The "Nosedive" episode of Black Mirror [0] is a nice thought experiment, where the whole person's life revolves around a social media score.
The Social Dilemma
391–400 of 421 posts
Re: The Social Dilemma
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a big difference when you take informed consent into account. When I go to the doctor I understand the scope and goals of my healthcare provider. I'm not surprised when my behaviors are changed to enhance my health. When the average person uses social media to connect with friends they aren't informed on the scope or goals of the social media provider. When I RSVP to a birthday party I only expect that my res…
> When I go to the doctor I understand the scope and goals of my healthcare provider. Are you sure about that? The fact that I have to sometimes argue for a test, and their counter argument isn't "the test isn't useful or even worse", but rather "the test is expensive" makes me wonder what their goal is. I'm paying for the test (or my insurance is), aren't I? It seems they're trying to optimize for something, but I'm…
Physicians have an ethical obligation not to order unnecessary treatments, especially those that could cause iatrogenic harm. That applies regardless of who is paying. Most tests produce some level of false positives, which can potentially lead to more unnecessary treatments.
From an evidence-based medicine standpoint, how likely are those tests to actually optimize your health?
Re: The Social Dilemma
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're refusing to engage with the point I'm making (as is your right). But just to summarize: - "Nobody could have foreseen people getting sick when we fed them these poisoned cakes! Oh if only I hadn't made these millions of dollars making people sick!" - "Actually, many people over decades have argued that people should be able to see and modify the recipes that go into their food." - "No, that's completely differ…
You fail to see the simple point Facebook's software runs on Facebook's computers. The four freedoms are not touched by that. People voluntarily use the services they provide. Besides that, the four freedoms include the freedom to use the software (Facebook's proprietary software, after all, runs on top of free software) for anything the user seems fit, including serving poisoned cakes and make billions of dollars ou…
> You fail to see the simple point Facebook's software runs on Facebook's computers.
a) This isn't strictly true. The Facebook app runs on users phones.
b) I don't know why you think this is a compelling argument. Why shouldn't we demand ethical behaviour from software accessed over a network? I can't tell if you're just a fatalist who can't even imagine expecting better, or if you really believe doing shitty things to your users doesn't count if you do it over TCP.
Re: The Social Dilemma
#394I don't understand this movie. I agree with the sentiment that social media is bad for people, especially youngsters, but I fail to see how advertising and corporations are to blame for the UX practices of social media websites (notifications, infinite scroll, liking posts etc), especially to the level that the movie makes it out to be. Sure, it is in Facebook's best interest to keep you on the site for as long as po…
Yeah, there was a lot of denouncing evil practices, and very little instrospection. Like with every human vice, there being bad agents exploiting the phenomenon shouldn't overshadow the fact that its deep rooted in how we work, because it risks precluding self-examination and self-awareness as a way out. Remember when the Flappy Bird guy removed the game from the store because it was too addictive for his liking? It…
Huh, I forgot about Flappy bird!! That pretty much hits the nail on the head. I agree blaming corporations sells better, but they really exaggerated it.
I just rewatched some of it and got to the bit on A/B testing and how it is mind control and we are all guinea pigs being manipulated... apparently every marketing department in every business, and every advertising company is now some evil puppet master controlling people without their consent!
Re: The Social Dilemma
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where is the evidence for this hypothesis that it’s easier than ever before ? Communists, Nazis had absolutely no trouble destroying truth. History is full of this.
Your argument of "we've overcome similar things before" was dealt with in the documentary: this is always adapting to hook you in better, it benefits from massive social pressure and it's fueled by billions of $. So actually we've never overcome anything like this before and no one had such power before to spread misinformation. One could argue that there's plenty of other reliable news sources, but for many reasons…
No, it hasn’t been dealt with. My point is prior to 2004 there was enormous amount of disinformation in the world that had no trouble spreading quickly. The documentary presented no evidence that somehow people are now misinformed more than they had been in the past. Social media is one way to spread both information and misinformation but it’s not the only way and it’s not clear that its net effect is that people are misinformed more than before. I remember the world before iPhones and Facebook and I’d say average person in that world was totally misinformed about many things.
Re: The Social Dilemma
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your argument of "we've overcome similar things before" was dealt with in the documentary: this is always adapting to hook you in better, it benefits from massive social pressure and it's fueled by billions of $. So actually we've never overcome anything like this before and no one had such power before to spread misinformation. One could argue that there's plenty of other reliable news sources, but for many reasons…
No, it hasn’t been dealt with. My point is prior to 2004 there was enormous amount of disinformation in the world that had no trouble spreading quickly. The documentary presented no evidence that somehow people are now misinformed more than they had been in the past. Social media is one way to spread both information and misinformation but it’s not the only way and it’s not clear that its net effect is that people ar…
> I remember the world before iPhones and Facebook and I’d say average person in that world was totally misinformed about many things.
Not nearly as misinformed as during the communist/nazi eras you mentioned above.
Re: The Social Dilemma
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you sure social networking is not expensive to provide? What makes you think so?
I think this is one of those "difficult to fully work through in a comment thread" topics. So, I don't expect to convince anyone that isn't already sympathetic to this point. That said... For a bottom-up argument, consider mostly text based media like twitter or whatsapp. If you're involved in similar tech, I think it's quite easy to roughly estimate both the development and infrastructure requirements for something…
Diaspora thought like you and went the length. Not sure how it played out, but iirc in the beginning they found it more work than they had expected. https://diasporafoundation.org/
I think there may be a lot more aspects to it that need attention than one anticipates at first.
Re: The Social Dilemma
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
not as catchy but much better than "If you're not paying then you are the product". Wikipedia free. Linux in all its flavors are free. Libre Office, Firefox, LLVM, gcc, python. Lots of things are I'm not paying and don't make me the product.
It's an interesting counterpoint, but I'd argue that none of those are really businessman or are expected to have revenue models. The exception being Firefox, which I believe is paid by Google for search engine placement and does make you the product.
businesses*.
Re: The Social Dilemma
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speaking from personal experience - I watched the film with my girlfriend and a lot of it was news to her. It's changed her relationship with social media and technology. I also suggested it to a friend who was pretty addicted to Facebook and believed a lot of conspiracy theories. It's made him realise how FB has given him (and others) a distorted picture of reality. He's now disconnected from Facebook and only keepi…
This movie hasn't been out long, you sure your friends won't be up to their old ways in a month or two?
I don't know, but they've got a hell of a lot more of a chance now that they're actually aware of the issues.
Re: The Social Dilemma
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ads are definitely a large part of the problem, but they are not the only problem. Ads are what turn us from customers into cattle, yes, but I think that online services could be almost as bad if we paid for them. Indeed, micropayments might actually result in many of the same issues as ads do: in a world with micropayments for each page load, publishers would still want to increase engagement, because that would dir…
Examining my own behavior, I do see a lot of the last part of your comment. Even as someone who recognizes the potential for abuse when you have incredibly detailed models of people and can use them to manipulate behavior, it's not as obvious as another subscription fee. I have a strong bias against any sort of automatically recurring charge. In some ways I'm very illogical about it--yearly subscriptions like Amazon…
What if we actually got paid for the data collection? Like UBI through the tech giants. Maybe then you have an issue where it's like the more you use the more cash you get, or maybe it's just a flat payment i.e. if you have even a single facebook account and they've used your data in some way, you get the payment?
God, this is when the lawyers get involved! YUCK!