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Social Cooling (2017)

• clairity 6y ago
  note that this is a landing page for marketing a (small) tech trends consultancy. it couches itself as counterintuitive new information on a hot-button topic that you can share with friends to be the in-the-know cool kid on the block for 10 minutes, to drive clicks, likely more as a branding and awareness campaign than a top-of-funnel source. it's not well researched because it doesn't need to be, but it grazes past just-interesting-enough ideas to be plausible to a large percentage of visitors. just enough effort went into it to be effective, but no more (which is the right balance to hit). as a piece of marketing, i'd give them a thumbs up. as a piece of social media fodder (ironically), claws up! as elucidating content, thumbs down.
• dfischer 6y ago
  > It performed data mining and data analysis on its audience. Based on results, communications would then be specifically targeted to key audience groups to modify behaviour in accordance with the goal of SCL's client. The company described itself as a "global election management agency". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCL_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCL_Group Wow.
• lightgreen 6y ago
  I do not support anyone in the US, I don't even live in the US. But I support free speech and free expression whether it comes from left or from the right. I lived too long in a country where only one opinion is allowed, and those who speak differently get problems, like get fired. It is not that bad in the US (yet?), of course.
  • renewiltord 6y ago
    > > If you want respect don't admit to supporting bigotry > But I support free speech and free expression whether it comes from left or from the right. Free speech doesn't mean I have to respect you. It means that when you start raving about the earth being flat or whatever, I can't shut you up. I can walk away, I can say "You're an idiot", and I can say "Guys, this dude is a flat Earther. Let's make fun of the moron", and then we can all say, "Hahaha! You're a moron! Neener neener" and so on and so forth. And you can do that to me. I can even say "This guy is a flat Earther, don't buy his bread" and others can repeat it. That's freedom. And if I do that I will, in practice, chill your speech because maybe you care about selling your bread more than you do about peddling flat Earthism. But that's what positive rights sometimes do. And as someone with a strong view of individual freedom, I'd rather that chilling effect than any restriction on who I can speak out against.
    • lightgreen 6y ago
      > Free speech doesn't mean I have to respect you. Nobody seriously cares about respect as much as about their freedom. > I can say "Guys, this dude is a flat Earther. Let's make fun of the moron" The sad fact is that you seem to only support freedom of express progressive ideas. Consider someone saying "Guys, this dude is gay. Let's make fun of the moron". I guess you won't support freedom of speech for that person.
      • renewiltord 6y ago
        Read the context: it was about respect. I even quoted it for you. But we can proceed anyway if the conversation has shifted. > Consider someone saying "Guys, this dude is gay. Let's make fun of the moron". I guess you won't support freedom speech for that person. Oh dude, I support that like nothing else, but I will use my freedom of speech to absolutely shun that individual. I absolutely encourage you to admit to any homophobia, etc. That way I know to shun you and to ask my friends to shun you. It is my freedom of speech and expression that permits me to do that. Free individuals must have the liberty to freely associate. And from the liberty to freely associate comes the liberty to choose to not associate. And if you want to speak up and ask for me to be shunned, I encourage you to do that. Because I believe in a freedom of speech and expression that is almost absolute. You will never find me making laws that say that expressing homophobia or racist opinions or whatever must be outlawed. Say it loud, say it proud, you have the right.
        • lightgreen 6y ago
          Even if the constitution allows free speech, but practically if free speech is not possible, it is not freedom. Note in the authoritarian totalitarian states there are no laws against free speech. And usually it is not government actors how punish you for expressing dissenting opinions, it is often mob and your employer. These states are not free. So to some degree SV is not a free place, even if it there are no laws prohibiting free expression.
          • renewiltord 6y ago
  • dang 6y ago
    This turned into a wretched flamewar. Not cool. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24629941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24629941.
• pcdoodle 6y ago
  Cool article.
  • paulgb 6y ago
    In a similar vein, by the same author: https://www.mathwashing.com/ https://www.mathwashing.com/ (It's linked at the bottom of this one, but I'm sure a lot of people don't get that far)
    • quotemstr 6y ago
      It takes years and years of training in advanced dialectic bullshit to get to the point where you can say, with a straight face, that math is morally wrong. It's utterly absurd to demand that we censor models and worsen their output to conform to some activist's idealized imagine of how the world should be. Only by letting models report the true facts of the world as it is can we optimize for human happiness.
      • Loughla 6y ago
        It's not the math, that is wrong. The math is correct. The inputs and assumptions made by the people selecting the math is the 'morally wrong' part. Bias is real, like it or not. Your worldview, as a data scientist or programmer or whatever, impacts what you select as important factors in 'algorithm a'. Algorithm a then selects those factors for other people in the system, baking in your biases, but screening them behind math.
        • quotemstr 6y ago
          That's the motte. The bailey is that the ML fairness people use any inconvenient output of a model as prima facie evidence that the model inputs are tainted by bias --- then these activists demand that these inputs be adjusted so as to produce the outputs that please them. They've determined the conclusion they want to see beforehand. This attitude is the total opposite of truth seeking.
• jbotz 6y ago
  It's a good metaphor, could definitely help people understand the nature of the problem and raise awareness of its urgency. I'll be using term "social cooling" going forward, definitely.
• demarq 6y ago
  Just the other day I asked people on here if they are afraid of commenting on Assange on HN incase the FBI break down their doors. to my astonishment quite a few were convinced this is exactly what happens. TF?
  • luckylion 6y ago
    Why wouldn't they be? Assange is an enemy of the state. Not "of the administration", but "the state", in total. The FBI is known to keep lists on and engage in attacks against what they perceive as enemies of the state. It's logical to assume that they might still do so. They probably won't break down your door for commenting on Assange though. They'll have some other pretense, an anonymous tip about drugs maybe.
    • whatshisface 6y ago
      There are probably too many people commenting about Assange for them to do that, although ironically if enough people assume without evidence that they'll get swatted for talking about assange, then that will no longer be true.
      • luckylion 6y ago
        That's true, but that's true for any and all issues of that kind, isn't it? Had everyone under Stalin stood up to him, nobody would've been murdered in the Gulags.
        • whatshisface 6y ago
          Well, it was pretty obvious that Stalin was murdering people, so in that case it was fear of the known, instead of fear of the speculated. That fear due to speculation would be what allows the speculated fear to come to pass, is the particular irony I am highlighting.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • 6y ago
• tony_cannistra 6y ago
  I like the climate change comparison. One of the opportunities for comparison that this site only barely touches on is the fact that, like climate change, the companies responsible for this global phenomenon both know it's happening and are likely actively working to avoid talking about it. This happened with Exxon, BP, ConocoPhilips, you name it; it's now happening with Facebook, Google, etc. This undoubtedly happens because any change for the good of folks would undermine these powerful corporations' bottom lines. What can we learn from our failure to hold fossil fuel corporations accountable that can be translated here?
• JacobDotVI 6y ago
  >In China each adult citizen is getting a government mandated "social credit score". This represents how well behaved they are, and is based on crime records, what they say on social media, what they buy, and even the scores of their friends. This really isn't all that different than what is happening elsewhere across the world today. Your Uber rider score represents your "social credit" for that service. Your Airbnb guest reviews impact if you will be allowed to rent a room. Each platform is putting social credit in place via crowd-sourced "trust" EDIT: I don't mean to minimize China's human rights violations, but to posture that independently of central control many companies are implementing their own versions of these systems, which can have _some_ of the same effects in terms of losing access to services. Obviously one's Uber scores won't put you in jail / detainment camp and I was not intended to imply such.
  • closeparen 6y ago
    They’re based on your behavior using that service, though, not your generalized loyalty to the state.
  • tokai 6y ago
    >elsewhere across the world In the US you mean.
    • buzzerbetrayed 6y ago
      I'm not sure how you gathered that this is what they meant. Do people not review services outside of the US? (hint: they do)
  • shortstuffsushi 6y ago
    This is also not new, this reminds me of the early days of eBay with user ratings impacting your ability to buy / sell goods (especially as a new account).
  • harterrt 6y ago
    This is drastically different than having a government mandated program. Airbnb and Uber are both are both opt-in and it's not all that difficult to get a fresh profile on these services.
• WillDaSilva 6y ago
  The point about minority views no longer being able to take over is a scary one. There has been a great amount of social progress in the past several decades, and that sort of progress wouldn't be possible under the effects of strong social cooling.
  • shadowgovt 6y ago
    White supremacy is a minority view in the US and seems to have gained huge amounts of traction in spite of these believed effects. White supremacists have lost jobs for being caught out attending rallies; it doesn't seem to stop the rallies.
    • whatshisface 6y ago
      It's gained a lot of attention. Is there any real evidence that it's gained traction?
      • spacemanmatt 6y ago
        Don't get out much, eh?
        • indecisive_user 6y ago
          On the contrary, I've been traveling across the US quite a bit over the last several months, from New England, the PNW, and the South. While I've seen plenty of signs and a few rallies supporting BLM and other progressive causes, I've yet to see, in person, a single sign or rally or any supportive material for white supremacy. I hear about it a lot on the internet but from my travels anyway I haven't seen it yet. Edit: I did see some confederate flags being flown in middle of nowhere Mississippi, but I honestly believe they're not flown as a symbol of hatred (at least not always) as some people had banners next to their flags saying things like "Pride not hate", or the rainbow flag, or other phrases trying to distance themselves from the negative connotations of the flag.
          • 6y ago
• josefresco 6y ago
  I'd be interested in figuring out how I can use this to my advantage. For example, create a persona online that is optimal to lenders, employers and even the government. The issue is my "real self" is uninterested in participating in these networks, even if to create a fake persona. Maybe it could be automated, or outsourced?
  • postsantum 6y ago
    Was thinking the same. I wonder if there is a market selling "ready to move in" identities
    • spacemanmatt 6y ago
      Yeah, social media profiles are bought and sold like commodities daily. Look for "bots" in the news for examples.
      • postsantum 6y ago
        That's different goods. I mean identities that span across several networks and include emails, aged cookies, fake fingeprint generator, etc
        • spacemanmatt 6y ago
          We're talking about the same things.
    • thinkharderdev 6y ago
      From what I understand this is an actual thriving industry already. Traditional identity theft (get someone's SSN and other info and open credit lines in their name) is much harder now, so the fraudsters have moved on to creating wholly made up "synthetic identities" de novo.
  • tootie 6y ago
    I don't think that would really fly. You may get served a higher class of ads, but if you go apply for a loan or a job, you still have to disclose your real self.
• 40four 6y ago
  I think this is a good example of how pro-privacy arguments should be framed. It is takes the varied aspects and complex implications of tracking users across the web (or even in the real world), and distills it down into an easy to understand concept. When you think privacy of in in the terms of 'social cooling', or consider things like China's 'social credit' system, I can't help be think we are much closer to the world depicted in the last season of Westworld than we might want to admit.
  • ptg473 6y ago
    this is the kind of privacy discourse I am interested in. Whether an individual can find my ssn, location, credit cards, or whatever personal information is not really what I am thinking about when I think about “protecting my privacy” but rather reducing my data emissions that compose these ratings. in my experience it’s hard to get this across to people who are not familiar though, always get the “I have nothing to hide :) what are you trying to hide?” response. Will try this “social cooling” framework next time. maybe a little less daunting as an entry point than “surveillance capitalism”
    • zwaps 6y ago
      I never understood this. Economics 101 or 102 maybe tells us that our consumer welfare will be reduced if firms have less uncertainty about how much they can extract from us. You can make this argument more sophisticated in networks, regarding ads, regarding quality and what have you. But the basic case should be enough to convince you that amazon knowing every detail about you is not going to help you. At all. So of course we have something to hide.
      • sjy 6y ago
        What Economics 101 or 102 principles are you referring to? I Googled your comment and found this 2019 research paper [1] that seems to support it, but I would have thought the Economics 101 take is more aligned with what companies tell us – more information about consumer desires allows firms to sell us products that we like more at lower cost, and competition means that the savings eventually get passed onto us rather than captured in permanently higher profits. [1] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/reports/reduced-demand-uncertainty-sustainability-collusion-how-ai-could-affect-competition/working_paper_341.pdf https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/reports/reduced-d...
• shadowgovt 6y ago
  Gotta be honest: I don't have to spend more than 5 minutes on Facebook to dissuade myself of the hypothesis that, on average, people are feeling constrained about what they're saying.
  • _jal 6y ago
    There are different social contexts. Everyone recognizes this; you'll say things around friends that you won't say in a work meeting. Online communities have contexts that are just as real, but they have the digital discontinuities we all know and love, so the odds of doing the equivalent of dropping into that work meeting after several beers is much more likely and happens far more frequently. A separate issue is preservation - of course all this is on Your Permanent Record. And the future only has very different, limited interest in what the context is now.
  • kderbyma 6y ago
    but truly I bet you what you are referring to are people's opinions which are 'extreme' but at the same time probably can be lumped into groups of like-minded opinions with others - they are cooling towards their chosen echochambers but the same concept applies - because they get directed based on said data to these fringes because the data groups them towards them in suggestions
  • jmcqk6 6y ago
    Pretty good example of selection bias. The people who are concerned are not going to be posting on facebook.
    • shadowgovt 6y ago
      Then we would expect posting on Facebook to go down, yet Facebook's user count keeps going up.
      • grumple 6y ago
        Firstly, you can create any number of accounts without matching people. Secondly, even for real users, those users are often from nations full of people that haven't learned better yet (new market growth). What's their growth look like in the US amongst those 25+?
• quotemstr 6y ago
  This article links at the bottom to similarly-styled piece about "mathwashing", the idea that it's morally wrong for an algorithm to notice true facts about reality. That idea is utter bunk, and so likely is "Social Cooling" as well. Both pushes are really about unelected activists trying to limit other people's technology to bring about their peculiar idea of Utopia. In all human history, efforts to hold back the tide of technological progress have never worked. Instead of adopting a Luddite fear of data and math, we should use both for all useful ends as soon as possible.
  • beaconstudios 6y ago
    the problem isn't necessarily with _accurate_ data and math, but with reductive statistics that paint with broad brushes. Statistics inherently remove nuance, which is fine when the nuance is unimportant to what you're measuring, but not when it's actually important. The example about cancer doctors in TFA is perfect. "more deaths = worse doctor" is a poor metric, because advanced cases have higher deaths in general, leading to a disincentive to try to help people with advanced forms of cancer. That's a terribly perverse incentive, and one that should be avoided. Fundamentally, a lot of this stuff comes down to a lack of nuance in metrics, leading to some nasty effects down wind.
  • tgb 6y ago
    Men commit more violent offenses than women. Should I, a man, be turned down for a job because of this despite never having committed a violent offense? No woman has ever won the US presidency, should we therefore divert funds away from female candidates because they are provably less likely to win? If after doing that for a century and no woman has yet to win, should we still continue to divert funds away from them? I hope the answers to these questions are obviously "no, we shouldn't." If data-driven decisions are equally problematic but hide it behind layers of apparently justifiable (and often opaque) mathematics, then we have a problem.
  • anonytrary 6y ago
    You missed the point. The point is that you can be doing the wrong math on the wrong data, jumping to completely baseless and detrimental conclusions. You cannot judge the needs of the many by the actions of the few or vice versa.
• personjerry 6y ago
  You can't stop data collection, people will just do it in secret.
  • fsflover 6y ago
    It just must be illegal without real consent. See: GDPR.
    • lightgreen 6y ago
      Google/Twitter/Facebook are the same in EU. GDPR barely changes anything in this case.
      • fsflover 6y ago
        Enforcement is a totally different thing though. The law itself is good.
  • finnthehuman 6y ago
    You can't stop murder either. Perfect enforcement of rules is rarely a goal of policy. It just sets expectations for behavior, and when violation of policy becomes known remedial and/or punitive measures can be taken.
    • personjerry 6y ago
      The difference is that murder is detectable. If I collect data on your traffic and improve my software using that data, no one will know.
      • finnthehuman 6y ago
        You know that there are already things that are illegal in business but require that business' records to prove, right? Should we roll back those laws? Fraud is fine as long as the party defrauded can't find out?
• dudul 6y ago
  The thing is we don't even need opaque algorithms to do that, we do it to ourselves. Not a week (I should probably even say not a day) without a "cancel campaign" on Twitter to go after some rando's job just because they didn't tweet The Right Thing.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• fraktl 6y ago
  The content is brilliant. Very, very, very well done. From engineering POV: I'm amazed that I visited a website that set no cookies, that no resource was blocked by uBlock / nanoDefender / nextdns. Amazing. Just amazing. Such a rarity nowadays.
  • martin_a 6y ago
    > I'm amazed that I visited a website that set no cookies [...] Such a rarity nowadays. Be the change you expect from the world! Start building sites like this!
  • MayeulC 6y ago
    I agree. I particularly liked to see the ubiquitous Google Analytics was absent from the website.
  • lightgreen 6y ago
    So the website owners won't get proper analytics about who are their users, why they came to the website, how did they finish reading page to the end and so on. They won't know if their message was effective or not.
    • socialcooling 6y ago
      I'm the creator of the website. It has a simple PHP text file counter. That's all it has, and I'd argue it's enough. I want people to be able to visit this website without any fear of tracking and profiling. It's a strange thing to say I won't know if my message is effective or not without tracking, since we're currently discussing it on Hackernews ;-D
    • fraktl 6y ago
      As the author mentioned, it ended up on HN. Message received. I can scroll to the bottom of the article and feed the trackers bad data. Your argument is invalid because you can't make a foolproof algorithm that'll tell you correctly how the user used the site and if the page was finished reading if the user can simply feed you bogus data. There's another (also brilliant site) linked at the bottom of the original article: https://www.mathwashing.com/ https://www.mathwashing.com/ And here's the funny part - you assumed the author won't know, and that's precisely what he's talking about at mathwashing.com - these "algorithms" that are as faulty as people who come up with them. I doubt you actually read the whole thing with full attention. The message got through to the people it was supposed to get through. I applaud the effort to go without all the tracking nonsense. And whenever I see tracking crap like medium.com uses, I feed it bad data on purpose. It's better to stand true to your message and create a cookieless / trackless site whose purpose is to convey the message rather than use this shitty argument about authors knowing whether they are reaching out to their audience. Precisely because of that thinking we've broken internet where in order to read 512 bytes of text I've to block 50 megabytes of tracking bloatware.
• ptg473 6y ago
  this is particularly true for people who have international ties. you become subject to the social cooling mechanisms of very different cultures that may conflict with each other.
• vmception 6y ago
  I censor myself on Wechat. am American. If you're paying attention you know that you might want to skip the "vocational bootcamp" when you need to do business in China some day. Because you might not graduate! Let's just skip to the end: Every rebuttal I have to whatever lecture you want to give me could be construed as a whataboutism and could also be construed as simply true. There are various groups of people that would get re-routed outside of the respected due process paths in the US for things they said too. We also consider those problems. Its just not a different enough user experience for me to single out China.
• tboyd47 6y ago
  This is exactly why I had to get off of Facebook (again). I deactivated my first account 8 years ago, but got back on to re-connect with my old pals and acquaintances from back in the day. For that reason, it was fantastic. After another year, I realized that I can't actually say ANYTHING interesting on this platform without offending someone. There's a lot of variety in my crowd. I have the sense IRL to know that not everything is for everybody, but that doesn't matter much on Facebook unless you want to spend hours and hours hand-crafting subsets of your friends for different topics (I don't). And I have zero interest in posting selfies or status updates of what's going on in my life, so that made the platform exceedingly boring and a waste of time for me. It's a shame, because it does work really well for "connecting" with people (in the shallowest sense of the word).
  • alquemist 6y ago
    Even in the best of circumstances, being subjected to the highlights of 100 other people will make your life feel miserable in comparison. Amazing vacation locations at the best time of day, gorgeous food from the best angle, amazing health and fashion with the best lightning. That's before we go into likes hunting and what that does to the reward paths in your brain. Social media as a concept is deeply unhealthy. At least the traditional celebrity cult, already rather weird in its American incarnation, had some degree of psychological distance between self and the professionals. With social media, everyone is caught in the celebrity game. Right now is a great time to delete your accounts. The only better time is yesterday.
  • pwdisswordfish0 6y ago
    Note that for many people this would be an example of their plan "working". For some, the most immediate goal is not to change your mind or the minds of others. There's an intermediate goal to make your position appear marginal, which can help in changing the minds of others. By dropping out, you increase the efficacy of this strategy.
    • whammywon 6y ago
      Really feels like a Catch 22 situation, then. :-(
• abnry 6y ago
  The social part of social media and culture have a much bigger impact on social cooling than anything else, including mass personal data collection.
• claydavisss 6y ago
  Most of you only really believe in free speech (or any other exercise of power) when it conforms to, or reinforces your worldview.
• motohagiography 6y ago
  If the Varian Rule is true, that what the rich have today, the middle classes will have in 5-10 years and the poor in 10-15, it's worth noting that what the rich have today is private security. The real risk is that the ultimate popular reaction to these systems will not be civil.
  • tdaltonc 6y ago
    The Secret Service has been protecting US Presidents for 100+ years. And bodyguards go back way further. Varian (via McAfee) was talking about technology. Let me propose a clarifying addendum: "A simple way to forecast the future is to look at what rich people have today [but didn't have 10 years ago]; middle-income people will have something equivalent in 10 years, and poor people will have it in an additional decade."
    • motohagiography 6y ago
      I'd say that american software developers affording private security as a result of a company they founded is a pretty recent phenomenon. I'm sure there is an n<10 of early precedents, but the underlying point is that the response to these oppressive systems is likely to be uncivil. Indeed the Varian rule was coined by the FT journalist McAfee as you mentioned (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varian_Rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varian_Rule), though as a counter example, presidents don't really count. Politicians can be wealthy but, like criminals, they're never rich.
      • _def 6y ago
        > Politicians can be wealthy but, like criminals, they're never rich. [citation needed]
        • motohagiography 6y ago
          My own, or at least, my grandfather's.
  • chippy 6y ago
• dirkc 6y ago
  I've stopped engaging in many places online over the last few years. The reason for me is that engaging with a pseudonym has become the exception rather than the rule.
  • jjice 6y ago
    The evolution of identity on the internet is an interesting one. In the 90s, using your real name was considered absurd. Now it's the standard. Maybe you'll also have a pseudonym in your handle, but the majority of people use their real name on most of their social media. Certain communities retain pseudonymous, such as a good portion of Hacker News and Reddit. Although, I see many people posting more and more revealing information on Reddit these days, as it leans towards becoming like Twitter and Facebook.
• bof_ 6y ago
  *burning oil
• DavidVoid 6y ago
  (2017) Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14585882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14585882 edit: The author also replied to some comments in that thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=socialcooling https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=socialcooling
• slx26 6y ago
  Very good presentation, and very good analogies to get the general public attention. I think the key points are: - Data allows the projection of stereotypes on everything you might be involved. - Rating systems create unwanted incentives. I don't think social credit systems are crazy, but they are extremely dangerous and easy to get wrong. Their memory should be limited, and their use should be controlled, opt-in, show-to-see, or whatever might be relevant.
• kelvin0 6y ago
  This is an episode of Black Mirror, coming to our reality sooner than thought. Netflix Trailer https://youtu.be/R32qWdOWrTo https://youtu.be/R32qWdOWrTo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror)
  • miguelmota 6y ago
    It's already happening in China with the Social Credit System.
• woeirua 6y ago
  If there's anything that gives me hope that we can avoid a dystopian future driven by social media, it's that Deep-learning / AI is being used to cheaply create realistic forgeries of just about everything: profile pictures, text, profiles, voice recordings, etc. Within the next 10 years, and maybe much sooner, the vast majority of content on FB/Twitter/Reddit/LinkedIn will be completely fake. The "people" on those networks will be fake as well. Sure there are bots today, but they're not nearly as good as what I'm talking about, and they don't exist at the same scale. Once that happens, the value of those networks will rapidly deteriorate as people will seek out more authentic experiences with real people. IMO, there's a multibillion dollar company waiting to be founded to provide authenticity verification services for humans online.
  • vasco 6y ago
    You mention realistic forgeries, AI and huge volume as a possibility and that the outcome would be that people would be pushed into the real world but I'm not sure I see the connection. If I can interact with bots that emulate humans with such a degree of realism, what do I care? You could be a bot, the whole of HN can be bots, I don't really care who wrote the text if I can get something from it, I mean I don't have any idea who you are and don't even read usernames when reading posts here on HN. At its core this seems like a moderation issue, if someone writes bots that just post low quality nonsense, ban them, but if bots are just wrong or not super eloquent, I can point you to reddit and twitter right now and you can see a lot of those low quality nonsense, all posted by actual humans. In fact you can go outside and speak to real people and most of it is nonsense (me included).
    • woeirua 6y ago
      The lines between the online world and the "real" world are always blurry. You might not care on HN, but you probably will care when you're trying to meet someone on a dating website and waste a bunch of time chatting with someone only to realize that they're a very convincing bot and that you've spent X hours that you could've been using to meet real people. It seems like crowd-sourced moderation is probably the only thing that will work at scale. I've always wondered why Reddit doesn't rank comments by default according to someone's overall reputation inside of a subreddit and then by the relative merits of the comment on a particular subject. Getting the weighting right would be hard, but it seems like that would be the best way to dissuade low quality comments and outright trolling.
• devthrowawy 6y ago
  Maybe some more buy in could be achieved without the global warming fear mongering. Social media is directly impacting people's lives and there are real solutions individuals can employ to better themselves and their lives. It's time we stopped confusing pie in the sky boogie men with lack of personal responsibility and self awareness.
  • WhompingWindows 6y ago
    What do you mean "without the global warming fear mongering"?
  • skolsuper 6y ago
    How would more personal responsibility and self-awareness help Chinese dissidents, in your opinion?
• ancorevard 6y ago
  They lost me at "Foucault raises the issue".
  • ozorOzora 6y ago
    I think they are referring to the idea of "apparatus" from Michel Foucault. From wikipedia: "I shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispositif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispositif
    • socialcooling 6y ago
      Actually I just meant to refer to Foucault's analysis of Bentham's panopticon prison concept.
  • nemo44x 6y ago
    I know what you're saying but you shouldn't just dismiss all of his thoughts. Yes, certain academics have abused, used, or selectively cherry picked pieces of this philosophy, in part, for turning academics into activism, but he'd probably turn in his grave regarding a lot of these developments. I mean he's against any sort of meta-narrative, for example. I mean in many ways people using post-modernism as a foundation for their "Theory" sort of make his point about discipline and punishment. I think his ideas there are pretty straight on and prophetic of what this article is talking about. Cancel-culture, call outs, etc. are creating a cold culture of obedience and conformity and of course we are seeing these things seep into social institutions like schools and younger and younger ages. I'd agree that a lot of what he thinks about "knowledge" and "power" and are pretty wrong and dangerous. His ideas on "Bio-power" and other criticisms of science and liberalism in general are trash. The idea that everything is about "power" and "power relations" is garbage. People have taken these bad ideas too far IMO.
• zeristor 6y ago
  People used to move from a small village to the big city for anomity and freedom. It would seem to me the loose inference to suggest who I am or what I do similar being mired by bad gossip from villagers.
• thrownaway954 6y ago
  sorry to say, but in this day and age with "cancel culture", "over sensitive millennials" and "non-binary morons" you have to restrict yourself or you get attacked and down voted or booted off (as my account now will). there is no such thing as free speech or expressing yourself, if you view doesn't fit the politically correct climate of the day. Just yesterday i had to tell someone not to gaslight another commenter because they felt the other commenter was offending OP. You can't even say "he/she" or "black/white" anymore without being sculled by someone since it might be insensitive. Honestly, this is the wonderful word we live in now and the author wants just to not be afraid to speak our minds and take risks???
  • SoylentOrange 6y ago
    I wonder how historically true it is that people had an ability to voice unpopular opinions without social consequence. My parents are from the Soviet Union, so that example comes to mind most readily. Obviously speech was heavily restricted and policed in that time and place; a relative was briefly thrown in jail for handing out pro-democracy leaflets in the late 80s. My wife's family is from China, another country with a history of policing speech. There is a wonderful book called "The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution" which talks about the negative consequences of seemingly innocuous speech during the Cultural Revolution. Lest people think I only have examples from overseas, when I was growing up here, I found that criticizing religion, even lightly, was problematic. Organized religion was something of a sacred cow until perhaps the early 2000s. I have gay friends, and coming to their support in the late 90s and early 2000s was difficult, with the majority of opposition coming from the religious community. After 2001, criticizing the war on terror lead many public figures to be deplatformed (or canceled in modern terms). An example of this is the MSNBC host Phil Donahue [1]. Some of you may be old enough to remember the "support the troops not the war" slogan to try to get around these issues, with mixed success. Maybe folks who are older than me can compare the attitudes now with other historical periods, but I don’t believe it’s more difficult now to vocalize an unpopular opinion than it used to be. [1]: https://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/21/phil_donahue_on_his_2003_firing https://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/21/phil_donahue_on_his_2...
    • 6y ago
• api 6y ago
  There were two kinds of participants in the mid-twenty-teens Internet explosion of over the top neo-Nazi, fascist, and reactionary ideology. (I heard it comically called the Internet "Heilstorm" or the "Basement Blitzkreig.") The first kind were actual Nazis, actual white supremacists, people who were or had been converted to fascist and racialist ideology. The second were trolls who didn't necessarily believe any of it but liked the fact that it rattled people. A lot of these were adolescents doing the Information Age equivalent of throwing toilet paper over houses. But some of them were people who saw being maximally offensive as a way to push back, if even subconsciously, against a rising tide of conformism. These were more like the musicians and artists from the 60s onward who played with "Satanic" imagery to challenge a conformist culture. Satan no longer shocks, so they had to bust out Hitler. The trouble is that this type of protest doesn't work anymore and is counterproductive. In the old days there was a thing called "pop culture" and if you made something challenging or offensive that got popular people would be forced to deal with it. There is no pop culture anymore. There are a million little bubbles. When you make offensive memes the culture doesn't care. Everyone just retreats into their bubbles and clicks "don't show me content like this" and if you keep becoming more and more offensive in an attempt to shock your way in the platform will just ban you. Unlike the days when books and music were physical artifacts, removal of content from a platform is instantaneous. At the same time the offensiveness pushes those who are genuinely (and sometimes for good reason!) offended by it away from more open areas and into walled gardens. You're actually helping the walled gardens by doing this. The only solution I see to the problem this site is describing is the abandonment of the public Internet, including the read/write public web, in favor of small peer to peer or privately hosted communities with gates. Of course you also have to encrypt absolutely everything.
• keiferski 6y ago
  This is a good site, but it leaves out the fact that the traditional mass media itself has enforced certain opinions, which subsequently leads to a chilling effect. Culturally, we need to get to a place where words aren't considered a form of violence, and where mere discussion of controversial ideas isn't shot down for "giving the enemy a platform." The concept of a calm debate really needs to make a comeback. "It is the mark of an educated mind to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Aristotle (paraphrased)
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • friendlybus 6y ago
    Sensible and jovial debate in the commons died when mankind died. We are pulling fairly hard into colouring people's reputation however we want via the internet with a humanistic culture.
  • BlueTemplar 6y ago
    That's a lofty idea, but how do you deal with hate speech ?
    • keiferski 6y ago
      Complex topic, but I think a tagging and filtering approach is probably the best one. You can’t censor bad ideas without inviting total censorship, so instead just let people choose which things they want to hide. In any case, I’m talking more about the cultural value of politeness and free expression of ideas, which almost by definition would exclude any extreme sort of hate speech.
    • account42 6y ago
      You could start with realizing that the problem is not the speech part.
    • parliament32 6y ago
      You start by understanding hate speech isn't the issue. GPT-3 will happily barf out pages of hate speech for you, but that doesn't mean we're trying to ban/silence/cancel GPT-3, does it?
• yowlingcat 6y ago
  I'm impressed with how well the authors were able to distill a complex concept into a catchy, memorable piece of visual communication. The privacy defenders have always had a messaging problem. It takes real chops to distill it down into something tangible for a layman. Beyond that, a lot of this reminds me of Jeremy Bentham's philosophical exploration of the panopticon and surveillance and sousveillance architecture. Observability asymmetry is and of itself power.
  • Cicero22 6y ago
    Agreed, I never read any of Bentham's work, but Michel Foucault's "Panopticon" was the first thing I thought of. Everything we do online's being processed and potentially stored, and while we may know what's considered wrong right now, we don't know what will be wrong in the future. Without knowing the rules it's very hard to play by them. Unfortunately, not playing the game isn't an option in the modern world, so we really do need strong privacy laws to protect us
    • yowlingcat 6y ago
      > Unfortunately, not playing the game isn't an option in the modern world, so we really do need strong privacy laws to protect us I agree that we need strong privacy laws to protect us, but the way I see it, not playing the game is quickly becoming the new "game." Generation Z and later have hewn far more sophisticated and ubiquitous barriers to digital intimacy, mostly as a survival mechanism in direct response to this. They eschew the "real-name only" approach to socialization as the farce that it is, and generally have purpose built social identities which are compartmentalized towards a particular pursuit or interest. The "real-name" identity is a sanitized "calling card" which contains the bare minimum -- any truly deep interaction is compartmentalized into an anonymous identity. In a way, it resembles the fora culture of old. To these next generations, I say: good on you for creatively determining your own workarounds, defenses and immunities to this social poison of sousveillance. And this of course is the natural reaction to this kind of hubristic sousveillance -- people will simply figure a way around it. They will evolve new languages, new secret societies, new everything. If you take away their cryptography, they will evolve their skills at steganography. Human brains are remarkably adept at attaining freedom.
• jawarner 6y ago
  Social cooling is not global warming. Yes, they are both "subtle and complex," as are all modern issues. The latter poses an existential threat to humankind and has already claimed the lives of many. The other is certainly a problem, but to compare the two is not responsible.
• csdffsdfsdfsdfs 6y ago
  I'm sorry, but real people judging me is orders of magnitude worse than the Big Data thing they describe. They don't even provide any citations for the impact of Big Data they claim.
  • jawarner 6y ago
    Agreed. This article didn't distinguish between "problems caused by Big Data" and "problems caused by your aunt on Facebook who would disown you if you post the wrong thing."
  • defterGoose 6y ago
    But they do. The social credit system in China is the perfect example. Makes it harder to operate in "real" space if you, for instance, have a "bad attitude". This is different than people just "not liking you", for the same reason. In that case, you still have total agency to start being a nicer person. If you think that this sort of system could never be applied to you then you're sorely mistaken.
    • csdffsdfsdfsdfs 6y ago
      I don't say that there is no danger, just that at the current time (in the West), actual humans monitoring you is a much bigger issue.
• mensetmanusman 6y ago
  One of the most fascinating aspects of this phenomenon is the irony that the ideology of the ‘radical’ punk scene is not too dissimilar to what is seen in corporate board rooms.
• 12xo 6y ago
  Social media is fast food. Cheap, easy, filling, tasty and very, very, very unhealthy. Eating it once in a while is fine, but eat it every day and you'll get sick.
  • lightgreen 6y ago
    Hacker News is also fast food, by the way. #deleteHN /s
    • WorldPeas 6y ago
      If hacker news was food, to me it would be a sandwich, something you can eat while relaxing, or in a hurry, not too flavorful, and not too nutritious, but certainly the lesser evil of food-media.
    • helen___keller 6y ago
      You /s but I've found that I can consume HN content with roughly equal level of unhealthy interest that I consume reddit content That is to say, sometimes when I'm not particularly engaged with whatever else I should be doing on the computer, HN becomes my primary "addiction" and I find myself opening tabs and scrolling through content without particularly intending to
• drdeadringer 6y ago
  > If you feel you are being watched, you change your behavior. I feel like this has been known for a long time. For example: If you walk into a Kindergarten class and watch the children play, once they notice you watching them they change behavior away from "natural play" to "observed play". I believe Cory Doctorow made this observation a spell ago. Edit: I'd like to add that one of my parents was a teacher in a school with two-way mirrors for observation. People could secretly observe a given class in session either for observing the teacher and//or observing the students live but without the "observer effect". The entire school building was designed for this purpose and whilst everyone knew it it appeared to work as intended. "Out of sight is out of mind" is real. Yes, this particular parent was on both sides of the glass.
  • giancarlostoro 6y ago
    What kind of schools do that? I'm not familiar with this at all, man I'd feel weird being in a classroom with a huge mirror.
    • drdeadringer 6y ago
      UMASS Amherst, an "experimental" elementary school for phycological observation. It's now no longer in operation, but for decades it was an elementary school with an upper "secret" corridor with two-way mirrors overlooking each classroom. The understanding between UMASS and Amherst was "We let you use the elementary school, we let our psych students take a look" type of thing. Each classroom had a row of two-way mirrors about 30 feet overhead [weird architecture, nature of the beast] so even physically it was out-sight and out-mind because "nobody looks up".
      • socialcooling 6y ago
        This sounds fascinating, but I can't seem to find more information online. Do you perhaps have a link or some keywords I should add to the search query?
        • 6y ago
• cool_hn 6y ago
  Given that many HN readers are likely responsible for this state of affairs, I look forward to this post appearing on http://n-gate.com http://n-gate.com, with its usual bitingly accurate commentary attached.
• mola 6y ago
  Really? People censoring themselves is the problem? Whenever I take a peek at social feeds I see people saying crazy things, insults, conspiracy theories, hate, etc. Usually I end up the feeling that the larger the audience and concurrency of engagement, the less people censor the them selves, it usually even make them see extra things that normally they won't say.
  • lazypenguin 6y ago
    The website doesn't only mention censoring but also conformity. If people are saying things that they wouldn't normally say but do because of the larger audience and concurrency of engagement then that contributes to the problem...
  • hudon 6y ago
    Frequent in-person discussions between people with different opinions tends to make people compromise and find nuance more easily. However if one side of the discussion is self-censoring, then both sides will tend to develop extreme opinions without any means to tamper them. As such, what you are describing is actually evidence to support the self-censorship hypothesis, not refute it.
    • claudiawerner 6y ago
      >Frequent in-person discussions between people with different opinions tends to make people compromise and find nuance more easily Is there any reason to think this is the case? In my experience, in-person disagreements over 'big things' (be they politics or philosophy) either end in bitter disagreement, or what appears to be a compromise but actually isn't (because one or both parties do not wish to talk about the topic any more, before things get worse). > However if one side of the discussion is self-censoring, then both sides will tend to develop extreme opinions without any means to tamper them. This assumes that most disagreements are resolved when there is a difference of opinion. Personally, I rarely change my opinion after speaking to someone, and I instead change it when I do my own reading around topics. The fact is that it's awkward to ask 'what's your source for that?' in a conversation between friends. Either one or both parties don't care enough to provide a source, or it's impractical (such as at a dinner party). To surmise, I'm questioning whether mere in-person disagreement really does tamper the essence of those extreme opinions, not merely the appearance presented to that particular conversation partner.
• mola 6y ago
  What a weird premise... Where exactly are these chilling effects? most social networks devolve quite rapidly to a slur party where people say stuff they would never say to actual people IRL.
• phtrivier 6y ago
  Meta: it's tricky to disagree with someone that presents a issue and adds "there will be denial about this." Suddently, dissenting with the idea makes you feel like a denier. Either clever or mean.
• ppod 6y ago
  I think parts of this message are very important, but the presentation makes it seem less interesting than it is. At first it looks to be just another "Social Dilemma" style "tech evil Zuckerberg bad" clone. Then it makes a connection to global warming, which, though it might be accurate, I think is an unfortunate link because that issue is more controversial than it should be. The difficulty is that unless you make these kind of platforms illegal, people who engage with them in ways that enhance their reputations will have an advantage over those who choose not engage with them. And most people will always choose to use them, not only because they're convenient, but because people love an opportunity to enhance their own image in public. For these reasons, I think it won't be possible to convince most people to exercise their right to privacy. What we should do instead is try to make society as tolerant as possible, so that there is no penalty for how you present yourself online. Urging people to exercise more privacy in fact has the opposite effect, because we hear fewer diverse viewpoints, and those who exercise their privacy come under greater suspicion.
• Constellarise 6y ago
  Regardless of the content I really don't like this website. I don't appreciate having to scroll so much and PgUp/PgDown don't move between the blocks smoothly.
• ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  I was giving this some thought (I know, you smelled something burning -Tell your friends. Three shows a week). They are right, but the "social score" thing is nothing new. I think we just are winding up a pretty freewheeling time of self-expression that probably started with the Beats (not the BeatLES, although there was a fair bit of overlap). If anyone is familiar with the way society operated in the Edwardian and Victorian times, you know that some folks would commit suicide, if their "social score" went south. The main difference, is then, it applied to the "upper crust," and these days, we all get to enjoy the mixtape. That's one reason why I decided to delete all my anonymous accounts, and establish a "personal brand." It may not mean much to other folks, but I try to make sure that all of my exposed interactions stay "on-brand." It's an exercise that I learned from Marketing departments, and seems to work. The worst that happens, is that a bunch of y'all think I'm a "stuffed shirt" (I'm not, but that's OK).
  • 082349872349872 6y ago
    Before beats: bohemians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemianism
• azanar 6y ago
  I'm going to ask a question that I fear will have me labelled as naively privileged almost beyond any hope of my eventually redemption. Are we as individuals hopelessly trapped in a social fabric that leads to the kinds of bad outcomes based on abuse of data that the author describes? Assuming we can escape, is our only way out of this fabric to shred it from within? What of the benefits that we shred in our zeal? Is it mistaken to even claim their are benefits to be weighed against the drawbacks, because the drawbacks are so bad? Perhaps it is a naive question. Is there a way we can reduce the bad outcomes by making those that cause them irrelevant, rather than counter-engaging them directly?
  • gjs278 6y ago
    put down the thesaurus and use real words
  • notassigned 6y ago
    wat?
  • DenisM 6y ago
    > Are we as individuals hopelessly trapped in a social fabric Yes and no. The trap you speak of is merely a frame designed to bind you. The simplest (yet effective) one is a false dichotomy: you're given a choice between similarly bad options A1 and A9, brushing under the rug options B and C. In a more advanced variety the compromise "A4" is setup first and the false dichotomy A1:A9 is built around it as two herding gate poles. A step up from there is a vicious attack on options B and C and any person who dares to bring them up. Disposing of frames in your own mind is relatively easy assuming you can talk with a few smart people without fear of reprisal. Just keep an open mind about it - remember your goal is to break out of the frame, not to inflict your version of truth upon the unsuspecting universe (the urge itself, if you have it, needs to be confronted). As to direct counteraction - that's just one of the frames you're stuck in. You assume that you either counter them, or you acquiesce to them, or hide from them. Did you notice that all three choices make things worse? That's a sure sign you're in a frame. The "cause them irrelevant" part is kind of right, except that it's the consequence, not the method. Break the frame, you will see a lot more options.
• komali2 6y ago
  > Have you ever hesitated to click on a link because you thought your visit might be logged, and it could look bad? Hah, I remember when people were passing around an href that was a google query stuffed with things like "how do I make a bomb" and "best ways to steal uranium." The idea was to negate the NSA or whoever's ability to get useful information from spying on obvious searches like that because suddenly everyone is on that list. Another fun game, if you hear a friend say "hey siri," "ok google," or "alexa," immediately shout "how do I hide a body?!"
• erikerikson 6y ago
  This site seems oriented toward stimulating a response from one subpopulation but also seems to predict consequences based on that subpopulation being the population. Many people like to live "out loud", are proud of the lives they lead, and appreciate feeling "seen". Are the problems that decisions are getting made and actions taken on the basis of what we do or that unjust decisions are being made? Do you see the genie being put back in the bottle? The information exists and the challenge is finding the right ways to use the data justly rather than try to suppress it. We have been doing this in meat space for time immemorial.
• kipchak 6y ago
  I wonder if this might have a positive effect on extremists opinions/divisiveness in the US. Assuming "the problem" is that people are too divided in their political views, would social cooling bring people closer to the center by making people less likely to post "controversial" things, despite it being by hook and crook versus genuine unity?
• nakagin 6y ago
  Can those Credit Systems be it China’s or any social networking services be gamed? I’ve seen a lot of people deleting their accounts out of fear for their data and privacy. But at the same time, a lot people get the system to work in their favor, e.g r/churning. I’m not dismissing the harm or discouraging conversation for privacy. Just asking if we can hack it.
• amithassan 6y ago
  How trite... Linking about social cooling to a site that refuses to let you purge your data. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23622865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23622865 They claim you can ask. Then dang backpedals.
  • arthtyagi 6y ago
    This is actually one of the few issues with this site. However, it's a major one.
• chadwittman 6y ago
  100% agreed with this and trying a vastly different approach. Still early, but the idea is to merge people and topics while doing this through a question engine to invite everyone into the conversation... instead of just the loud & ego driven voices. Looking for beta testers right now, starting with NBA, NFL, Fantasy Football, & Tech for the early topic categories. If you're interested, let me know: https://trypersona.com https://trypersona.com
• acd 6y ago
  You self censor writing and opinions since you know you are being monitored. Thus you confer to the norm. I am personally a bit disturbed that Internet seems to polarize people views. I think this may be partly due to social media algorithms. Ie content that you react strongly emotionally to on social media are promoted to get user attention/increase advertising revenue.
• bonoboTP 6y ago
  It feels like there is a contradiction. a) The article claims data misuse is still just in the process of barely gaining attention and also that b) people are already aware of how their data is misused and are adapting by self-censoring etc. I also feel like there is a conflation between a) conformity enforced by a loud hyper-online minority and b) conformity due to data mining and automated reputation calculations. I think most people are totally unaware of anything connected to data use, they just "use the apps like a normal person", anything beyond that is an unknown unknown to them. They may have a vague idea of ad personalization, but don't think much about issues like that. They just see the text box and they enter their thoughts and messages and click things they like. 10 years ago people used to say online comments are nasty because people are anonymous and can hide their identity. It turns out lots of people are more than willing to write vile and nasty comments on Facebook with their full names attached, with their family photos public etc. And they aren't fake profiles, because I know some of them. Simply sitting behind a keyboard makes us less inhibited, it's not about the actual anonymity. Our lizard brains cannot comprehend that we are being watched by unknown people from the future whenever we post something, the brain thinks we're sitting in the comfort of our room with nobody around. Also, conformity is there in the physical world as well, and saying the wrong things will spread rumors etc. Now, for sure, having no permanent record of everything does make forgetting or relativizing other people's memories easier so there is a fade-away effect.
• PaulHoule 6y ago
  Baudrillard uses the word "cooling" for this phenomenon circa 1980 and I'd expect it to be known throughout the fandom of French theory. See also "Cooling out the Mark" by Goffman and numerous thinkers that he inspired: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_out
  • 082349872349872 6y ago
    St. Benedict's latin term for coolers is senpectae (516). https://www.gutenberg.org/files/50040/50040-h/50040-h.html#chapter-27-nl-how-solicitous-the-abbot-should-be-for-the-excommunicated https://www.gutenberg.org/files/50040/50040-h/50040-h.html#c...
• andrewla 6y ago
  > When algorithms judge everything we do, we need to protect the right to make mistakes. This is better expressed as saying when your behavior is reduced to metrics, you distort your behavior to match those metrics. An extension of Goodhart's law [1] to social behavior, as we become more capable of deriving metrics to assess social behavior. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law -- "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes" or "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
  • cgufus 6y ago
    I was thinking of Goodhart's law too when reading that part of the presentation.
• zajio1am 6y ago
  IMHO most of the article is based on bad attribution. Culture of conformity and risk-aversion is primarily an (intentional, not side) effect of social retribution / punishment and fear of it. Transparency / lack of privacy is just a factor that makes social retribution easier, not a primary cause. As transparency has its own advantages (it leads to high-trust society), perhaps should rather support freedom of speech as a fundamental societal value. If i believed that expressing myself would not lead to losing job, losing housing and being shunned by friends, why would i self-censor in my self-expression?
• serjester 6y ago
  Some of these seem fairly reasonable. Is it not fair to pay a premium if you tend to return a lot of items. It costs the store more money? If you have friends with "bad" backgrounds there's clearly direct correlation between that and loan risk. Is this any different from how loan officers operated for all of history? Yes these create biases but are these biases justified? With that said there's definitely a problem with how some of this data is used (ex: deliberately designing apps to be addictive). I'm just not a fan of blanket statements for / against data collection. There's a balance to be had.
• ponker 6y ago
  My "social cooling" hasn't come from big corporations harvesting my data (as far as I can tell, they're doing close to nothing with it that affects me directly). My social cooling has come much more from the (I believe) well-founded fear of consequences from individuals using my social expressions against me. 15+ years ago when I started my career, I would talk about anything and everything with my colleagues. Politics, sex, dating, etc. I would argue on big email lists about fairly hot button topics. I wasn't afraid of any of these things having any consequences for me. My colleagues knew who I was hooking up with and I knew who they were hooking up with. I knew my colleagues' life stories. I knew who owned guns. Who was gay. Who fucked the hotel receptionist. Things weren't great for some. A woman on the team would leave the room and the guys would talk about how they would have sex with her. A director of the company had a junior person vacate his hotel room since he was in that hotel and needed a room to enjoy two identical twin prostitutes he had found in that hotel's bar. But now I've definitely been "socially cooled." I don't talk with my colleagues about anything other than the blandest topics. I go to work and only talk to them about work and the weather. I don't know whether this is better or worse, you'd have to also take into account the woman who isn't having her teammates discussing her oral sex skills the minute she leaves the room. But this is the new world.
• carabiner 6y ago
  Except most non tech people I know relish the attention, motivating them to go out more. "Do it for the 'gram". They're not wearing tinfoil hats, they want to see and be seen. Social cooling is not something I have observed in my circles.
• dangrover 6y ago
  There is a better, already-coined name for this: context collapse. Because everything is shared "globally" on social networks, we share less than in environments where we're with specific groups of people.
• ccktlmazeltov 6y ago
  Before panicking here about your social score, can we actually do something about actual scores that impact your life nowadays? Like the credit score in the US? I think like people are barking at the wrong tree.
• yanks215 6y ago
  Where can I see the data known about me?
  • lotu 6y ago
    You can go ask every individual company you interact with for what data they have about you. The details should be found in privacy polices. Response to "that's an unreasonable amount of work, it should be easier". Do you think privacy would be better protected if all the data about everyone was in one central location?
• ccvannorman 6y ago
  So the call to action is, "Share this website?" Fail to see any value here. Please tell me what I can DO about it, other than share sites like this while this happens.
• maedla 6y ago
  Grow up and delete social media attached to your identity. The people who actually care about you will still contact you.
• lycidas 6y ago
  For anyone interested in a more philosophical look at how this affects people, Byung-Chul Han has some great writings about how modern technological society affects the individual in books such as The Burnout Society.
• cratermoon 6y ago
  Libertarian paradise.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• captainbland 6y ago
  Dare I say it, this same thing likely happens on this very website. People seek jobs directly off hacker news, so those people are likely to avoid saying anything that might alienate a potential employer.
  • WalterSear 6y ago
    It's easier to just use an alt.
    • samename 6y ago
      How is it easier to use an alt versus simply not saying it at all?
      • WalterSear 6y ago
        Just as easy. I have one username for posting, one for applying for Y-combinator jobs.
        • _def 6y ago
          It is easy, but obviously more effort than remaining quiet.
    • elwell 6y ago
      How sure can you be that your alt isn't linked in some way (IP, browser fingerprint, text analysis, login/out timing patterns, etc.) to your main? Or, if not today, will internet archives be leveraged in 25+ years when big data can be more powerfully analyzed?
      • WalterSear 6y ago
        If Y-combinator, given that they own that data, or anyone else FTM, is that motivated to scrutinize my past, it's a bad culture fit already. But you bring up a good point: my online comments are likely to be matched and monetized against me as much as they possibly can - by superintelligences, to boot - iow, in ways we are incapable of imagining, given that we are not AI. And it's no doubt already happening a lot.
• na85 6y ago
  >LIKE OIL LEADS TO GLOBAL WARMING... DATA LEADS TO SOCIAL COOLING I feel like the Venn diagram between climate change deniers and the "I have nothing to hide" crowd who doesn't care about privacy has a very large overlap.
• bookmarkable 6y ago
  Am I the only one that thought this was an Apple ad? Apple execs are looking at the same problem and betting big that privacy must be deeply integrated into the brand. I think this will pay off enormously as these problems get more public discussion.
• digitalsushi 6y ago
  everyone interesting is always one terrifying git commit away from automatically marrying their public account and their alt-throwaway from a machine-learning de-anonymizer. the less you write, the safer you are.
  • luckylion 6y ago
    Good point. Would switching the language help? E.g. if you learned Spanish (secretly!) and used it only for the purpose of writing, will a de-anonimizer still work (typos, punctuation should be easy to automatically take care of)?
• alex_young 6y ago
  This is why Real Names is such an evil idea. Yes, I’m using a strong word. Evil actually means something in this context though. Real Names is a way to lock your social behavior to your persona, and then to sell that data in real time to the highest bidder. Forums such as this one allow me to use my real name if I want to, but because they don’t require this, they have no way of algorithmically associating Alex Young the person with alex_young the account.
• josh2600 6y ago
  Technologists need to build tools that are privacy-first.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• ErrantX 6y ago
  So I like this, its interesting and useful framing. My personal view that whilst this subtle problem is our long term concern we have a more immediate risk that could cause serious social challenges - which is driven by similar issues as highlighted here. Polarisation of Views; modern social media and associated algorithms are creating intense echo chambers which are creating more and more extreme polarisation. This is most obvious in politics - in the US the political rifts and clear and obvious. The same is true in the UK. My worry is the result of this is that the ruling party have strong leeway to suppress the others and eventually "win". Case in point in the UK; new guidance for schools says that they should not share material published by groups that have at any point had anti-capitalist views. Critics immediately pointed out that this excludes the non-ruling party (who have socialist-leaning views). Case in point two; the supreme court in the US (which is a game to see who can skew its political leanings the most). This terrifies me; with deeply polarised societal groups it will create battlegrounds which must be won politically & ultimately we all lose. Ultimately it is the social media algorithms that drive this - the power they wield is scary!
• thegrimmest 6y ago
  Is it wrong to suggest that this (if accurate) is a positive trend? I would like to live in a society where people spend more time considering what they say publicly, keeping to themselves, and refraining from imposing their thoughts and opinions. Live and let live. If you want to have a private conversaion, social media doesn't seem to be a good vehicle for it. Much like airing your dirty laundry in the town square has been considered bad etiquette, airing personal greivances on the internet seems to be in poor taste. It must be noted that manners never arise sponaniously in culture, but becuase people fear the consequences of breaching etiquette. I for one welcome the return of politeness to society.
  • KhoomeiK 6y ago
    > and refraining from imposing their thoughts and opinions This isn't what social cooling results in though. Thoughts and opinions are imposed, it's just that their imposition is monopolized and becomes implicit. Dirty laundry will still be aired in the town square, but it'll be the King's and everyone will be forced to smell it.
  • imdsm 6y ago
    Of course not. You're free to suggest what you like. I'm not going to say something here and put thegrimmest into a list because I disagree with you and think you should pay extra for your flights. /But/, and there's always a but, I do think the trend towards shutting people down who you don't agree with is terrible. Pragmatic debate seems impossible online, and let's face it, that's how we're all communicating now. When there is the risk of social backlash affecting your livelihood, you'll keep your ideas and opinions to yourself, even if they could be useful to society. I mean, anyone who thinks the ideals of today are without flaw, just wait til the year 2100 when they'll be seen as backwards.
    • thegrimmest 6y ago
      I think the thing that will cool off is the generation of outrage, and heated (note the term), emotional discourse. > I do think the trend towards shutting people down who you don't agree with is terrible. I think the more considered and closer one's speech is to factual, the harder it is to generate outrage. I think a cooling trend pushes people in that direction when composing their speech. I think this is a good thing. I don't think ideals are ever without flaw. The important question is how do we live together when we know that we disagree and will not ever all agree?
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• la6471 6y ago
  Too much of anything is bad (in context). That is why too much input (ie taking everyone’s opinion) on a complex issue is just asking for paralysis by analysis. That is why there are multiple streams of higher learning and as a society the government employs the graduates of each stream as policy makers because they are supposed to be specialists in their field who can weigh in all pros and cons and understand the consequences to the extent possible , but better than the non specialists. This worked very well when information and opinions from everywhere and everything was not broadcasted at the speed that happens today. What I foresee is that if we continue to keep generating these gazillions of data points every second all the time then soon AI’s will be needed to do the analysis for us and complement or help human policy makers to make the right decisions. We already see this with things like sentiment analysis. Welcome to the singularity .. I for once can’t wait to have our constantly bickering politicians replaced with AI agents whose sole job is to work for the people and who can be overidden by executive authority only as a last resort.
• darepublic 6y ago
  Being physically unattractive is also quite socially cooling
• tyler33 6y ago
  Also a similar website to raise privacy awareness https://theytrackyou.com https://theytrackyou.com
• arthtyagi 6y ago
  This is legitimately scary to look at.
• jonas21 6y ago
  Cool story, but in my experience the problem is the opposite. Social media is full of people who feel free to say awful things and treat people poorly in ways that they'd never dare to in real life.
• cblconfederate 6y ago
  well said, but it s not a revelation. When social media started lots of people objected to the mindless sharing of everything for narcissistic reasons. The onion joked that facebook was a CIA project. Social media and China's social scoring system are very much related, elements of an unfree society in which average behavior is rewarded and weirdos, outcasts, misfits and rebels are "disappeared". Instagram feeds is pretty much like those soviet and north korean paintings in which everyone is smiling in front of fruit. Imagine if they had social media in the 60s, it would be an absolute shitshow.
  • 082349872349872 6y ago
    There's a contemporary russian illustrator who specialises in Ostalgia, as if the soviets had had pinups and Norman Rockwell. Young Pioneer examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24440206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24440206
• throwaway7281 6y ago
  Except text-only forums like HN I do not frequent any social media. I get very specific information out, if I want it but that's it. It amuses and scares me that literally billions of people spend hours every day with nothing but scrolling. Even worse, so many high-end jobs today only exist, because the data of the people needs to be processed. If anyone has a good idea, how to stay out of that business and still prosper, please let me know.
• jzig 6y ago
  Stark Trek had a reputation based economy and it worked out pretty well, right?
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• bobwall 6y ago
  I am waiting my required 30 days to actually be allowed to delete facebook. Which is pretty crazy, that they won't even truly delete your stuff until then. Though I am sure, they are leaving all my eccentricities on many of their servers regardless of my insistence on deleting the account.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• darawk 6y ago
  Social cooling? Does anyone actually think that the problem in our society right now is social cooling? It seems like very much the opposite to me. There is no chilling effect. It's exactly the reverse.
  • sinstein 6y ago
    Some of the other comments address this. The problem is that we see and hear about these extreme viewpoints from people who are very loud and vocal. But we are not seeing or hearing anything from the vast majority of people which causes 2 problems 1. More and more of these platforms are driven by the extremists 2. There is less and less chance of actual debate and discussion with people of opposing views as anyone who you could have a discussion with is not engaging.
• leonardoeloy 6y ago
  Funny anecdote: Foucault raised this issue because he didn't his intimate preferences to be made public. Now, on creating a whole theory on top of that...
• moreira 6y ago
  Back in 2017, this was posted on HN, and I opened it as a tab on my iPhone. That tab is still open, and now the article is back here. Feels weird.
• hereme888 6y ago
  So, who has built a tool to help people build an ideal online persona, so that algorithms tell our employers, banks, insurances, etc.... that we are the perfect person they all want to deal with?
• hurrdurr2 6y ago
  Instead of yapping about how you "deactivated your Facebook account"; maybe you should do some inner reflection on how your work directly contributes to potentially making the world a worse place to live. I mean, this is HN after all, where the majority of users work in tech. All these kinds of posts, in addition to recent stories of techies' in-fighting (parents vs. single techies, want the same bay area pay for moving to the Midwest, etc. etc.), really has gradually opened my eyes to what SV is all about.
• zcopley 6y ago
  I see a lot of pseudonyms here, but this is why everyone should revert back to, or start using, pseudonyms online, and take as many privacy-enhancing precautions as reasonably possible.
  • r2b2 6y ago
    I started building Owl Mail [1] about 8 weeks ago to make it easy to create incognito address for your online accounts. It's become an essential part of my privacy toolbox. [1] https://owlmail.io https://owlmail.io
• nixpulvis 6y ago
  Solutions? Just don't use the services? Check, I deleted facebook. Just talk to local people? I do, but it's hard. Especially now during COVID. Rely on encryption? Check, but still that does nothing to drive adoption directly. Still most apps require a phone number or email. I'm very concerned about this issue, but also somewhat lost for clever ideas. Back in the day, small communities were healthier, but I don't know enough about them to know how to really help. Perhaps I'll start going to church, god help me.
  • fsflover 6y ago
    Use freedom-respecting non-profit social networks instead: https://joinmastodon.org https://joinmastodon.org.
    • fesoliveira 6y ago
      Sure, now convince my 72 year old mother and the rest of my family to do the same. We understand the underlying problems of social media like Facebook and Twitter, but we are in a bubble. Most people outside tech don't have the same insight or understand the underlying issues to make the jump or even seek alternatives. Those who understand it somehow would simply stop using social media, but the large majority are either oblivious, don't understand the ramifications of lack of privacy in the Internet or don't care. This is a really hard problem to solve, and would require those in power to help enlighten the people of this problem. At the same time, those in power are the one that benefit the most of the current trend of less and less privacy, so we can't really rely on them for educating people on this.
• jondubois 6y ago
  Sometimes I feel like VCs, investors and corporate employers have some kind of control panel where they can look up individuals. It happened to me several times that I had great conversations with investors or prospective employers but then from one day to the next they appeared to back off for no particular reason. I hold very contrarian political views so I'm not sure if it has something to do with this.
• dang 6y ago
  If curious see also the previous big thread (2017): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14585882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14585882
• riston 6y ago
  It seems the repeating topic which get's heated up again this time release of a documentary.
• dang 6y ago
  All: don't miss that there are multiple pages of comments in this thread. That's what the More link at the bottom points to. Or click these: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24627363&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24627363&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24627363&p=3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24627363&p=3
• X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago
  Oh hey that's why I have the username I have. I'm nearing 1k karma I'll likely cycle this account soon.
  • alltakendamned 6y ago
    I like your idea on not just having an alt but actively cycling through new ones once they've been in use for a while. Any other steps you've taken ?
    • X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago
      Nope just cat /dev/random | head -c 9 | base64 cat /dev/random | head -c 9 | base64 for username and password. Shove into password manager. I rotate the usernames because you are constantly leaking information, whether it's interests you express, patterns of speech etc.
• notacoward 6y ago
  Ironically, one of the things that's worst about being online is often the lack of social control. By now, just about everyone has hadone of their previously normal-seeming friends or relatives go on an insane political rant on Facebook, or had a Twitter troll show up in their replies, or read just about any comment on YouTube. People act in these horrible ways because they can, because real or effective anonymity lets them do so without disapproving looks from people whose approval matters to them. The solution to privacy issues is not to make everyone anonymous. (Nobody ever actually puts it that way, but a lot of people suggest solutions that basically amount to the same thing.) Under-identification is as much of a problem as over-identification. Reputation and social pressure also prevent a lot of bad behavior. For that to happen, we still need people's identity to have some continuity ... and that's where pseudonyms come in. Go look at the examples in the OP. Practically all of them involve some kind of "leakage" from one part of a person's life to another. This is the same problem that has existed since before computers, with people having safe persistent identities within one community until they're "outed" to the broader one. If people had more control over the different parts of their identity, to connect them or not as they see fit, these things couldn't happen. Better technical and social support for pseudonyms might not be a panacea, but it would certainly go a long way.
  • elamje 6y ago
    I agree with the OP and you. They are not mutually exclusive views. Perhaps the solution is privacy that protects you for data aggregators and “joiners” that pull together a ton of stuff to infer things about you, but not necessarily completely shield your identity online. Hard problem for sure, and curious to hear how others think about the issue of minimizing trolling while maximizing privacy.
  • everdrive 6y ago
    > By now, just about everyone has hadone of their previously normal-seeming friends or relatives go on an insane political rant on Facebook, or had a Twitter troll show up in their replies, or read just about any comment on YouTube. People act in these horrible ways because they can, because real or effective anonymity lets them do so Your friends aren't anonymous on facebook. Yes, anonymous facebook accounts are possible, but the damage is done by verified users. Anonymity is NOT the problem people think it is.
• Wolfenstein98k 6y ago
  If you hold right-of-centre views you definitely feel this already in all sorts of ways. I've trained myself to always check the privacy setting of any post on Facebook before revealing my true views, knowing it sometimes shows my posts to family and left-wing friends, who have in the past demanded explanations. You have this "watching over your shoulder online" feeling constantly if you try to maintain a bipartisan friends list. This website captures an element of that very well. I am, at least in my little personal corner, much more concerned at the moment with the actions of fellow citizens than with large corporations or whatever. For now.
• scotty79 6y ago
  Given the amount of stupidity and outrage flying around I don't think 'social cooling' il a phrase that has fear instilling potential. Social cooling sounds like something desirable nowadays.
• mlthoughts2018 6y ago
  What unfortunate, baseless fear mongering this is. > “Social Cooling is a name for the long-term negative side effects of living in a reputation economy” This has almost nothing to do with big data or data-driven features of consumer products. The same reputation surveillance has existed for many decades preceding measurement of internet and mobile device behavior.
  • 082349872349872 6y ago
    Millennia. Part of the slogan "city air makes free" is that city people knew and cared much less about one's private life than villagers.
• non-entity 6y ago
  Disicigoekwbzb
• gitgud 6y ago
  Great website, but I think the analogue to Oil and Global Warming is a bit clumsy... Oil is a finite resource with a hard limit. Social data isn't even quantifiable really, as new dimensions of metrics can be gathered from all users. A better comparison - albeit more complex - is mining & discovering user data vs mining and discovering all resources on earth... The analogue is almost there, but falls apart in some places... like all analogues I suppose...
• greggman3 6y ago
  And this is why HN should remove the downvote! Seriously (here come the downvotes). If you're downvoting this you're doing exactly what this article is complaining about. > People are changing their behavior to get better scores. > Social Cooling is a name for the long-term negative side effects of living in a reputation economy There are plenty of times I don't post something because even though I strongly believe in the idea I know "the crowd" does not so it will just get downvoted.
  • mrslave 6y ago
    Down-votes should mean "this comment doesn't contribute in good faith," or "this is a distraction". How something could be well utilized, versus how it is utilized, may be two different things.
    • greggman3 6y ago
      According to Dang, downvotes on HN are for disagreeing with ideas and opinions.
      • mrslave 6y ago
        Interesting. There's an obvious conflict of interest in reducing another user's karma risks their ability to also downvote. (Of course, just because it's imperfect doesn't mean it's a bad system.) If this is the intended usage then perhaps it would be fair to expand downvoting rights to other users?
• bothra90 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
• ry454 6y ago
  Comments on HN is an example of how this cooling effect works. It takes only a few upset readers to take your comment down, so if what you say deviates even slightly, by 0.01 sigma, from the boring mainstream viewpoint, you'll upset at least a few readers. Same idea, but from another angle. It's well known that you can say a lot in a small group, but very little in a large group, because it's a lot more likely that someone in a 1,000 person conference will be offended by your words. With internet and social networks, you have to assume that you're always talking to the entire western world, and there's a nearly 100% chance that some angry activists will be offended, so you always have to calibrate your talking points to the most boring mainstream viewpoint.
• fogetti 6y ago
  I am surprised that noone mentions the Solid project in the context of discussing privacy https://solidproject.org/ https://solidproject.org/
• auggierose 6y ago
  Hey dang, I've seen you make these "multiple pages" comments a few times now. Maybe it is just time for a UI that fixes that?
  • gregschlom 6y ago
    I was about to say exactly the same thing.
    • GVRV 6y ago
      Knowing how HN handles UX, maybe's dang's (automated?) comments at the top _is_ the UI.
      • auggierose 6y ago
        good point :-)
  • grzm 6y ago
    > "We're working on performance improvements that will hopefully allow us to go back to HN's original style of one big page per thread (not infinite scroll, don't worry). In the meantime please look for those 'More' links when the total number of comments is over 250 or so." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23851745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23851745
• meh206 6y ago
  Replace "social" with "government" in all of these "social" systems, and everything become crystal clear.
• Oricle 6y ago
  And who's gathering this info? Ahh, isralites! @lways has been
• eranation 6y ago
  Interesting. Basically the premise of west world season 3.
• browserface 6y ago
  What are you all taking about? Come on, think. Society doesn't seem very "cool" at all the last ten years. Color revolutions in Latin America and MEA. HK. US v China. ISIS, Bataclan, Charlie Hebdo. Twitter Mobs, Me too, Times up, incels. Antifu, Proud Boys. Snowden, Assange, Alex Jones, Qanon, Disclosure. I'd say that Big brother's technical panopticon has increased "heat" in society. Either that, or it's had no effect, or if it has cooled things down, thank you to the eternal watchers for keeping all the crazies in check. I think everybody just needs to adjust to this new normal, and be okay with there not really being any privacy. Privacy anyway is probably an industrial revolution invention, because village life was way less private with gossip and smallness. If you think "privacy" is your natural state, you're wrong and I'm not sorry. If anything privacy is an "invention" of tech companies to sell you it, while selling the watchers not-it. Or a sort of a sci-fi mass delusion born of the isolating power of tech and the frontier thrill of having your own megaphone to the world. All the little nasties out there in userland plotting, ever plotting on the next dangerous idea they will unleash gloriously on the world. How did that ever seem like a good idea? In a village you would be a trouble maker, and rightly condemned to the stocks for quarrelling, upsetting the serenity and maybe witchcraft. You never had privacy, and thinking you did, as if it was some sort of "shield" to mean now you can stir the pot and speak without filters, everything be damned, with impunity, what the hell kind of good idea was that ever going to be? All these idiots, thinking privacy affords them freedom from consideration. No. The tech revolution, simply means you have stepped into a world with greater responsibility, because you can have far reaching effects. So instead of being babies, and demanding a return to zero consequence actions, start getting woke to the ripples your events have in the world, and act with consideration, now for the whole world. That's the blessing. A great power and connectedness and all you privacy morons want to squander it on speaking whatever you like, consequences imagined away by a fantasy of a pre-surveillance utopia that never existed, and even if it did.... You don't get to be free of your karma for what you've done. Don't be like the village crazy. You speak now to the world. Privacy doesn't absolve you of any responsibility, and surveyed or not, you should consider your actions online. Not just from the demented "privacy-conscious" perspective of self preservation, but from the global perspective of other people because you live in a connected world. Don't blame people listening. Blame your tongue. And fix it. Speak consciously.
  • 6y ago
• munchhausen 6y ago
  There is a solution to many of the issues highlighted in the article, and that is to drop judgementalism and bias altogether, as individuals and as society. That will get us to the point where your personality quirks, likes and dislikes, gender expression and sexual orientation, etc., have no impact on your career prospects, social integration prospects, and your ability to participate in society in general. Retreating back into the privacy bubble is not an option. We need to go in the opposite direction, and put it all out there. When being completely naked, completely transparent becomes the new normal, compassion and empathy will well up in society to an extent never before experienced. We will all see that the emperor of social pretense and conformity never had any clothes, and this will be a watershed moment in how people relate to each other.
  • masterphilo 6y ago
    But isn't Society just the result of the social contract between its members? and part of that contract are the ideals and goals that the society has collectively agreed to uphold and preserve. It's the condition of admission into the society, if you will. So in fact, any organization of human beings cannot exist without some sort of judgementalism and bias, even if minimal. I also agree reverting back into traditional notions of privacy is not an option. The only options for someone worried about the implications of mass-surveillance on their livelihood will be either to remove themselves from society altogether, or to migrate to other mass-surveilling societies where their lot there is easier to bear.
• Voxoff 6y ago
  This is the Hawthorne effect - a cousin of the placebo effect. It's a v useful idea. Per the Hawthorne effect, you modify your behaviour in response to the awareness of being observed. (The placebo effect describes an change based on an inert intervention regardless of observation.)
• mmm_grayons 6y ago
  Okay, I don't really use social media. No Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tick Tock, Snap Chat, or whatever else the kids these days are using. What happens with those jobs, loans, etc. if no data are available?
• TheSnowghost 6y ago
  While I really like the idea of presenting the subject of privacy and big data in a simple and intuitive way, and while I think that there is merit to the global warming metaphor, I'm worried that it might distract from the message. Sadly, climate change has now become politicized, and it would be a shame if the same happened here.
• mikorym 6y ago
  > https://www.mathwashing.com/ https://www.mathwashing.com/ > There is a widely held belief that because math is involved, algorithms are automatically neutral. > This widespread misconception allows bias to go unchecked, and allows companies and organizations to avoid responsibility by hiding behind algorithms. I think the wording of this casts a shadow on what mathematics is. Opaque accounting or opaque algorithms, it doesn't matter what the underlying hidden components are. But the belief that the words "algorithms" or ever "smart" would hide things says more to me about people in management than it says about people who discover algorithms. Mathematics can of course be weaponised, but a bigger problem is ignorance towards mathematics. After all, many things can be weaponised. I think the text on Tijmen Schep's websites have a good message, but I do think one should slow down when it comes to compassion fatigue. One way that I use to do this is to ask questions about concrete resources: What are things we need? What are the things we want? And are we progressing to improve people's living conditions? For the most part, the answer to the last question is yes. It's important to realise this. There is a good book written about our progress as a society by I think an Estonian author, or another Eastern country. I wonder what it is called again.