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Engineered Addictions

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Re: Engineered Addictions

#191

Post by wonderwonder »

crawfordcomeaux wrote: post #157
wonderwonder wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear you but disagree. Who decides what the common good is? You end up with companies moralizing, forcing employees to adhere to those common goods in both their work and personal lives. Forcing people to get the vaccine was for the common good. DEI was common good and that in turn led to Trump being elected. The pendulum swings. At least with share holder value, you know where you stand. The common good is a const…

Common good: humans, according to systems theory, have the same needs and there's a finite set. We can map them & then design systems so as to satisfice all of them.

Over human history the best system we have come up with and implemented to ensure this has been capitalism. Nothing else has come close

Re: Engineered Addictions

#192

Post by fragmede »

Avicebron wrote: post #189
api wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t all this company is the product stuff an obvious side effect of wealth inequality? There is way way more money up top looking for investments than there is in the hands of customers, so it’s far more profitable to chase that money and make the stock the product than it is to care about the actual product much. It’s a special case of the more general big dumb money problem that happens whenever too much money en…

I would be willing to bet addiction in general (gambling, drug, dopamine, etc) is probably a symptom/side effect of wealth inequality. Desperation -> "relatively cheap method of short term emotional/sensory boost" -> Further Desperation not mitigated by outside forces -> repeat

Then rich people would never be addicted to things, but a history of musicians dying from drug overdoses says that's not true. Addiction is a deep topic that doesn't simplify into one neat little pet theory for it.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#193

Post by Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #76
throwawayoldie wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a better idea: let's combat the notion that putting shareholder value ahead of the common good is moral.

If I had to choose between common good and shareholder value all else being equal, I'd choose common good every time. We should be suspicious of games that favor shareholder value over common good and repair them. Of course this is harder than it sounds, but letting the person with the most money in a Monopoly game also set the rules is absurd and and obviously wrong. Wrong even without having a consensus reality on…

> If I had to choose between common good and shareholder value all else being equal, I'd choose common good every time.

Absolutely and me too. And that's why neither of us are actually CEO of anything (I assume)

Re: Engineered Addictions

#194

Post by mylifeandtimes »

smikhanov wrote: post #160
Aurornis wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People pay for software all the time. Well obviously some people would pay. The hurdle that a company needs to clear is getting enough people to pay to support both an engineering staff and the infrastructure costs. Do the math on how many people are necessary to run a web site with on-call rotation, minimum moderation, and someone to run the business. The number of $2/month subscription required to make that work…

Do the math on how many people are necessary to run a web site with on-call rotation, minimum moderation, and someone to run the business. The number of $2/month subscription required to make that work is prohbitively high. Is this really so? Let's try doing the math: you're describing a distributed team of maybe 10 people, likely less. Let's assume you need $600K/year to run this business (is this the right number?…

> Do the math on how many people are necessary... you're describing a distributed team of maybe 10 people, likely less. Let's assume you need $600K/year to run this business

Using the heuristic that HR costs are 2x the gross salary, the 10 people are earning 30K/year gross salary (no bonus). And I'm not leaving any room to pay for the compute/storage infra.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#195

Post by ants_everywhere »

crawfordcomeaux wrote: post #157
wonderwonder wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear you but disagree. Who decides what the common good is? You end up with companies moralizing, forcing employees to adhere to those common goods in both their work and personal lives. Forcing people to get the vaccine was for the common good. DEI was common good and that in turn led to Trump being elected. The pendulum swings. At least with share holder value, you know where you stand. The common good is a const…

Common good: humans, according to systems theory, have the same needs and there's a finite set. We can map them & then design systems so as to satisfice all of them.

Humans don't generally have the same needs, and to the extent they do they're competing over limited resources.

At one extreme you get theories like communism or socialism that treat humans as disposable cattle to be murdered or starved when they stand in the way of whatever the party leaders decide is the common good.

The common good is something that has to be worked out deliberatively and is more like taking the resultant of a huge number of force vectors than it is like mass producing units of the same good for everyone.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#196

Post by DaveZale »

Are we overthinking this?

Old school specialty sites are still around, with topics, categories, and discussions around the whole site emphasis.

As someone who likes to grow a little food in a semi-rural area, I enjoy permies.com - every day, a volunteer posts a new question or reposts a relevant topic, depending on the season or recent interest or whatever.

But they're not trying to make a billion dollars. Or even a million dollars.

That's why I like it. To raise funds, they sell books, playing cards, instructional videos. With non-invasive "tiny ads" which they self-parody.

Small is beautiful. The current internet is ruled by evil reptiles seeking to rip off your time, your data, your privacy, your friends... "Don't be evil" is dead and gone.

Turn back the clock 30 years. I did. And I'm happy.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#197

Post by Avicebron »

fragmede wrote: post #192
Avicebron wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be willing to bet addiction in general (gambling, drug, dopamine, etc) is probably a symptom/side effect of wealth inequality. Desperation -> "relatively cheap method of short term emotional/sensory boost" -> Further Desperation not mitigated by outside forces -> repeat

Then rich people would never be addicted to things, but a history of musicians dying from drug overdoses says that's not true. Addiction is a deep topic that doesn't simplify into one neat little pet theory for it.

Well it's not a neat little pet theory though, it's an opening up of the conversation, thinking in binary.. It's a "poor vs rich" disease isn't helpful. Thinking in gradients is... "It's 50% more likely in people with this income level vs 10% in this other population", that's still a problem. The point is to address problems, not hand wave them away as "complicated" etc etc, something something engineering

Re: Engineered Addictions

#198

Post by teaearlgraycold »

DaveZale wrote: post #196

Are we overthinking this? Old school specialty sites are still around, with topics, categories, and discussions around the whole site emphasis. As someone who likes to grow a little food in a semi-rural area, I enjoy permies.com - every day, a volunteer posts a new question or reposts a relevant topic, depending on the season or recent interest or whatever. But they're not trying to make a billion dollars. Or even a…

I use tildes.net quite a bit. It’s not for everyone but it’s great to have for those that like it.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#199

Post by fragmede »

Avicebron wrote: post #197
fragmede wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then rich people would never be addicted to things, but a history of musicians dying from drug overdoses says that's not true. Addiction is a deep topic that doesn't simplify into one neat little pet theory for it.

Well it's not a neat little pet theory though, it's an opening up of the conversation, thinking in binary.. It's a "poor vs rich" disease isn't helpful. Thinking in gradients is... "It's 50% more likely in people with this income level vs 10% in this other population", that's still a problem. The point is to address problems, not hand wave them away as "complicated" etc etc, something something engineering

the article is about digital addictions, and not gambling or drugs.

The point of saying it's complicated isn't to dismiss the problem, but to invite a deeper understanding of the problem itself so as to be better equiped to help solve the underlying issue, rather than show up, guns blazing, and then not actually fix anything.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#200

Post by Velorivox »

smikhanov wrote: post #123
Aurornis wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and then charging users $2/month to use it wouldn’t work? Commenters all across the internet will say they’d pay good money for a site that does something specific that sounds like a good idea. Then when the site is built, you will discover that they will not, in fact, pay any money for it at all. You will continue to add the features they request and the goalposts will continue to move. Social networks are even mo…

You description is probably spot on, but boy I’d love to have a version of Instagram where I could just pay $5/month and get a time-sorted stream of photos of my friends’ babies, Piña coladas with a beach background, and sweaty mirror selfies in a gym without any stupid ads in the middle.

You can do that in some places: https://help.instagram.com/923021729404927?helpref=faq_conte...
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