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Engineered Addictions

masonyarbrough.substack.com

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Re: Engineered Addictions

#261

Post by Nasrudith »

moefh wrote: post #140
sorcerer-mar wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should read a history book about why corporations were invented and allowed to exist.

There's an old saying: The purpose of a system is what it does[1]. You can't (well, shouldn't) judge something by its intended purpose if what it ends up doing goes against it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

That line is blatant projection on the part of central planners. Both in the sense of how they see the world and it must be planned rather than arising from interactions of independent parties and random vatiables and because it is casting their own flaws onto others.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#262

Post by armada651 »

jaredklewis wrote: post #229
klik99 wrote: post #20

> Then it raised venture capital, hit scale, and needed to hit growth numbers and meet quarterly metric goals. The focus shifted from “authenticity” to “daily active users.” Having spent a few years in the VC world I have been increasingly convinced outside investment is the biggest reason why companies lose their morals. The legal obligation to represent shareholders erodes morality. When the people running these co…

> The legal obligation to represent shareholders erodes morality This "legal obligation" is an internet rumor that does not exist in the real world. Yes, if your company has competing buyout offers of $1m and $2m and the board takes the $1m offer because they received a bribe, it will come up. Otherwise, it never does. The proof is in the pudding (please go find me even one case where shareholders have successfully i…

Just because the risk of getting successfully sued for making decisions against the interests of shareholders is low, it doesn't mean that it won't influence executive decision making. CEOs want to avoid legal risks above all else and thus the laws around fiduciary duty can have a chilling effect even if judges generally go along with the CEO's interpretation of what is in the interest of shareholders.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#263

Post by Nasrudith »

j7ake wrote: post #171
potatolicious wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think it honestly lets founders off the hook too much. In 95% of cases, the founder isn't smashing moral barriers because the VCs and shareholders are making them, or lording the threat of legal action or any some such. In 95% of cases, the founder is smashing through moral barriers because their interests are aligned with the VCs: because they think what they are doing will lead to stupendous mega-wealth for…

It’s also survivorship bias. Given that a start up has explosive growth, it way more likely that they are amoral. The ones who play the game with integrity and morals never have the type of growth that makes headlines. But I’m sure they exist.

That really doesn't follow. Explosive growth guarantees amorality? What sin is inherit to success? Has envy become so embedded in our thinking that success alone is proof of guilt? Or is it just Original Sin style bullshit where everone is automatically guilty?

Re: Engineered Addictions

#264

Post by moefh »

Nasrudith wrote: post #261
moefh wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an old saying: The purpose of a system is what it does[1]. You can't (well, shouldn't) judge something by its intended purpose if what it ends up doing goes against it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

That line is blatant projection on the part of central planners. Both in the sense of how they see the world and it must be planned rather than arising from interactions of independent parties and random vatiables and because it is casting their own flaws onto others.

I'm curious to know why you see it that way, as I don't interpret it like that at all.

Quite the opposite in fact: if anything it's a reaction to people who do try to understand a system by looking at its original plan: it says that you should disregard that and look at what the system actually does (which includes "interactions of independent parties and random variables", as you say).

In any case, that's how I meant it: it's a bit useless to dig up the original purpose of corporations in history books to talk about how corporations work today, like the comment I replied to suggested.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#265

Post by asdf6969 »

Jensson wrote: post #202
asdf6969 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Voting obviously works, you can vote away capitalism, some countries did that. The only reason it "doesn't work" is that the countries that did vote away capitalism didn't fare very well, so other countries people are very reluctant to try that again. But they absolutely could if they wanted.

Some countries “voted” to elect Putin and napoleon too…

Re: Engineered Addictions

#266

Post by ants_everywhere »

trinsic2 wrote: post #257
ants_everywhere wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

The word "Common Good" has a specific meaning. It steams from the word "Common" which means the people that share common values at our most basic levels, and "Good" means whats best for the people that share these common values. What you are talking about is imposed self-interest at the level of the population from one or a small population that do not represent the common good. Not the same thing IMHO.

That's not what common good is. Common good never requires that people share core values.

Common good historically was what's good for the city/polis/country/band/family. Basically, you make some (ideally relatively small) sacrifice to your own interest for the sake of a larger group you share fate with.

There are more formal/mathematical versions of it, for example in Bentham where the common good is essentially a weighted sum over the good to each individual. Rousseau described it almost exactly as the resultant of force vectors. There are more authoritarian versions like in historical Sparta and more recently in Marx and Engels where it's imposed through violence.

> imposed self-interest

I'm not sure exactly what you're saying here, but self-interest is almost by definition not externally imposed. In Marxism one particular vision of the common good is imposed externally via a "revolutionary terror."

Re: Engineered Addictions

#267

Post by Nasrudith »

alwa wrote: post #114
johncole wrote: post #64

Thought experiment: what if these apps were owned by non-profits? Would they still be addictive? I don’t think the VC money does much but accelerate the end state, the apps would become addictive if they were held privately their entire lifespan.

For that matter—the apps that communities are using that aren’t so aggressively exploiting addictive patterns—like the one you and I are using now—could it be that they’re at some level the norm, they’re just kind of boring beyond the small group of people who find them useful? Methamphetamine is flashy and destructive, and its supply chain and sales force are the sort of thing romanticized in Breaking Bad —but billi…

You should look at the history of tea closer, namely the Opium Wars and how the desire to not deflate their economy via consumption lead to it. Technically also a demonstration of the harm of bad economic practices likd precious metal standards and mercantalism as well.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#268

Post by Nasrudith »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #139
fullshark wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government regulation / laws

And whats more, there is only one law you need to change. You simply need to remove common carrier exemptions from hosts so that if false or misleading information is delivered to a user from a platform, that platform can be sued for damages. Its the rule that newspapers and TV need to live by, social media should play by the same rules. The platforms then simply need to protect themselves my making sure they accurat…

Goddamn it, that misinformation is like a fucking weed.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#269

Post by ants_everywhere »

trinsic2 wrote: post #254
carlosjobim wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After Stalin's death, the Soviet union wasn't a total failure. And few can argue that China is a total failure today. But they paid a much higher price than what's acceptable. To make a somewhat successful "common good" society you first need to exterminate large swatches of the population. (This includes Scandinavian countries, which is less common knowledge). Then you can build on the new generation which won't res…

Kind of sounds like what is happening now in the west under our current financial/economic system, albeit slowly by manufacturing crisis's and health problems to whittle down the population. >To make a somewhat successful "common good" society you first need to exterminate large swatches of the population It sounds like you are conflating "common good" with authoritarianism. Common good happens at the grass roots lev…

> when groups become to large people vie for attention which causes the most egoic people to try and dominate the areas that they are in.

You may be interested in this essay from the feminist movement in the 60s: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm. It describes how the lack of structure or process forces the group to be run primarily by social dynamics like friendship, charm and influence.

There are lots of effects that happen as groups scale. But this capture of consensus-based and flat groups by ego-centric charismatic members happens in even tiny groups.

That's why successful flat groups (e.g. parliaments) have structure (e.g. Robert's rules) and make decisions by majority vote rather than consensus.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#270

Post by hollerith »

I was addicted to reading newgroups using Larry Wall's trn program.

In trn, it is very easy to get a new screenful of text to appear, but it is hard to go back to what you were reading 3 screenfuls ago (unless you are still in the same message you were in 3 screenfuls ago, in which case, to get back, you could scroll up 3 times) which discourages reflection, which leaves fewer reasons not to constantly seek out the next dopamine hit (namely, the next passage of text that teaches you something).

My point is that neither trn nor the newsgroups were in any way VC-funded. There also weren't any non-VC-funded startups or companies involved: when I started browsing them in 1991, the software that ran the newsgroups was entirely designed, implemented and operated by volunteers. Yes, these volunteers mostly worked for tech companies, universities or governmental research labs (because in those days, most people with internet connectivity got it through their workplace and most normal workplaces did not have internet connectivity) but their involvement in the newsgroups did not figure into their employer's evaluation of their work performance.

My point is that VCs are not the whole of the problem. Not even the profit motive is the whole of the problem. The problem can show up in a program distributed under an open-source license for hobbyist or communitarian reasons.

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