4 ms·

What's really chilling is the atmosphere in tech in which certain legitimate democratic outcomes are wrong and that tech has a responsibility to "do better" nex

What's really chilling is the atmosphere in tech in which certain legitimate democratic outcomes are wrong and that tech has a responsibility to "do better" next time and avoid more "mistakes". Perhaps your algorithm isn't buggy just because the democratic process didn't produce your desired outcome.

spamizbad 8y ago
I think you should read the twitter thread linked. Nobody is calling this a bug: rather, YouTube put their fingers on the scale because it was better for their bottom line.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  What he's saying is that this is a retrospective that's looking to blame outside reasons for the outcome of a vote, when ultimately the reason a vote went one way may simply be genuinely because most voters felt that way. In hindsight you can blame a million externalities for any 'undesirable' result in any election, because there are a practically infinite number of factors, foreign and domestic, involved in the elections of any major nation. For instance imagine leave lost and chose to play the same game. In mid April 2016 Obama blew to the UK to try to do a mixture of evangelizing against Brexit and implicitly threatening the leave position as well by suggesting that Britan would be 'at the back of the queue' in any future US trade deals if Brexit passed. And one can only imagine the thousands, if not millions, of pro-remain posts and topics shared on social media by people outside of Britain. Of course these ended up being completely pointless and Obama's visit actually ended up strengthening the leave position, but cast in a different light these sort of externalities could be used to try to argue for undue and undemocratic influences that led to the result of the election. But it's revisionism.
- hardlianotion 8y ago
  I hear an assertion that Brexit was promoted because it is divisive. Without knowing what was done and what he means by what he claims, it is hard to come to a non-knee-jerk reaction. If you think Brexit is a disaster in principle, this is catnip. If you don't, not so much.
cdoxsey 8y ago
It's chilling but it will be a little while before we end up there. The engineers (and friends) who built these systems are wildly successful, and as often happens in these cases, they now feel guilty about that success, especially when they're surrounded by so much human suffering (in a place like SF), which pushes them in a progressive direction. But now they've discovered that the systems they built had unintended consequences and may have even led to the very success of the political ideologies they despise. The cognitive dissonance working at a place like Twitter must be palpable. Trump probably drives more revenue to the company than any other person, and yet probably 90+% of the employees who work there despise the man and everything he stands for. So you can see why so many people are on-board with trying to do something about it. But the same poorly-thought-out, gung-ho attitude which led to algorithms no one understands anymore, will backfire when they try to "correct" them. Social engineering is a dangerous game. This country is a time bomb just waiting to go off and when Silicon Valley finally pulls the plug on Trump there's no telling where it will end. (though I do think things have calmed down a little in the last couple years... we'll see where they end up after the midterms...)

spamizbad 8y ago

I think you should read the twitter thread linked. Nobody is calling this a bug: rather, YouTube put their fingers on the scale because it was better for their bottom line.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
TangoTrotFox 8y ago
What he's saying is that this is a retrospective that's looking to blame outside reasons for the outcome of a vote, when ultimately the reason a vote went one way may simply be genuinely because most voters felt that way. In hindsight you can blame a million externalities for any 'undesirable' result in any election, because there are a practically infinite number of factors, foreign and domestic, involved in the elections of any major nation. For instance imagine leave lost and chose to play the same game. In mid April 2016 Obama blew to the UK to try to do a mixture of evangelizing against Brexit and implicitly threatening the leave position as well by suggesting that Britan would be 'at the back of the queue' in any future US trade deals if Brexit passed. And one can only imagine the thousands, if not millions, of pro-remain posts and topics shared on social media by people outside of Britain. Of course these ended up being completely pointless and Obama's visit actually ended up strengthening the leave position, but cast in a different light these sort of externalities could be used to try to argue for undue and undemocratic influences that led to the result of the election. But it's revisionism.
hardlianotion 8y ago
I hear an assertion that Brexit was promoted because it is divisive. Without knowing what was done and what he means by what he claims, it is hard to come to a non-knee-jerk reaction. If you think Brexit is a disaster in principle, this is catnip. If you don't, not so much.

cdoxsey 8y ago

It's chilling but it will be a little while before we end up there. The engineers (and friends) who built these systems are wildly successful, and as often happens in these cases, they now feel guilty about that success, especially when they're surrounded by so much human suffering (in a place like SF), which pushes them in a progressive direction. But now they've discovered that the systems they built had unintended consequences and may have even led to the very success of the political ideologies they despise. The cognitive dissonance working at a place like Twitter must be palpable. Trump probably drives more revenue to the company than any other person, and yet probably 90+% of the employees who work there despise the man and everything he stands for. So you can see why so many people are on-board with trying to do something about it. But the same poorly-thought-out, gung-ho attitude which led to algorithms no one understands anymore, will backfire when they try to "correct" them. Social engineering is a dangerous game. This country is a time bomb just waiting to go off and when Silicon Valley finally pulls the plug on Trump there's no telling where it will end. (though I do think things have calmed down a little in the last couple years... we'll see where they end up after the midterms...)