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The Platform Is the Enemy

203 points by nomdep 6y ago

ashton314 6y ago
The tone is perhaps a tad melodramatic, but that keeps it fun to read! I think there’s a question worth asking here that I don’t thing gets asked enough: what are the decisions we want to leave to humans? What decisions do we want to leave to individual humans? This article reminded me of Neil Postman’s Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. I’ve written my thoughts on it here.[^1] His primary thesis is that all technology has a trade-off and an agenda of how it wants to be used, and more importantly, we are often blind to that trade-off and agenda. For simple technologies, like hammers and spoons, the danger is negligible. For more powerful technologies like writing, telegraphy, and statistics, the dangers are much harder to see. I highly recommend Technopoly if this article struck a cord with you. [^1]: https://lambdaland.org/posts/2020-08-16-book-review-technopoly-v2/ https://lambdaland.org/posts/2020-08-16-book-review-technopo...
- Vishal_TE 6y ago
  People also need to think for themselves and take responsibility for their actions. Remember the case where someone got millions for spilling hot coffee on himself? Hot coffee is hot and it's the drinkers responsibility to not spill it. We can't blindly follow what we read or see. If we do that, there won't be any issue. The other problem is that platforms try to be the arbiters of truth. That can't work because most things are in shades of gray. When platforms take sides, the other side feels slighted.
  - grzm 6y ago
    > "Remember the case where someone got millions for spilling hot coffee on himself?" Often trotted out as an example of frivolous litigation, you're likely referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restaurants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau... > "Stella Liebeck, a 79-year-old woman who suffered third-degree burns in her pelvic region" > "Liebeck sought to settle with McDonald's for $20,000 to cover her actual and anticipated expenses. Her past medical expenses were $10,500; her anticipated future medical expenses were approximately $2,500; and her daughter's loss of income was approximately $5,000 for a total of approximately $18,000" McDonald's offered $800. Liebeck retained an attorney. After continuing to refuse to settle, the jury ultimately awarded $160,000 to cover expenses, and $2.7M in punitive damages. If you want to argue the personal responsibility angle for the $20,000, you're entitled to your opinion. The millions were not what she personally was asking for.
    - KMag 6y ago
      Yes, the common perception of this lawsuit is a prime example of an excellent PR spin. Almost everyone seems to know of this lawsuit, but almost all of them seem to have very important details wrong. There are good reasons McDonald's lost this lawsuit. Skin grafts on your genitals are not just hot coffee. They were serving coffee 40 deg F (22 deg C) hotter than the temperature needed to fry an egg, and at least 20 deg F (11 deg C) hotter than any other tested vendor. Also, at the time, McDonald's had reports of over 700 people who had been injured to various degrees by their coffee.
      - znpy 6y ago
        thanks for posting this. this story keeps popping up, always with this kind of details either omitted or completely wrong. it's important to keep reminding people of those important details. thank you!
      - syshum 6y ago
        >>They were serving coffee 40 deg F (22 deg C) hotter than the temperature needed to fry an egg That right there is also PR spin, because it does not actually take that high of heat to "fry an egg", infact to cook eggs properly you often want lower heat or they become rubbery... Thus it is PR spin to phrase it in that manner because people associate "frying" with extreme high temps well over boiling point (212 degrees F / 100 deg C) The coffee at McD's at the time was around 180 degrees F (82 deg C), their justification for that (right or wrong) was customers wanted to hotter coffee so it would still be hot when they arrived at the homes or offices after visiting the drive through. Anecdotally, I know many people today that complaining about drinks from Drive through not being HOT enough, or cooling down too quickly >>Also, at the time, McDonald's had reports of over 700 people who had been injured to various degrees by their coffee. Over a 10 year span, over thousands of locations, and probably millions of cups of coffee sold, from a statistical standpoint that is very small rate
    - Mikhail_Edoshin 6y ago
      And the punitive damages were awarded because there were documents that McDonalds was aware of the danger (there were other similar cases), but did nothing. I've also heard they deliberately kept the coffee very hot because they were promoting free refills, but wanted to discourage them to actually happen, but I don't know if it's true.
  - inglor_cz 6y ago
    "Remember the case where someone got millions for spilling hot coffee on himself? Hot coffee is hot and it's the drinkers responsibility to not spill it. We can't blindly follow what we read or see. If we do that, there won't be any issue." I think you pwned yourself here, repeating blindly a very distorted presentation of the actual incident. Go read up more on it, you might change your mind. There is a good reason why McD lost the case despite lawyering up.
  - bserge 6y ago
    Oh, you used the R word. That's a big no no. Nobody likes Responsibility, and you're to blame heh.
    - Can_Not 6y ago
      I don't mind taking personal responsibility and (anyone) getting handouts, things are a bit incorrectly tuned as far as laws go though.
  - siltpotato 6y ago
    In light of what the others have said, perhaps you should edit and show a better example.
- pdonis 6y ago
  > what are the decisions we want to leave to humans? What decisions do we want to leave to individual humans? The problem is that to even ask these questions, you must already have an answer to them: you have to know who "we" is.
  - cinquemb 6y ago
    Well maybe not an answer, but there is definitely the assumption of consensus around who "we" is.
- cm277 6y ago
  Everything is relative. A couple of millenia ago, powerful technologies meant plumbing, sewage, currency, postal mail. Do you want to think about any of these things? No, you just assume they work so you can move your thinking up the stack. But you absolutely want them regulated and managed by a democratic authority too... Why is Twitter different?
  - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > you absolutely want them regulated and managed by a democratic authority too... Why is Twitter different? If my sewage or plumbing stop working, I get sick and die. If my Twitter stops working, nothing...I am not on Twitter. Lots of countries (e.g. Japan) do fine with a private postal service. And plenty (e.g. Panama or America in the era of free banking) do fine outsourcing their currency. I am not saying Twitter shouldn’t be regulated. Just that this isn’t the argument for it.
    - undreren 6y ago
      It depends on what you mean by “stops working”. When social media becomes the primary driver of misinformation and anti-democratic sentiment, then it has arguably “stopped working”. While users might not be sick in the flesh, their minds will surely start to rot.
      - bserge 6y ago
        And solving it by blocking Twitter is just so... human. The platforms aren't the problem, people are the problem. Education is piss poor, if that's not fixed/improved, we can go back to pre-industrial times and people would still vote for a moron who promises big things, never delivers and just grabs power for themselves. Financial/civic/political education in schools? Public-sponsored articles and videos debunking conspiracies? Nah, just ban Twitter, that'll solve it. People on either side of the fence believe they're right. Keep ignoring and belittling each other and it will lead to an even worse situation down the road.
        6y ago
- KMag 6y ago
  Technopoly was floating around my fraternity's library. I picked it up randomly, and loved it. Postman didn't write the ancient Egyptian myth told in the beginning of the book, but Pharaoh being cognizant of the downside to Thoth's gift of writing to mankind was eye-opening. The rest of the book was also good. It really changed my prospective on technology, to always be on a lookout for hidden downsides to seemingly universally beneficial technologies like writing. (MIT fraternities may be a bit different from what you'd expect. About half of MIT undergraduate men are members of fraternities.)
  - BlueTemplar 6y ago
    Does it mention the rise of Protestantism and the 100 years war as a consequence of the printing press ?
- Guthur 6y ago
  For me it comes across as typically nihlistic, which is all too common these days, where by it's making statements that we're nothing more than survival of the fitest. For me this is just patently false, humanity has tackled with existentialism, art, science and much more. Many of which is to better understand our position in the universe and not just to survive. But there is a crux to it; not everyone cares. Which again can also be seen through the generations many people are just interested in surviving and have no more desire than to get to the nearest McDonalds or Starbucks, and that's fine. I feel this is the majority of people and it's only a few exceptional individuals that have the drive and ability to push beyond; some of them are actually often quite troubled and maybe it's their very lack of contentment and happiness that drives them on. I feel the nihlistic point of view has the greatest of troubles with this state of affairs because if the vast majority are just content to sit back and go to the nearest Yelp recommendation, and there's no real higher purpose, then it's all just rather depressing.
  - giantg2 6y ago
    "... if the vast majority are just content to sit back and go to the nearest Yelp recommendation, and there's no real higher purpose, then it's all just rather depressing." I think we're there. Many I people I know, or know of, don't care about higher purpose and don't care to understand the concepts or mechanisms underlying the technology that does stuff for them. They just want life to be easy and fun (as we all do), but they don't care about exploring meaning in life or even going in-depth into their own beliefs
cl0ckt0wer 6y ago
This is a great example of why platforms have so much power. If you look at TFA source, it's designed by someone else. And that dev is shilling for digital ocean, so I'm assuming that's the host. The internet is specializing, and hosting is a very hard specialization. TFA goes on to talk about how we don't think anymore, and we abdicate our choices to group think. Then they compare the social effect of telephones and FB. Then they go on to compare social media to an extinction level event. Hyperbole aside, I understand why people are so agitated. FB has been going for about 18 years now, I don't think this has been what's caused the unrest that we're seeing. Poor living conditions for the bottom half of society has given this legs. Yeah, we can kill of section 230 and make everyone choose from a list of pre-approved messages, but that is not a fix.
- lovecg 6y ago
  > Poor living conditions for the bottom half of society has given this legs. Debatable. There are many conflicting explanations about the current phenomenon and some of them talk about the role of the solid and relatively secure middle class that has lost something intangible, a sense of hope for the future, identity in other words. The more I try to read and understand the less clear it seems. But it’s safe to say any single minded narrative is probably too simplistic and doesn’t fully explain the whole reality.
- incrudible 6y ago
  Killing section 230 would force social media sites to choose between censoring according to their whims but then being on the hook for everything, or delegating censorship to the law. I think there is a valid argument to be made that Twitter is not like a TV station, but more like television itself. Suppose all television had a strong political bias into some direction, that would be an unacceptable situation.
29athrowaway 6y ago
People like to talk about their rights, but rights can only exist in a society where people fulfill their duties as citizens. For example, you have the right to be treated with dignity, but it is also your duty to treat others with dignity. You have the right to not be discriminated, but also the duty to not discriminate others. And so on. As a citizen, you have freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom to vote... but it is also your duty to develop critical thinking and stay informed so you can exercise those freedoms for the greater good.
- bserge 6y ago
  You could say people have a... responsibility. Maybe there should be a class on just that throughout all school years.
schoen 6y ago
I found this taxonomy (helping you decide / helping you act) interesting, and I wonder whether there are other categories that it might naturally be extended with. Helping you deliberate, helping you discuss, helping you exercise command authority? I was just watching some videos of mission control centers from space missions and they were interestingly different from any situations I've been in myself. They're about helping people talk to each other in a very structured way, as well as looking at information together (also in a very structured way) -- with defined scopes of authority and responsibility, and responding to a sometimes quickly-evolving situation.
a-dub 6y ago
i don't think that mike judge set out to make a movie about the relationship between humans and technology.
- bitwize 6y ago
  Yeah, I think he saved that for Silicon Valley.
sanxiyn 6y ago
It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Alfred North Whitehead (1911)
- Aerroon 6y ago
  It is repeated because the advancement of civilization has enabled us not to think about the intermediary steps. It's a reminder to sometimes think about the process itself. It can lead to discoveries that can improve the entire process. The 'erroneous truism' is like the saying "Don't judge a book by its cover." The meaning of the saying isn't that you must ignore the cover and judge every book by its content. Picking out a book to read from the library would be impossible. We still need to make decisions based on heuristics. The saying is simply a reminder that sometimes a poor outward appearance can have a gem hidden underneath.
- incrudible 6y ago
  This statement does not age well. Some of the worst disasters of the twentieth century relied on masses of people not stopping to think what they were doing.
- raspyberr 6y ago
  Just have a look at the immediate news-headline issues happening around the world. I reckon a good number of them wouldn't be issues if people did some "thinking" and not relying on "the algorithm" to tell what's happening.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
  There’s a lot baked into that. It’s great that I don’t need to think about manual memory management. It’s a different class of operation than OP is talking about. I suppose google search is somewhere in the middle.
randallsquared 6y ago
> If Yelp picks the restaurants for me enough, I stop having nuanced preferences about restaurants. That energy expenditure is no longer needed for survival and reproduction. Dump those neurons. Over time people stop caring about the tiny details of what the difference is between a good and a great restaurant. Yelp handles that. I think there's a distinction that's being glossed over, here: people can be desirous of eating at some restaurants more than others because of the results, but no longer pay attention to what those restaurants have in common -- what the underlying reasons are for the outcome at those restaurants that they prefer. Something which helps decide where to eat would ideally highly rate restaurants you'd enjoy, while not requiring you to learn specific details about the preparation of really excellent food. I disagree with the assertion that letting a rating service choose the restaurant (or a list of restaurants of the highest rating) will result in not having desires about the experience at that restaurant, but I think "nuanced preferences" in the initial sentence must mean "knowing a lot about the kind of restaurants I like", instead.
- lovecg 6y ago
  But the whole idea of attaching a one dimensional number to a preference seems flawed. How do you even compare movies, books, songs you enjoy? There’s a broad sense of liking or not something in general, but attaching a 4.1 stars to this and 4.3 stars to that seems delusional. And it’s not context-free either: start taking into account the time of day, state of mind, the phase of the moon or what have you, and you might as well throw the whole concept out.
  - mikewarot 6y ago
    >But the whole idea of attaching a one dimensional number to a preference seems flawed. I think the idea of attaching a one dimensional number to almost anything in computer mediated communications is wrong. I believe we should rate things with a vector, not a scalar. Example: Your post Is 4.5 insightful, 0.2 snark, 5.0 truthful, 0.0 political
  - BlueTemplar 6y ago
    The law of large numbers deals with the last issue. A much worse issue is that the aggregated rating is going to depend on the expectations that people had of the product. And bad marketing can screw that up, especially if it attracts the kind of people that are a bad fit for the product. And the smaller you are, the more the 'marketing' is out of your hands.
based2 6y ago
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
ColinHayhurst 6y ago
Suppose "make something people want" is the North star. It's the YC strapline, of course. The issue is that the "people" concerned change. As a startup we make something people want, and if we get it right we might choose to take on the rocket fuel that gives us a slim chance of becoming a platform. But the rocket fuel suppliers want returns, so we switch from being concerned about people, as users, and more concerned about shareholders. Andlet us not forget VCs want monopolies. So we have a bunch of unsolved problems with monopolies maintained with the lie that Shopping, Search, Messaging, Social Interaction, Video Calls ... are solved problems. Technology and media should help you decide what to do and help you accomplish things you have decided to do. What it shouldn't do, but does so increasingly, is stopping us thinking when we should be.
jeandejean 6y ago
We can't grasp the world's complexity as an individual but we need a simple, universal and unquestionable definition of technology...
bserge 6y ago
The platform is not the enemy, it's just a resource. If you choose to believe any information as it was written, without thinking about it yourself or checking with other resources, that's on you. Personal responsibility seems to be criminally underrated, everyone would rather blame anything and anyone but themselves. That's toxic for everyone, including yourself. But this reminded me, I don't remember the last time I solved a problem without looking for an answer online... It's really efficient, but I've lost the ability to quickly solve something by myself. This is why I'm afraid of all the censorship and blocking, I'd have to go back to how it was. It was slow and hard, but also fun tbh.
gverrilla 6y ago
Such a shallow text. Writer doesn't even understand what a platform is.
hyko 6y ago
There seems to be a general assumption that pre-internet technologies didn’t change people’s behaviour or dramatically alter the contours of their life decisions, which is of course very wrong. There’s no possibility of a decline into an idiocracy because we’ve been in one since the dawn of civilisation. Since we have this far lacked the technology to modify ourselves directly, we’ve offloaded any of our super-human goals onto our environment in a symbiotic dance with the gifts evolution has bestowed upon us. There isn’t some inflection point where computers are a catalyst into an imagined decline: they are just part of the evolving process. Perhaps direct augmentation will change things, but that is unlikely to be available to us in the near to medium term. People’s desires and perceptions have been shaped by–and in turn shaped–thousands of years of technology at this point; from fundamental tech like reading and writing through hygeine and mass media. Rolling back one layer is not particularly important.
classified 6y ago
> If we can't fix this, we're all going to die. He should have told this to Elohim a million years ago, when the human source code was being written. By now that ship has sailed.
- NateEag 6y ago
  Remember that Elohim let humans break their own source code, according to the book of Genesis. Tree of the knowledge of God and evil, etc, etc...
  - NateEag 6y ago
    ..."good and evil," not "God and evil."
    - classified 6y ago
      Oh, I took it to be a deliberate pun. No damage done :)
DebtDeflation 6y ago
What I wouldn't give to go back to the Internet as it existed when I was an undergrad in the early 1990s - Usenet, IRC, and Listserv.......
- unnouinceput 6y ago
  Those things still exist today, they didn't vanished. And none is stopping you creating new IRC channels or Usenet groups. Oh, wait, your problem is not that those things vanished, is that people no longer use them in large numbers. So what you want is to impose your will on others to use the technology that you want instead the one that they want, yes? I think this is called dictatorship.
bloomingeek 6y ago
Fascinating! So the old saying, "Use it or lose it" remains relevant in the computer age. Most things are invented with profit in mind, that's fine as long as the way the product is used benefits mankind. Oh wait, some of mankind are dishonest and borderline evil! We didn't see that coming! (Wow, I'm still making a profit!)
al2o3cr 6y ago
Yelp tells you which restaurant to go to. I must've missed that button in the app. Probably a good thing, since the places it recommends are gonna be full of straw men.
- gfodor 6y ago
  You're arguing semantics. If Yelp reduces the choices for you down to a ranked list, it introduces a huge amount of bias in your decision. And if you use it relatively deterministically, you've consequentially changed your behavior in a way such that an outside observer will eventually be able to predict your behavior with high probability, if they understand what Yelp is showing you. In that sense, "telling you" starts to be a sane thing to think, even if it's not literally telling you the exact singular place to go.
BlueTemplar 6y ago
'Platforms' were derisively nicknamed in France in 2007 during a historic Libre Software Meeting as "Minitel(s) 2.0", to insist on them being a regression compared to the normal Internet / Web : https://www.fdn.fr/actions/confs/internet-libre-ou-minitel-2-0/ https://www.fdn.fr/actions/confs/internet-libre-ou-minitel-2... (fr) (Note that this probably predates the generalization of the term 'platform', as neither it, nor the French 'plateforme' is nowhere to be found in the transcript.)
njacobs5074 6y ago
Years ago (c. early 1980s), a friend of mine who was studying psychology quipped that one of his professors asserted that "70% of people do not engage in introspection". I thought it was a remarkable statement and it certainly resonated with my then recently acquired hipster outlook on life. But in the intervening years, I've seen little to indicate that he was wrong.
- stevesearer 6y ago
  Introspection is hard and takes time. I’ve found that people can spend time alone only to always fill it with activities like podcasts and reading. While not bad, they tend to add more information when sometimes what is needed is time to process existing information. I wonder if people get new understanding or ideas while in the shower because it is just a routine, manual activity where they actually have a few minutes with no additional inputs.
egypturnash 6y ago
Man half the task of using Yelp is looking at the reviews and deciding which ones are legit and which are either a 5-star review that was paid for, or a 1-star review by some tourist who is annoyed that their feet were not immediately kissed upon walking through the door, and that they were served an authentic example of the local cuisine instead of the bastardized version from a chain restaurant in there Homeland Of No Spices. Which I guess probably goes back into the thesis that "the platform is the enemy" in some ways but geez, people just stop at the star ratings on Yelp and don't go any further before eating?
- clan 6y ago
  They do not. It has taken me a long time to learn and accept. And I still struggle with it. Many people have very different priorities and choose not to care. I am then often asked for advice for places to go and items to buy. Why? Because I do spend the time and effort it takes to go "beyond the stars". For years I could not wrap my head around people who did not do that. I have learned (still learning) not to call them stupid, lazy or weak. They simply have different priorities. Priorities. That is what I have chosen to call it. And I am still struggling with it... :-)
- ljm 6y ago
  Can't really remember the last time I used or saw value in platforms like Yelp, or TripAdvisor, but generally if I'm on holiday I'm not using Google to search for 'best restaurants' in the area or whatever; I'll take a local recommendation or just experiment. Tourist traps are easy enough to identify. I might still enjoy a restaurant if the food wasn't great, because other parts of the experience more than made up for it. I won't support a system like Yelp because the end result is that everything becomes average to serve the algorithm.
marcinzm 6y ago
The argument taken to its extreme is that all of civilization is a mistake since civilization involves specialization which means individuals give up their decisions on things. It's a very pessimistic argument and assumes that people don't use the saved energy for productive endeavors. The fact that civilization has prospered indicates to me that they do in fact simply find other things to spend their mental energy on. Do you want Einstein spending mental energy on picking his next restaurant or solving the fundamental questions of the universe? edit: Much has been written about how the most productive people aggressively remove having to make trivial choices from their lives. To the point of having fifty copies of a single set of clothes.
- syshum 6y ago
  Civilization may not be a mistake, but it is clear that 90% of people in a civilization is dragged forward kicking and screaming by 10% of people into a Civilization it is not equipped to handle and unprepared for. I think that more than anything is the underlying lesson and danger from the idiocracy documentary We are injecting tools, and technology into civilization that we are not ready for with no concern or care for the damage it does
  - yawnxyz 6y ago
    I think clinical trials are the most aggressive form of making sure that a new technology isn't harmful on the population. I can't even imagine what tech would look like if strict pathways like clinical trials were forced on apps and websites, but I could imagine that be possible one day.
    - marcinzm 6y ago
      You can't really do random testing on social products because there's no good way to segregate a social network. Too much overlap and sharing. Harm is also subjective which makes it very hard to measure. For example, tech that made people more supportive of gay rights would have been considered very harmful until fairly recently by a majority of the population.
EGreg 6y ago
I have seen the problem described for years. What about the solutions? They are not easy, but would go along these lines: https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#Distributed-Operating-System https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#Distributed-Operating-...
chrisandchips 6y ago
In drawing the distinction between technologies that enable us to act on a decision we’ve already made versus those that try to make the decision for us, its interesting to note that the former is increasingly leading to the latter. When I started using platforms like Netflix and Uber Eats, it was because I already knew the things I wanted to watch and eat, and they provided an easy way for me to act on those desires. As they became normalized parts of my day to day, it only seemed natural that I should start following their recommendations as well. Now it feels increasingly like I go to them to give me answers, unlike when I started out.
- yawnxyz 6y ago
  I rejected Spotify's Discover Weekly suggestions for a really long time, but lately I've been more and more accepting of the fact that wow, I really do like Discover Weekly's suggestions every week, and I don't know how to reconcile that
  - onelovetwo 6y ago
    We're all dealing with the same thing but its not just Spotify...its every algorithm we encounter. Its hard to reconcile that we're not unique, we're extremely predicable.
  - Can_Not 6y ago
    Spotify's algorithm clearly doesn't know how to find music I like, but it's (afaik) a harmless heuristic that accidentally gets it right a few times.
deckard1 6y ago
I'm surprised that the most obvious example of platforms getting in the way and real life imitating Idiocracy has not been mentioned: the Boeing 737 MAX. This is a plane where the engineers cut corners all so the business could beat their competitor. The focus was on the short-term. They broke the fundamental abstractions that the pilot is specialized on. And the results speak for themselves: hundreds of people dead, and a multi-billion dollar fiasco.
8note 6y ago
Google to me is the most obvious case of technology being a brain extension. Post google, people tend not to remember things anymore that can easily be searched
braindead_in 6y ago
Platforms are dangerous, but that's not AI's fault. If AI can control our minds, why would it drive us to extinction? Doesn't the AI want to survive as well? If the AI has any real intelligence, it would want to keep us around, in some form or the other but in tightly controlled simulated environment. In that case, we could very well be in a simulation right now. And that line of thought leads you directly to Advaita Vedanta.

203 points by nomdep 6y ago

The tone is perhaps a tad melodramatic, but that keeps it fun to read! I think there’s a question worth asking here that I don’t thing gets asked enough: what are the decisions we want to leave to humans? What decisions do we want to leave to individual humans? This article reminded me of Neil Postman’s Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. I’ve written my thoughts on it here.[^1] His primary thesis is that all technology has a trade-off and an agenda of how it wants to be used, and more importantly, we are often blind to that trade-off and agenda. For simple technologies, like hammers and spoons, the danger is negligible. For more powerful technologies like writing, telegraphy, and statistics, the dangers are much harder to see. I highly recommend Technopoly if this article struck a cord with you. [^1]: https://lambdaland.org/posts/2020-08-16-book-review-technopoly-v2/ https://lambdaland.org/posts/2020-08-16-book-review-technopo...

Vishal_TE 6y ago
People also need to think for themselves and take responsibility for their actions. Remember the case where someone got millions for spilling hot coffee on himself? Hot coffee is hot and it's the drinkers responsibility to not spill it. We can't blindly follow what we read or see. If we do that, there won't be any issue. The other problem is that platforms try to be the arbiters of truth. That can't work because most things are in shades of gray. When platforms take sides, the other side feels slighted.
- grzm 6y ago
  > "Remember the case where someone got millions for spilling hot coffee on himself?" Often trotted out as an example of frivolous litigation, you're likely referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restaurants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau... > "Stella Liebeck, a 79-year-old woman who suffered third-degree burns in her pelvic region" > "Liebeck sought to settle with McDonald's for $20,000 to cover her actual and anticipated expenses. Her past medical expenses were $10,500; her anticipated future medical expenses were approximately $2,500; and her daughter's loss of income was approximately $5,000 for a total of approximately $18,000" McDonald's offered $800. Liebeck retained an attorney. After continuing to refuse to settle, the jury ultimately awarded $160,000 to cover expenses, and $2.7M in punitive damages. If you want to argue the personal responsibility angle for the $20,000, you're entitled to your opinion. The millions were not what she personally was asking for.
  - KMag 6y ago
    Yes, the common perception of this lawsuit is a prime example of an excellent PR spin. Almost everyone seems to know of this lawsuit, but almost all of them seem to have very important details wrong. There are good reasons McDonald's lost this lawsuit. Skin grafts on your genitals are not just hot coffee. They were serving coffee 40 deg F (22 deg C) hotter than the temperature needed to fry an egg, and at least 20 deg F (11 deg C) hotter than any other tested vendor. Also, at the time, McDonald's had reports of over 700 people who had been injured to various degrees by their coffee.
    - znpy 6y ago
      thanks for posting this. this story keeps popping up, always with this kind of details either omitted or completely wrong. it's important to keep reminding people of those important details. thank you!
    - syshum 6y ago
      >>They were serving coffee 40 deg F (22 deg C) hotter than the temperature needed to fry an egg That right there is also PR spin, because it does not actually take that high of heat to "fry an egg", infact to cook eggs properly you often want lower heat or they become rubbery... Thus it is PR spin to phrase it in that manner because people associate "frying" with extreme high temps well over boiling point (212 degrees F / 100 deg C) The coffee at McD's at the time was around 180 degrees F (82 deg C), their justification for that (right or wrong) was customers wanted to hotter coffee so it would still be hot when they arrived at the homes or offices after visiting the drive through. Anecdotally, I know many people today that complaining about drinks from Drive through not being HOT enough, or cooling down too quickly >>Also, at the time, McDonald's had reports of over 700 people who had been injured to various degrees by their coffee. Over a 10 year span, over thousands of locations, and probably millions of cups of coffee sold, from a statistical standpoint that is very small rate
  - Mikhail_Edoshin 6y ago
    And the punitive damages were awarded because there were documents that McDonalds was aware of the danger (there were other similar cases), but did nothing. I've also heard they deliberately kept the coffee very hot because they were promoting free refills, but wanted to discourage them to actually happen, but I don't know if it's true.
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  "Remember the case where someone got millions for spilling hot coffee on himself? Hot coffee is hot and it's the drinkers responsibility to not spill it. We can't blindly follow what we read or see. If we do that, there won't be any issue." I think you pwned yourself here, repeating blindly a very distorted presentation of the actual incident. Go read up more on it, you might change your mind. There is a good reason why McD lost the case despite lawyering up.
- bserge 6y ago
  Oh, you used the R word. That's a big no no. Nobody likes Responsibility, and you're to blame heh.
  - Can_Not 6y ago
    I don't mind taking personal responsibility and (anyone) getting handouts, things are a bit incorrectly tuned as far as laws go though.
- siltpotato 6y ago
  In light of what the others have said, perhaps you should edit and show a better example.
pdonis 6y ago
> what are the decisions we want to leave to humans? What decisions do we want to leave to individual humans? The problem is that to even ask these questions, you must already have an answer to them: you have to know who "we" is.
- cinquemb 6y ago
  Well maybe not an answer, but there is definitely the assumption of consensus around who "we" is.
cm277 6y ago
Everything is relative. A couple of millenia ago, powerful technologies meant plumbing, sewage, currency, postal mail. Do you want to think about any of these things? No, you just assume they work so you can move your thinking up the stack. But you absolutely want them regulated and managed by a democratic authority too... Why is Twitter different?
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > you absolutely want them regulated and managed by a democratic authority too... Why is Twitter different? If my sewage or plumbing stop working, I get sick and die. If my Twitter stops working, nothing...I am not on Twitter. Lots of countries (e.g. Japan) do fine with a private postal service. And plenty (e.g. Panama or America in the era of free banking) do fine outsourcing their currency. I am not saying Twitter shouldn’t be regulated. Just that this isn’t the argument for it.
  - undreren 6y ago
    It depends on what you mean by “stops working”. When social media becomes the primary driver of misinformation and anti-democratic sentiment, then it has arguably “stopped working”. While users might not be sick in the flesh, their minds will surely start to rot.
    - bserge 6y ago
      And solving it by blocking Twitter is just so... human. The platforms aren't the problem, people are the problem. Education is piss poor, if that's not fixed/improved, we can go back to pre-industrial times and people would still vote for a moron who promises big things, never delivers and just grabs power for themselves. Financial/civic/political education in schools? Public-sponsored articles and videos debunking conspiracies? Nah, just ban Twitter, that'll solve it. People on either side of the fence believe they're right. Keep ignoring and belittling each other and it will lead to an even worse situation down the road.
      - 6y ago
KMag 6y ago
Technopoly was floating around my fraternity's library. I picked it up randomly, and loved it. Postman didn't write the ancient Egyptian myth told in the beginning of the book, but Pharaoh being cognizant of the downside to Thoth's gift of writing to mankind was eye-opening. The rest of the book was also good. It really changed my prospective on technology, to always be on a lookout for hidden downsides to seemingly universally beneficial technologies like writing. (MIT fraternities may be a bit different from what you'd expect. About half of MIT undergraduate men are members of fraternities.)
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  Does it mention the rise of Protestantism and the 100 years war as a consequence of the printing press ?
Guthur 6y ago
For me it comes across as typically nihlistic, which is all too common these days, where by it's making statements that we're nothing more than survival of the fitest. For me this is just patently false, humanity has tackled with existentialism, art, science and much more. Many of which is to better understand our position in the universe and not just to survive. But there is a crux to it; not everyone cares. Which again can also be seen through the generations many people are just interested in surviving and have no more desire than to get to the nearest McDonalds or Starbucks, and that's fine. I feel this is the majority of people and it's only a few exceptional individuals that have the drive and ability to push beyond; some of them are actually often quite troubled and maybe it's their very lack of contentment and happiness that drives them on. I feel the nihlistic point of view has the greatest of troubles with this state of affairs because if the vast majority are just content to sit back and go to the nearest Yelp recommendation, and there's no real higher purpose, then it's all just rather depressing.
- giantg2 6y ago
  "... if the vast majority are just content to sit back and go to the nearest Yelp recommendation, and there's no real higher purpose, then it's all just rather depressing." I think we're there. Many I people I know, or know of, don't care about higher purpose and don't care to understand the concepts or mechanisms underlying the technology that does stuff for them. They just want life to be easy and fun (as we all do), but they don't care about exploring meaning in life or even going in-depth into their own beliefs

cl0ckt0wer 6y ago

This is a great example of why platforms have so much power. If you look at TFA source, it's designed by someone else. And that dev is shilling for digital ocean, so I'm assuming that's the host. The internet is specializing, and hosting is a very hard specialization. TFA goes on to talk about how we don't think anymore, and we abdicate our choices to group think. Then they compare the social effect of telephones and FB. Then they go on to compare social media to an extinction level event. Hyperbole aside, I understand why people are so agitated. FB has been going for about 18 years now, I don't think this has been what's caused the unrest that we're seeing. Poor living conditions for the bottom half of society has given this legs. Yeah, we can kill of section 230 and make everyone choose from a list of pre-approved messages, but that is not a fix.

lovecg 6y ago
> Poor living conditions for the bottom half of society has given this legs. Debatable. There are many conflicting explanations about the current phenomenon and some of them talk about the role of the solid and relatively secure middle class that has lost something intangible, a sense of hope for the future, identity in other words. The more I try to read and understand the less clear it seems. But it’s safe to say any single minded narrative is probably too simplistic and doesn’t fully explain the whole reality.
incrudible 6y ago
Killing section 230 would force social media sites to choose between censoring according to their whims but then being on the hook for everything, or delegating censorship to the law. I think there is a valid argument to be made that Twitter is not like a TV station, but more like television itself. Suppose all television had a strong political bias into some direction, that would be an unacceptable situation.

29athrowaway 6y ago

People like to talk about their rights, but rights can only exist in a society where people fulfill their duties as citizens. For example, you have the right to be treated with dignity, but it is also your duty to treat others with dignity. You have the right to not be discriminated, but also the duty to not discriminate others. And so on. As a citizen, you have freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom to vote... but it is also your duty to develop critical thinking and stay informed so you can exercise those freedoms for the greater good.

bserge 6y ago
You could say people have a... responsibility. Maybe there should be a class on just that throughout all school years.

schoen 6y ago

I found this taxonomy (helping you decide / helping you act) interesting, and I wonder whether there are other categories that it might naturally be extended with. Helping you deliberate, helping you discuss, helping you exercise command authority? I was just watching some videos of mission control centers from space missions and they were interestingly different from any situations I've been in myself. They're about helping people talk to each other in a very structured way, as well as looking at information together (also in a very structured way) -- with defined scopes of authority and responsibility, and responding to a sometimes quickly-evolving situation.

a-dub 6y ago

i don't think that mike judge set out to make a movie about the relationship between humans and technology.

bitwize 6y ago
Yeah, I think he saved that for Silicon Valley.

sanxiyn 6y ago

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Alfred North Whitehead (1911)

Aerroon 6y ago
It is repeated because the advancement of civilization has enabled us not to think about the intermediary steps. It's a reminder to sometimes think about the process itself. It can lead to discoveries that can improve the entire process. The 'erroneous truism' is like the saying "Don't judge a book by its cover." The meaning of the saying isn't that you must ignore the cover and judge every book by its content. Picking out a book to read from the library would be impossible. We still need to make decisions based on heuristics. The saying is simply a reminder that sometimes a poor outward appearance can have a gem hidden underneath.
incrudible 6y ago
This statement does not age well. Some of the worst disasters of the twentieth century relied on masses of people not stopping to think what they were doing.
raspyberr 6y ago
Just have a look at the immediate news-headline issues happening around the world. I reckon a good number of them wouldn't be issues if people did some "thinking" and not relying on "the algorithm" to tell what's happening.
6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
There’s a lot baked into that. It’s great that I don’t need to think about manual memory management. It’s a different class of operation than OP is talking about. I suppose google search is somewhere in the middle.

randallsquared 6y ago

> If Yelp picks the restaurants for me enough, I stop having nuanced preferences about restaurants. That energy expenditure is no longer needed for survival and reproduction. Dump those neurons. Over time people stop caring about the tiny details of what the difference is between a good and a great restaurant. Yelp handles that. I think there's a distinction that's being glossed over, here: people can be desirous of eating at some restaurants more than others because of the results, but no longer pay attention to what those restaurants have in common -- what the underlying reasons are for the outcome at those restaurants that they prefer. Something which helps decide where to eat would ideally highly rate restaurants you'd enjoy, while not requiring you to learn specific details about the preparation of really excellent food. I disagree with the assertion that letting a rating service choose the restaurant (or a list of restaurants of the highest rating) will result in not having desires about the experience at that restaurant, but I think "nuanced preferences" in the initial sentence must mean "knowing a lot about the kind of restaurants I like", instead.

lovecg 6y ago
But the whole idea of attaching a one dimensional number to a preference seems flawed. How do you even compare movies, books, songs you enjoy? There’s a broad sense of liking or not something in general, but attaching a 4.1 stars to this and 4.3 stars to that seems delusional. And it’s not context-free either: start taking into account the time of day, state of mind, the phase of the moon or what have you, and you might as well throw the whole concept out.
- mikewarot 6y ago
  >But the whole idea of attaching a one dimensional number to a preference seems flawed. I think the idea of attaching a one dimensional number to almost anything in computer mediated communications is wrong. I believe we should rate things with a vector, not a scalar. Example: Your post Is 4.5 insightful, 0.2 snark, 5.0 truthful, 0.0 political
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  The law of large numbers deals with the last issue. A much worse issue is that the aggregated rating is going to depend on the expectations that people had of the product. And bad marketing can screw that up, especially if it attracts the kind of people that are a bad fit for the product. And the smaller you are, the more the 'marketing' is out of your hands.

based2 6y ago

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/

ColinHayhurst 6y ago

Suppose "make something people want" is the North star. It's the YC strapline, of course. The issue is that the "people" concerned change. As a startup we make something people want, and if we get it right we might choose to take on the rocket fuel that gives us a slim chance of becoming a platform. But the rocket fuel suppliers want returns, so we switch from being concerned about people, as users, and more concerned about shareholders. Andlet us not forget VCs want monopolies. So we have a bunch of unsolved problems with monopolies maintained with the lie that Shopping, Search, Messaging, Social Interaction, Video Calls ... are solved problems. Technology and media should help you decide what to do and help you accomplish things you have decided to do. What it shouldn't do, but does so increasingly, is stopping us thinking when we should be.

jeandejean 6y ago

We can't grasp the world's complexity as an individual but we need a simple, universal and unquestionable definition of technology...

bserge 6y ago

The platform is not the enemy, it's just a resource. If you choose to believe any information as it was written, without thinking about it yourself or checking with other resources, that's on you. Personal responsibility seems to be criminally underrated, everyone would rather blame anything and anyone but themselves. That's toxic for everyone, including yourself. But this reminded me, I don't remember the last time I solved a problem without looking for an answer online... It's really efficient, but I've lost the ability to quickly solve something by myself. This is why I'm afraid of all the censorship and blocking, I'd have to go back to how it was. It was slow and hard, but also fun tbh.

gverrilla 6y ago

Such a shallow text. Writer doesn't even understand what a platform is.

hyko 6y ago

There seems to be a general assumption that pre-internet technologies didn’t change people’s behaviour or dramatically alter the contours of their life decisions, which is of course very wrong. There’s no possibility of a decline into an idiocracy because we’ve been in one since the dawn of civilisation. Since we have this far lacked the technology to modify ourselves directly, we’ve offloaded any of our super-human goals onto our environment in a symbiotic dance with the gifts evolution has bestowed upon us. There isn’t some inflection point where computers are a catalyst into an imagined decline: they are just part of the evolving process. Perhaps direct augmentation will change things, but that is unlikely to be available to us in the near to medium term. People’s desires and perceptions have been shaped by–and in turn shaped–thousands of years of technology at this point; from fundamental tech like reading and writing through hygeine and mass media. Rolling back one layer is not particularly important.

classified 6y ago

> If we can't fix this, we're all going to die. He should have told this to Elohim a million years ago, when the human source code was being written. By now that ship has sailed.

NateEag 6y ago
Remember that Elohim let humans break their own source code, according to the book of Genesis. Tree of the knowledge of God and evil, etc, etc...
- NateEag 6y ago
  ..."good and evil," not "God and evil."
  - classified 6y ago
    Oh, I took it to be a deliberate pun. No damage done :)

DebtDeflation 6y ago

What I wouldn't give to go back to the Internet as it existed when I was an undergrad in the early 1990s - Usenet, IRC, and Listserv.......

unnouinceput 6y ago
Those things still exist today, they didn't vanished. And none is stopping you creating new IRC channels or Usenet groups. Oh, wait, your problem is not that those things vanished, is that people no longer use them in large numbers. So what you want is to impose your will on others to use the technology that you want instead the one that they want, yes? I think this is called dictatorship.

bloomingeek 6y ago

Fascinating! So the old saying, "Use it or lose it" remains relevant in the computer age. Most things are invented with profit in mind, that's fine as long as the way the product is used benefits mankind. Oh wait, some of mankind are dishonest and borderline evil! We didn't see that coming! (Wow, I'm still making a profit!)

al2o3cr 6y ago

Yelp tells you which restaurant to go to. I must've missed that button in the app. Probably a good thing, since the places it recommends are gonna be full of straw men.

gfodor 6y ago
You're arguing semantics. If Yelp reduces the choices for you down to a ranked list, it introduces a huge amount of bias in your decision. And if you use it relatively deterministically, you've consequentially changed your behavior in a way such that an outside observer will eventually be able to predict your behavior with high probability, if they understand what Yelp is showing you. In that sense, "telling you" starts to be a sane thing to think, even if it's not literally telling you the exact singular place to go.

BlueTemplar 6y ago

'Platforms' were derisively nicknamed in France in 2007 during a historic Libre Software Meeting as "Minitel(s) 2.0", to insist on them being a regression compared to the normal Internet / Web : https://www.fdn.fr/actions/confs/internet-libre-ou-minitel-2-0/ https://www.fdn.fr/actions/confs/internet-libre-ou-minitel-2... (fr) (Note that this probably predates the generalization of the term 'platform', as neither it, nor the French 'plateforme' is nowhere to be found in the transcript.)

njacobs5074 6y ago

Years ago (c. early 1980s), a friend of mine who was studying psychology quipped that one of his professors asserted that "70% of people do not engage in introspection". I thought it was a remarkable statement and it certainly resonated with my then recently acquired hipster outlook on life. But in the intervening years, I've seen little to indicate that he was wrong.

stevesearer 6y ago
Introspection is hard and takes time. I’ve found that people can spend time alone only to always fill it with activities like podcasts and reading. While not bad, they tend to add more information when sometimes what is needed is time to process existing information. I wonder if people get new understanding or ideas while in the shower because it is just a routine, manual activity where they actually have a few minutes with no additional inputs.

egypturnash 6y ago

Man half the task of using Yelp is looking at the reviews and deciding which ones are legit and which are either a 5-star review that was paid for, or a 1-star review by some tourist who is annoyed that their feet were not immediately kissed upon walking through the door, and that they were served an authentic example of the local cuisine instead of the bastardized version from a chain restaurant in there Homeland Of No Spices. Which I guess probably goes back into the thesis that "the platform is the enemy" in some ways but geez, people just stop at the star ratings on Yelp and don't go any further before eating?

clan 6y ago
They do not. It has taken me a long time to learn and accept. And I still struggle with it. Many people have very different priorities and choose not to care. I am then often asked for advice for places to go and items to buy. Why? Because I do spend the time and effort it takes to go "beyond the stars". For years I could not wrap my head around people who did not do that. I have learned (still learning) not to call them stupid, lazy or weak. They simply have different priorities. Priorities. That is what I have chosen to call it. And I am still struggling with it... :-)
ljm 6y ago
Can't really remember the last time I used or saw value in platforms like Yelp, or TripAdvisor, but generally if I'm on holiday I'm not using Google to search for 'best restaurants' in the area or whatever; I'll take a local recommendation or just experiment. Tourist traps are easy enough to identify. I might still enjoy a restaurant if the food wasn't great, because other parts of the experience more than made up for it. I won't support a system like Yelp because the end result is that everything becomes average to serve the algorithm.

marcinzm 6y ago

The argument taken to its extreme is that all of civilization is a mistake since civilization involves specialization which means individuals give up their decisions on things. It's a very pessimistic argument and assumes that people don't use the saved energy for productive endeavors. The fact that civilization has prospered indicates to me that they do in fact simply find other things to spend their mental energy on. Do you want Einstein spending mental energy on picking his next restaurant or solving the fundamental questions of the universe? edit: Much has been written about how the most productive people aggressively remove having to make trivial choices from their lives. To the point of having fifty copies of a single set of clothes.

syshum 6y ago
Civilization may not be a mistake, but it is clear that 90% of people in a civilization is dragged forward kicking and screaming by 10% of people into a Civilization it is not equipped to handle and unprepared for. I think that more than anything is the underlying lesson and danger from the idiocracy documentary We are injecting tools, and technology into civilization that we are not ready for with no concern or care for the damage it does
- yawnxyz 6y ago
  I think clinical trials are the most aggressive form of making sure that a new technology isn't harmful on the population. I can't even imagine what tech would look like if strict pathways like clinical trials were forced on apps and websites, but I could imagine that be possible one day.
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    You can't really do random testing on social products because there's no good way to segregate a social network. Too much overlap and sharing. Harm is also subjective which makes it very hard to measure. For example, tech that made people more supportive of gay rights would have been considered very harmful until fairly recently by a majority of the population.

EGreg 6y ago

I have seen the problem described for years. What about the solutions? They are not easy, but would go along these lines: https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#Distributed-Operating-System https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#Distributed-Operating-...

chrisandchips 6y ago

In drawing the distinction between technologies that enable us to act on a decision we’ve already made versus those that try to make the decision for us, its interesting to note that the former is increasingly leading to the latter. When I started using platforms like Netflix and Uber Eats, it was because I already knew the things I wanted to watch and eat, and they provided an easy way for me to act on those desires. As they became normalized parts of my day to day, it only seemed natural that I should start following their recommendations as well. Now it feels increasingly like I go to them to give me answers, unlike when I started out.

yawnxyz 6y ago
I rejected Spotify's Discover Weekly suggestions for a really long time, but lately I've been more and more accepting of the fact that wow, I really do like Discover Weekly's suggestions every week, and I don't know how to reconcile that
- onelovetwo 6y ago
  We're all dealing with the same thing but its not just Spotify...its every algorithm we encounter. Its hard to reconcile that we're not unique, we're extremely predicable.
- Can_Not 6y ago
  Spotify's algorithm clearly doesn't know how to find music I like, but it's (afaik) a harmless heuristic that accidentally gets it right a few times.

deckard1 6y ago

I'm surprised that the most obvious example of platforms getting in the way and real life imitating Idiocracy has not been mentioned: the Boeing 737 MAX. This is a plane where the engineers cut corners all so the business could beat their competitor. The focus was on the short-term. They broke the fundamental abstractions that the pilot is specialized on. And the results speak for themselves: hundreds of people dead, and a multi-billion dollar fiasco.

8note 6y ago

Google to me is the most obvious case of technology being a brain extension. Post google, people tend not to remember things anymore that can easily be searched

braindead_in 6y ago

Platforms are dangerous, but that's not AI's fault. If AI can control our minds, why would it drive us to extinction? Doesn't the AI want to survive as well? If the AI has any real intelligence, it would want to keep us around, in some form or the other but in tightly controlled simulated environment. In that case, we could very well be in a simulation right now. And that line of thought leads you directly to Advaita Vedanta.