41–50 of 204 posts
We are in the age of "virtue signalling" people pretend to hold what they believe are popular virtues. Is it possible to mention "Donald Trump" and not cause an uproar of virtue signalling?
In one model of human behavior we all just become better people because we self-censor. I think that may be true for the first generation of people experiencing these effects in a society. Later generations will have more of a problem. The problem comes when they repress negative emotions and other status detractors because the cost of even being aware of them is too high. Then you have people who, in psychological t…
I was going to write at length about my concerns on this topic, and then I decided not to. Because it's entirely possible that one day many years from now, a prospective employer/insurer/whatever finds such a comment and flags me for it. That's the cooling effect in a nutshell.
Maybe an antidote to this phenomenon is for us to collectively go punk on it. If everyone trolls nobody trolls.
I think the creator may be better off conducting a through philosophical investigation in efforts of pinning down the concept. You would be much better off giving full citations to Foucault and Deleuze, and full analysis into the Snowden incident and the fallout rather than a sort of half nod to, what I think, are the foundation beams of this concept. This page kind of assumes the audience is already willing to admit…
Being trained as a media theorist I understand your criticism (and am going to check out Horkheimer's essay, thanks for the tip!).
But this website purposefully tries to keep things accessible in order to reach a wider audience.
I often see how academics have a deep understanding of what's going on, but just aren't as good at spreading that insight to a wider audience, like the startup community.
I really feel that engineers need to wake up to this kind of thing. I'm not saying we should stop (although that's what might happen), just that we pause and consider what this is doing to the world. It is the undercurrent for so many profound changes going on right now. Are we really comfortable as individuals building systems which predict someones mental (ill) health, personality traits or ethnicity just so we can…
It's like any other thing in capitalism. You'll have a contingent of folk that won't do the work, based on ethical reasons, and you have folk that will, for financial reasons. Anecdotally, the few folks I know that work for data collection companies are all "tinfoil hat" types. They have flip-phones, they have no online presence, they smile like a Cheshire Cat when you ask them about it and you generally get the impr…
I was going to write at length about my concerns on this topic, and then I decided not to. Because it's entirely possible that one day many years from now, a prospective employer/insurer/whatever finds such a comment and flags me for it. That's the cooling effect in a nutshell.
I sometimes worry that old HN comments will bother me in the future. HN doesn't allow you to scrub your history. But ultimately I say fuck this. Maybe it'll be for my own good, ensuring that future employers and partners will not be the kinds of people who would care about such things. Might be a great moron filter. Maybe an antidote to this phenomenon is for us to collectively go punk on it. If everyone trolls nobod…
I really feel that engineers need to wake up to this kind of thing. I'm not saying we should stop (although that's what might happen), just that we pause and consider what this is doing to the world. It is the undercurrent for so many profound changes going on right now. Are we really comfortable as individuals building systems which predict someones mental (ill) health, personality traits or ethnicity just so we can…
It's like any other thing in capitalism. You'll have a contingent of folk that won't do the work, based on ethical reasons, and you have folk that will, for financial reasons. Anecdotally, the few folks I know that work for data collection companies are all "tinfoil hat" types. They have flip-phones, they have no online presence, they smile like a Cheshire Cat when you ask them about it and you generally get the impr…
That is true, but going on my peers (especially the ones fresh from university), I think a dangerous proportion of people simply aren't aware on any level of the ethical implications of what they do. It's that which worries me.
A related question: can privacy be quantified? And if so, how? On what bases? Thoughts I've had: Total quantity of data available? Ability to define boundaries? Ability to enforce those boundaries? Knowledge of what boundaries to even define? Who knows what about a person? How many agents know what? How aware is the subject of actual knowlesdgee? How rapidly can that knowledge be further transferred? Does the surveil…
Anyway, I think you're forgetting one important dimension: whether the person in question would like that particular piece of information to be known.
The first thing I thought of was the "Nosedive" episode of Black Mirror this season. Seems more and more plausible every day.
What is missing is a government actively pushing this scheme - which China is doing with their "social credit score". An intermediate step would be selling of derived data to anyone, not just companies interested in hiring you but really anybody.
I really feel that engineers need to wake up to this kind of thing. I'm not saying we should stop (although that's what might happen), just that we pause and consider what this is doing to the world. It is the undercurrent for so many profound changes going on right now. Are we really comfortable as individuals building systems which predict someones mental (ill) health, personality traits or ethnicity just so we can…
I don't think there's any risk of that. As I pull out my favorite quote for the last few months: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair Very few people in the upper echelons of society (like highly-paid Silicon Valley engineers) truly believe they're doing something wrong, or could even be convinced they are doing something wrong.…
One of my favourite quotes too, but I refuse to accept it as law.
If people really do work at places like Google, Uber and Palantir to make the world a better place, then it suggests they would care if they are making the world a worse place inadvertantly, right? In which case it just takes education.
If, on the other hand, they don't want to look too deeply into the social consequences of what they work on, then that is more difficult to deal with.
All of these companies (especially Google) make some fantastic contributions. I just wish sometimes engineers looked up from the keyboard to see the bigger social picture.