171–180 of 840 posts
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I'd be fine with shorts if they didn't disable the normal player controls.
Yet another reason to use NewPipe or SmartTube rather than the YouTube app or the browser.
> We’ve all been Marl at one time or another This, to me, is the key line in this quite good article. It's not that software companies are catering to those other people who are infinitely stupid and deserving of our scorn. It's that they are catering to the worse impulses in all of us and encouraging us to become those people.
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> There are some things that you simply CANNOT express in a "free market" because the measure of their success cannot be expressed in market terms. Sure you can. If you want to measure the success of your matchmaking company in market terms, you could charge users for your matchmaking service and then return their money if they don't get married. You put your money where your mouth is by betting on the success of the…
There's also the issue of having a bunch of cash on hand to pay out. Plenty of companies do unlimited PTO or bar PTO roll-over, specifically to limit the liability of payouts. Also, if the relationship is abusive and the abused spouse is beaten into a marriage, are they owed a refund upon divorce? Death? Incentivizing speedy marriages, as opposed to good matches, is unambiguously bad for individuals and society at la…
That's a good idea. In this hypothetical app, if a couple stays together for a couple of years they should forfeit the right to get their money back even if they later break up. This reduces the amount of cash the company has to keep, at the cost of merely promising years-long relationships instead of marriages.
> Incentivizing speedy marriages, as opposed to good matches, is unambiguously bad for individuals and society at large.
How is that unambiguous? It seems to me like an empirical question. Are people taking too many risks with their relationships, or too little? The answer is different for each person, or even for the same person at different stages of their life. Very ambiguous stuff.
This can only be solved by company owners caring more about the usefulness of their product than about profit maximization. Being merely profitable should be fine. Being profitable should be a vehicle for creating and maintaining a good product, and not the other way around.
This also means that metrics like DAU and automated methods like A/B testing are no substitute for having good judgement, listening to users, and doing in-person usability studies.
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If you pack the whole problem into a definition of "worth living", then you're right. But the premise is that there is a range from extreme misery through neutral through extremely happy. The repugnant conclusion is that it is better to have many people in a state that is barely above neutral.
I'm not the one packing it, the setup of the problem does it. "Barely above neutral" means you've picked an acceptable state. And then we are supposed to consider that acceptable state "repugnant"?
It's not that the acceptable state of 1.01 is repugnant, it's that the conclusion seems counterintuitive and ethically problematic to many people, as it suggests that we should prefer creating a massive population of people who are barely happy over a smaller population of people who are very happy.
> We’ve all been Marl at one time or another This, to me, is the key line in this quite good article. It's not that software companies are catering to those other people who are infinitely stupid and deserving of our scorn. It's that they are catering to the worse impulses in all of us and encouraging us to become those people.
It's a very good point that I think some commenters here should take to heart. No matter how enlightened we think we are, we're all part of the masses and behave this way at one point or another.
I wonder whether the flattening of product depth is a unique founder effect, or is destined to happen due to the eventual formation of monopolies? Take photo sharing as an example. Early Flickr was amazing. It had tons of features - great varied groups of all types, a huge licensed image search system, great tags, etc. I joined regional groups, and also criticism groups for street photos, etc. Their comment system wa…
>Then yahoo killed it and now Instagram rules, with fewer features, more addiction and less depth. Flickr had addiction loops too but that wasn't the main focus. Though Flickr does exist (owned by SmugMug). No idea how their finances are. I expect so so. You're right that community has gone away to a large degree. But I'm not sure how much power Flickr had to influence that other than becoming Instagram--which the pr…
> Here’s what I’ve been able to piece together about the marginal user. Let’s call him Marl. The first thing you need to know about Marl is that he has the attention span of a goldfish on acid. Once Marl opens your app, you have about 1.3 seconds to catch his attention with a shiny image or triggering headline, otherwise he’ll swipe back to TikTok and never open your app again. This is hilarious and sad because it fe…
If this were true, the app probably wasn't worth having in the first place. An app that actually does something Marl needs, or enables him to do something he wants to do doesn't need to catch his attention with shiny things. The thing that will hook Marl is accomplishing what he set out to do, and generally that should be possible without spending a bunch of time customizing settings, but having sensible defaults doesn't mean those options/settings aren't valuable.
Marl doesn't need to change, and it'd be a shame if he (most users) were forced to tinker with a bunch of settings and change a bunch of defaults to do the things they want. Flexibility and customization is still important for the folks who need that though and useful software that does a good job offering that while also having sane defaults have an opportunity to be popular with everybody.
The tyranny of the marginal user reminds me of population ethics' The Repugnant Conclusion.[0] This is the conclusion of utilitarianism, where if you have N people each with 10 happiness, well then, it would be better to have 10 N people with 1.1 happiness, or 100 N people with 0.111 happiness, until you have infinite people with barely any happiness. Substitute profit for happiness, and you get the tyranny of the ma…
The Repugnant Conclusion is one of those silly problems in philosophy that don’t make much sense outside of academics. Utilitarianism ought to be about maximizing the happiness (total and distribution) of an existing population. Merging it with natalism isn’t realistic or meaningful, so we end up with these population morality debates. The happiness of a unconceived possible human is null (not the same as zero!) Comp…
> Utilitarianism ought to be about maximizing the happiness (total and distribution) of an existing population
For those who accept your claim above, lots of stuff follows, but your claim is a bold assertion that isn't accepted by everyone involved, or even many people involved.
The repugnant conclusion is a thought experiment where one starts with certain stripped-down claims not including yours here and follow it to its logical conclusion. This is worth doing because many people find it plausible that those axioms define a good ethical system, but the fact they require the repugnant conclusion causes people to say "Something in here seems to be wrong or incomplete." People have proposed many alternate axioms, and your take is just one which isn't popular.
I suspect part of the reason yours isn't popular is
- People seek axiological answers from their ethical systems, so they wish to be able to answer "Are these two unlike worlds better?" -- even if they aren't asking "What action should I take?" Many people want to know "What is better?" so they explore questions of what are better, period, and something they want is to always to have such questions be answerable. Some folks have explored a concept along the lines of yours, where sometimes there just isn't a comparison available, but giving up on being able to compare every pair isn't popular.
- We actually make decisions or imagine the ability to make future real decisions that result in there being more or fewer persons. Is it right to have kids? Is it right to subsidize childbearing? Is it right to attempt to make a ton of virtual persons?
> The happiness of a unconceived possible human is null (not the same as zero!)
Okay, if you say "Total utilitarianism (and all similar things) are wrong", then of course you don't reach the repugnant conclusion via Parfit's argument. "A, B, C implies D", "Well, not B" is not a very interesting argument here.
Your null posing also doesn't really answer how we _should_ handle questions of what to do that result in persons being created or destroyed.
> We really shouldn’t get ourselves tied into knots about the possibility of pumping out trillions of humans because an algorithm says they’ll be marginally net content. That’s not the end goal of any reasonable, practical, or sane system of ethics.
Okay, what is the end goal? If you'll enlighten us, then we can all know.
Until then, folks are going to keep trying to figure it out. Parfit explored a system that many people might have thought sounded good on its premises, but proved it led to the repugnant conclusion. The normal reaction is, "Okay, that wasn't the right recipe. Let's keep looking. I want to find a better recipe so I know what to do in hard, real cases." Since such folks rejected the ethical system because it led to the repugnant conclusion, they could be less confident in its prescriptions in more practical situations -- they know that the premises of the system don't reflect what they want to adopt as their ethical system.