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Former Google and Facebook execs are sounding alarms about the power of tech
- qrbLPHiKpiux 9y agoTech will only eat your soul if you let it.
- throwanem 9y ago"Addiction to heroin is a failure of willpower."
- andai 9y agoIf you know heroin will eat your soul, perhaps consider not doing heroin? It might be hard, but a lot easier than stopping once you've started.
- JumpCrisscross 9y agoBetween your poles is the temperate ground that in order to battle the scourge that is heroin addiction, one need first not be addicted to heroin. Disconnecting is not, by itself, enough. But controlling our own overexposure is a first step towards finding a general solution.
- andai 9y agoOK, my "have you tried not being addicted to heroin" sounded stupid. Let me rephrase: "Have you tried not living a life that's so sad that heroin actually seems like a good idea?" It works for nonhumans, too: https://imgur.com/gallery/PR9DJ https://imgur.com/gallery/PR9DJ
- throwanem 9y agoReplication crisis. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9148292 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9148292
- throwanem 9y ago("Have you tried not having a broken leg?" sounds pretty stupid too, not gonna lie. Even if we leave out the growing proportion of people whose habits found their origin in a prescription.)
- ThrowawayR2 9y ago> Let me rephrase: "Have you tried not living a life that's so sad that heroin actually seems like a good idea?" Good grief. How out of touch does a person have to be to think that's a reasonable suggestion to make? The ability to control one's circumstances is quite limited for large segments of the population and, even for those more fortunate, no one can predict when one of life's unexpected calamities will bring them down.
- rhizome 9y agoLet me rephrase: "Have you tried not living a life that's so sad that heroin actually seems like a good idea?" Genius. I wonder why nobody's thought of that until now.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Clubber 9y agoPot will make you turn into a zombie and kill people. One of the biggest flaws of the drug war was the inclusion of pot as an equally dangerous drug as heroin. Once people smoked pot and realized it was a big fucking lie, the warnings against much more dangerous drugs went unheeded.
- jancsika 9y ago> If you know heroin will eat your soul That's quite a big if. If it were true then hospitals should drop the use of opioids for any type of pain management to zero. Even with the opioid epidemic in the U.S. I've never heard anyone advocate such a radical position. > perhaps consider not doing heroin? In a lot of cases in the U.S. opioids were pushed to treat types of pain for which they have been shown to be ineffective. So the patient needed to take more than the proscribed amount of a drug that was more addictive than a pricier alternative therapy or treatment. I can't find the source for that atm, but it appears that prescription rates are significantly higher in the U.S. than in other developed countries[1]. So to answer your question-- no. Turning down a painkiller for a pricier alternative treatment requires both a) having disposable income and b) having sufficient time and expertise to do a research project on both the effectiveness of the suggested opioid painkiller and effectiveness of alternatives. And that is assuming one would somehow know a priori to disregard entirely the advice of their own medical doctor. It's simply not serious public policy to suggest that everybody just take on burdensome, life-altering levels of pain to avoid the vaguely-worded danger that an addiction robs one of their soul. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/12/28/opioid-abuse-in-america-is-so-bad-its-lowering-our-life-expectancy-why-hasnt-the-epidemic-hit-other-countries/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/12/28...
- zxcb1 9y agoIn secular world views there is no such thing as a soul, thus it can not be eaten. Finding the proper language for these phenomena is however an interesting topic.
- nordsieck 9y agoEnough people either have a dualist world view or are familiar enough with the idea that soul seems to be a serviceable word.
- zxcb1 9y agoWell, my point is that you can not believe that your soul is being eaten without believing in the metaphysical framework(s) from which the concept emerged, otherwise the parent comment makes no sense. The closest secular definition you get is System 1.
- lostcolony 9y agoThank you for being pedantic over a word literally (yes, literally) everyone reading it, yourself included, understood and interpreted correctly to mean the author's intent. You are providing a valuable service. /sarcasm
- zxcb1 9y agoI am sorry for that, but it is not obvious to me at all. Thats why I commented. One of the problems online is one of meaning, communication, context, definitions etc that we actually understand what someone is trying to convey. You for example felt the need to use a sarcasm expression, as you were unsure of me actually “getting” it.
- andai 9y agoYou spend too much time on the computer.
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- spodek 9y agoMaybe because I love Greenwich Village, Jane Jacobs, and Henry Thoreau, or maybe because between Steve Jobs' and Bill Gates' legacies, I chose Richard Stallman's, but I've never felt any appeal from Silicon Valley. Maybe visiting might change my view, but the realizations in the article seem obvious and late enough that I think I understand the appeal but don't share the values.
- EGreg 9y agoWhat do you do in NYC? Do you think it's worth it to make a location-based social activity layer for existing social forums like HN? So people could meet up, date, hire for jobs etc. No one's actual location would be revealed. But when people post something, others would know they are probably nearby.
- OliverJones 9y agoWith respect, that's been done. It was called Yik Yak. It was a disaster for the high school kids of my neighborhood; the geographic steering of messages allowed them to insult and stalk one another. The FOMO factor (fear of missing out) so carefully instilled in them by Instagram and the like made it very hard for them to just delete the app.
- CydeWeys 9y agoThat's not a fundamental flaw with the idea though, it's just that the specific community Yik Yak developed was terrible. You could do the same thing but have it target, say, LinkedIn's demographic instead of old-time MySpace's. There actually was a startup in DC that was doing something like this, called SocialRadar. They had a lot of funding but failed due to lack of adoption. They had a real name policy and didn't have any of the same problems that Yik Yak did.
- Clubber 9y agoAs an interesting aside, that's how BBS's worked pre internet. Long distances calls were so expensive, BBS forums were largely localized. We would have get togethers and people's houses or at libraries, to meet each other once or twice a year, drink beer, play volleyball, etc.
- throwaway13337 9y agoMaybe the difference between those that feel fulfilled in life and those who don't are the addiction loops we've found our way into. It would be nice to hack those loops in a meaningful way. Make creation a drip fed, nicely chunked, and skinner box filled experience. There are some methods like pomodoro but something software based to use these novel approaches could do a lot of good for the world.
- OliverJones 9y agoB. F. Skinner's box was a scheme for performing controlled experiments. The point was to isolate complex systems (minds) so simple hypotheses about their operation could be falsified or supported. It was scientifically successful. My mother of blessed memory, daughter of two professors of psychology, in her childhood lived next door to Dr. Skinner on St. Ronan Street in New Haven, CT, USA. Myth in my family says my grandparents had the good sense to refuse a request to make Mom a subject in that box. In the 21st century West no academic psychologist would even propose using a Skinner box on human subjects. Their institutional review boards (IRBs: scientific ethics watchdogs) would just laugh. It might be interesting, as an experiment in ethics, to propose some aspect of Facebook's attention hacking as if it were an experiment, and see what IRBs make of it. In the meantime: human complexity good, Skinner boxes bad. Please be careful.
- octaveguin 9y agoInteresting story but not very related to what the parent was saying. Examples of skinner boxes are everywhere in society today. They've been around longer than they were identified by Dr. Skinner. Anything that gives a variable reward for pressing the same button is participating in a sort of skinner box. Mobile games use them, slot machines use them, and you can even think of facebook/instagram likes as such variable rewards you get for the same action over and over. They are pervasive in society already.
- pault 9y agoTotally based on hearsay, but: a family member worked with a person who was the child of a research associate of Skinner and that person and their sibling were used as informal research subjects by their parents. Both of them were extremely disturbed humans, and while I never asked for specifics there were whispers of some very dark doings.
- saas_co_de 9y ago> The old idea of the online world as a burgeoning utopia looks to have peaked around the time of the Arab spring The only people who thought the "arab spring" was a burgeoning utopia are western military, intelligence, and political elites. Now those same people see these platforms as a threat and so the "respectable" media is full of anti-SV stories. > it’s all automated; the owners of the system can’t possibly monitor everything that’s going on, and they can’t control it Yes, that is the real problem: communications that can't be censored and controlled.
- wpietri 9y agoI'm not sure you read this very well. The notion is not that the Arab spring was a utopia. The notion was that the Arab spring, fueled by direct person-to-person connection on FB, Twitter, Whatsapp, etc, were symptomatic of the Internet's power to create freedom and social utopia. It's part of a persistent strain of technoutopianism. You might read Tom Standage's excellent 1998 book "The Victorian Internet", which talks about the adoption of the telegraph during the Victorian era. Many of the same things people said about the Internet's power to change society were said about the telegraph: https://www.amazon.com/Victorian-Internet-Remarkable-Nineteenth-line/dp/162040592X https://www.amazon.com/Victorian-Internet-Remarkable-Ninetee...
- Clubber 9y agoAnd it absolutely did, as did the Gutenberg press, the telephone, the radio and television. We just don't recognize it because we've never experienced a pre-telegraph life.
- wpietri 9y agoIt did change life, but not in the utopian way people were thinking. People thought, for example, that the telegraph would eliminate war by connecting people and eliminating the possibility of the misunderstandings that come from very high-latency communication technologies (e.g., horses carrying handwritten letters). It turns out that part of pre-telegraph life not only continued, but got worse.
- cynusx 9y agoI don't think it's a difficult tweak to the feed algorithms to allow for 5% (picked randomly) of diverging viewpoints in somebody's feed. It might even be good for their engagement metrics.
- Jgrubb 9y agoAgree. I wish there were actually a slider that you could adjust that would increase the X factor of the algorithm. I’d possibly use Facebook if it weren’t just the same 6 people every time I went on.
- baron816 9y agoUgh, the media has clearly been waiting around for a day when they can cast tech as the bad guy. Russians on Facebook and iPhone batteries are just not that big of a deal.
- te_chris 9y agoWhat do you expect? Big tech has gone to war with the media and taken the majority of their ad revenue, inserting themselves into the middle of the main relationship between them and their audience and advertisers. Only problem is tech didn't finish the job, so now media orgs see a chance to dispatch a few bloody noses back at their hubristic silicon valley 'partners'.
- rdtsc 9y agoYap. It was a bit of a back and forth. After the election was lost, the traditional media which Clinton relied on so much was deemed to have failed. Chomsky would say the Manufacturing Consent machine had broken down somewhere. Almost immediately Facebook and Google started talking about "Fake News" and how they'll work twice as hard to combat it. On the surface it was nice to see these companies saving us from lizard people spam, on another level it was a message to the future presidential or other marketing campaigns saying effectively "Don't spend you billions on MSNBC, spend them on us, we'll be far more effective". Now the old and crusty media is punching back and writing articles about how tech companies are eating our souls. I agree in principle with article and never even signed up for Facebook to begin with but like you identified so it has merit, but I think there is also a battle on another level here as well.
- autokad 9y agoi really wish they would get off this 'we lost the election because of misinformation on facebook so something has to be done about it' rhetoric. leaked emails (by help of the russians) surely helped trump, but even democrats concede that information was TRUE. this has nothing to do with social media, but training in the DNC about phishing scams might help. but honestly, there were so many huge flaws in the hillary campaign (relying 100% on data that was already proven in the primaries to be next to useless, disgust over the shadyness in how the clintons took over the dnc and stacked the deck against sanders, etc). and lets face it, they didnt have a problem with the internet when obama was using it to win, such as 'obama universities' training people to use a pyramid network on social media to basically create broadcast storms to get the algorithms to push their content to the top and shout out dissenting opinions.
- arca_vorago 9y agoIt's all about COPYLEFT people!!! Stallman was right, wake up to foss. OSS is not enough.
- krapp 9y agoAs far as I can tell, none of the perverse incentives in social media, app development or tech have been created by copyright laws, so how would "copyleft" have prevented them? Facebook could still be just as evil as it is, with the same dopamine-triggering dark patterns, had it been entirely written with FOSS licensed code. Copyleft licensing wouldn't make those techniques less effective, or hinder their spread across the web, or even make it easier to compete against the sites that employ them. It wouldn't even make it any easier to validate the codebase, since it's running on a remote server and everything beside public APIs and responses is a black box.
- jordigh 9y agoAGPL might help. You need secrecy to do a lot of nasty things. You can do nasty things without secrecy, but at least psychologically, people are a lot less inclined to be antisocial if they think they could be watched, even if they're not: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-illusion-of-being-observed-can-make-you-better-person/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-illusion-... Mastodon is a free social network. It's open source and it's copyleft. It's AGPLed. So far, I find it very enjoyable. It remains to be seen how it could be twisted into something unpleasant. I don't foresee that happening.
- modi15 9y agoGoogle, Facebook, Amazon, Apple - all need to be shut down in their present form. The biggest problem is that our anti-competitive legislation is ill-equipped to handle tech monopolies. The extremely complex nature of modern software and its ability to offer unparalled distribution advantage is nothing like the world has ever seen. The ability of Google to push something like a chrome browser comes not only from its galleons of highly paid engineers, but also its ability to advertise/support it for free for decades to come. There simply does not exist another sustainable model to finance a complex product like an internet browser and provide it for free to consumers for decades. The bigger problem is what is the form of regulation that could be applied to such behemoths. Its extremely hard to regulate it by a case-to-case basis, similar to what happenned in telecom, simply because the business models are too complex and different products monetize differently. I think a line of thought which might yield some regulatory possibilities is to limit these companies manpower. No single company should be allowed to employ more than X number of engineers. If they go above, they should be required to spin of into multiple entities, each of which do no more than X number of engineers. I dont know what X is - but that is open for deliberation. The impact that something like this could have on say Google is that Google is forced to split apart its search business with the ads business. This further allows the search business to collaborate with more ad providers to find the best fit. And on the other side, it allows its ads business to experiment with more search providers and open up a market for profitable search engines. This is not something I have completely thought through, but whatever little I have, this seems to be the cleanest approach to fix tech.
- specialist 9y agoI'd be satisfied with radical cashectomies. Fees, taxes, fines, whatever. Level the playing field. Keep the money moving.
- danjoc 9y ago>Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple - all need to be shut down in their present form. I can appreciate the sentiment, but then Baidu, WeChat, Alibaba, and Xiaomi win.
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- partycoder 9y agoBefore social network manipulation there was mass media manipulation. Social networks just made it global.
- paulcole 9y ago“I got rich by doing this but you definitely shouldn’t.” Hard to take this kind of attitude seriously. Things seemed fine enough when they were working there, so what has changed?
- drewbug 9y agoTalking about it no longer affects their livelihood?
- ebikelaw 9y agoI tire of the traditional media's need to write a negative story about how Facebook is cancer, and then throw in a legitimate company like Apple or Google to make it "Facebook and Google" are cancer. And this instance is particularly obtuse because the "former Google and Facebook execs" are the president of Facebook, and some random product manager from Google. There's only one former president of Facebook and there are probably 20000 former Google product managers. The latter guy is just some rando.
- Sir_Substance 9y ago>and then throw in a legitimate company like Apple or Google to make it "Facebook and Google" are cancer. This is very much a matter of perspective. Prior to Apple launching the app store as a walled garden for ios and then launching it on macos proper, it was generally an untested assumption that users would not be willing to accept such a software delivery model. Prior to Google, it was assumed that it would be unacceptable to require people sign up to and give personal details for access to software. Most software licences were distributed by emailing codes to the user. The web app with mandatory registration was usually only seen in enterprise grade portal-based software. Today, the standard software experience requires so many accounts that /average users/ are turning in desperation to password managers to corral the hundreds of accounts they need for their month-to-month computing, and Microsoft has moved from "next-next-done" installers to actively pushing a walled garden on the population. Despite Android having full support for distributing packages as .apk files that can be installed without the app store in the exact way you would use an msi or a deb, I would anecdotally say less than 5% of apps are offered for download from their creators websites in this traditional fashion. Sure seems like the tumors are metastasizing to me.
- ebikelaw 9y agoBesides the factual mistakes in your comment (for example, the majority of Google's numerous services do not require any kind of account), you seem to be talking about software distribution and licensing, while this article is about attention. There's a pretty strong case to be made that Facebook sucks up all of your attention and gives you nothing in return. You can't make that case against Apple and Google. One of them sells telephones, and the other provides access to all of the information in the world. The reason these can't be lumped together with Facebook is because Facebook lacks any kind of redeeming product. They give you nothing.
- klokoman 9y agoYeah, this "alarms" are just a way to call for regulations that will in practice pull up the ladder so other companies will never be able to climb where fb or google stand now. This has always happened in all industries: some companies become big and then they use the excuse of limiting their own power to close off the competitions to enter the market, in fact stabilizing their power and creating a REAL monopoly. I don't understand how can informed people still fall for this move.
- rhizome 9y agoI've been speculating for months that these companies would love to rotate out some of their VPs into a regulatory body in order to give their policies the force of law.
- perseusprime11 9y agoNot surprising to hear this kind of fear mongering from newspapers like guardian and Nytimes. They are the most threatened by Facebook and Google. Their breakfast, lunch and dinner got eaten by these companies so now they are using these narratives to advance their agendas. American tech companies are just fine. They are run by reasonable people. Bezos actually bought WashingtonPost so it does not die.
- pretendscholar 9y ago>Bezos actually bought WashingtonPost so it does not die. Thats a very charitable reading of what he did.