrote: post #228
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But that applies to having money at all. That can't be enough to call it gambling. It is, because there's no choice not to gamble. You have to make choices, and none of those choices are risk-free. The options are on a scale between low-risk negative-return and high-risk high-return. But the risk is never zero - not even in FDIC insured accounts - and there's an element of randomness involved in the outcomes. That's…

Government-backed bonds are the intended zero-risk option. You know exactly how much you will get and it is designed to track inflation (sorta). If you don't believe in that, precious metals are another way to go. I don't personally subscribe to that theory but that's the idea.

I think your parent's point is even larger than that. To be alive is to engage with risk. There are no stores of value that withstand all decay.

Re: Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco

#276

Post by gloryjulio »

hgomersall wrote: post #273
gloryjulio wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because investing conservatively is not gambling. Your definition of gambling is weirdly associated of how money is made, instead of risk making. Nobody uses this word in this way. Gambling is about of risk. It's not about how you are making the money For example, it's also possible to be actively taking part in the money making activity while taking unnecessary risk. A person can run his own company but recklessly m…

That's the point. Most financial investment is really putting money into something higher risk to get a (hopefully) higher return. Most "investing conservatively" is just being a bit more wary as to what risks are acceptable.

> That's the point. Most financial investment is really putting money into something higher risk to get a (hopefully) higher return.

It's about risk adjusted returns, not higher returns. If you are not considering the risk assessment you are objectively wrong. Take my previous example, how is actively working with you money by taking higher risk less gambling, than passively investing for example an all weather portfolio which is designed to preserve the capital? An all weather portfolio is firstly proposed by Ray Dalio to be as conservative as possible to hedge against all kind of risks while hopefully get some gain.

> Most "investing conservatively" is just being a bit more wary as to what risks are acceptable.

That's objectively wrong. For example lots of etf is designed to reduce risk by diversifying the investment. Just take your own just put money in the bank example. Suppose you do not live in stable country US/EU, and your country is having high inflation. How is just putting money in the bank with your country's depreciating currency less risky than let's say you invest in a global portfolio or an all weather portfolio? In this case, by not managing your risk profile, you are taking more risk.

I am only giving out 1 example to show that `Most financial investment is really putting money into something higher` is objectively wrong. It's actually the opposite if you look into how portfolio managing works. Majority of the funds managed for the Sovereign state or the rich are about hedging against the risks, it's the opposite of gambling.

Re: Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco

#277

Post by c22 »

vasco wrote: post #268
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are an oil company entering the futures market to reduce your risk on oil prices, you aren't gambling. If I enter the market and short oil for fun, I'm gambling. The stock market isn't gambling if you are just buying equities - you are literally purchasing a small stake in a company. The fact that prices move around a lot doesn't make it gambling per se. If I offered a new price on your house every day, it doe…

Reducing risk is a form of gambling. You're just betting on the "please don't" rather than the "please do". The point is always the same, you want to end up better off than others that didn't buy what you bought. If the oil futures purchase turns out to have been worthwhile because price went up due either to production going down or demand up, that doesn’t somehow create new oil. You just get to buy it cheaper than…

When I invest I don't really care if I end up better off than others. I'm just hoping to catch some slice of the ongoing economic growth so my at-rest wealth doesn't become devalued by inflation.

Re: Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco

#278

Post by tzs »

mook wrote: post #164
meowkit wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Do you use personal / behavioral data / usage to shape the user experience and recommendations, creating a reinforcing loop?” Roughly that.

I think a better take is: > Do you use personal / behavioral data / usage to shape the user experience and recommendations? You do not get covered by Section 230. If they get to exercise editorial powers, then it doesn't make sense for them to be protected from liability for choosing what to publish. If they just give you a giant firehose, then they're not doing anything editorially and they should not have any liabi…

That's not at all how Section 230 works. There's a popular myth that it distinguishes between "publishers" (who make editorial decisions about what content is shown and how it is shown) and "platforms" that just host it with minimal interference, but that is in fact just a myth.

However, I don't really see how Section 230 is even relevant here. What Section 230 protects them from is for being liable for what is in the individual user posts posted to Facebook. It essentially just makes it so that if you have a beef with what someone posts on Facebook and want to sue you sue the poster rather than Facebook.

What is being alleged is that Facebook's decisions in how to arrange and present and show or not show that user content has harmed people. Those are things that are not in scope for 230.

Re: Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco

#279

Post by tzs »

atmavatar wrote: post #166
matrix87 wrote: post #25

This seems really messy. We regulate gambling because it's a specific thing, but how do you differentiate a non-addictive platform vs an addictive platform? (aside from this specific company... I mean in general). How do you "test" whether or not they're inherently addictive? At least in this specific instance, they can look at the blast radius and make a determination. But this feels legally unsatisfying in the gene…

A simple first step to me would be to update the DMCA so that platforms using engagement-maximizing algorithms lose their section 230 protections. If you're targeting individuals with specific content algorithmically, you're hardly a dumb platform for user-generated content, and I would argue that it's well over the line that would classify you as a publisher.

Section 230 has nothing whatsoever to do with any distinctions or differences between "publishers" and "platforms". That's just an internet myth.

In fact protecting publishers from liability for user generated content was one of the main points of section 230.

Re: Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco

#280

Post by owebmaster »

yard2010 wrote: post #181
pertymcpert wrote: post #120

Meta employees reading this: whether you work in Reality Labs, ads, operations, ML compiler, LLMs, marketing, whatever. You're all complicit in the harm. Remember that.

Even those working on React? Asking for a friend

Even bigger harm since Vercel/nextjs takeover
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