9 ms·

I think it's like boiling the frog. If they ended up in a situation like that abruptly, most would bail. But the little day to day changes can lead to boiling t

by hawk_ 6y ago

I think it's like boiling the frog. If they ended up in a situation like that abruptly, most would bail. But the little day to day changes can lead to boiling the proverbial frog. We all do that to some extent. Members of the FAANG group of companies indulge in quite egregious practices from an outsider's (wider society) perspective but insiders feel it's normal.

taurath 6y ago
They also are sitting around listening to leaderships carefully crafted justification day in and day out. I’ve had otherwise smart engineers who work in advertising tell me that people enjoy looking them, and any criticism of “user engagement at any cost” is met with bewilderment.
- canadianfella 6y ago
  Looking them?
- DC-3 6y ago
  I honestly believe these sorts of blindspots of morality and critical thinking are due to under-exposure to the humanities. A lot of guys in tech could do with reading something - anything - that isn't 538 or a tech blog.
  - exolymph 6y ago
    I don't think this would go quite how you expect. Consider that Peter Thiel is a popularizer of Rene Girard.
  - kortilla 6y ago
    Humanities don’t teach critical thinking anymore than a standard engineering degree. Standard engineering degrees include courses on ethics, basic logic, etc. If you don’t pick up the ability to think critically from that, you’re certainly not going to get it researching humanities.
    - danielheath 6y ago
      Engineering degrees include one, perhaps two courses on those topics. You can scrape a bare pass on the second try without taking in the material and graduate in 3.5 years instead of 3. In a well-run humanities degree you would never pass the first year without being able to critically engage with difficult ideas, although I would have no trouble believing there are institutions that offer poorly-run ones.
      - Grimm1 6y ago
        I have a B.S. CS from NYU and I think I had 6 humanities, two specifically dealing with critically engaging with different and difficult ideas, 1 ethics, an additional writing course and two electives from what I recall. I imagine there are many more engineering degrees with requirements like mine. As an aside I also minored in philosophy and I know of multiple engineers who have done similar. I think painting with broad generalities does your point a disservice. I'll also raise the point a lot more people simply don't care or don't believe these things to be unethical than I think a lot of people are willing to admit.
      - kortilla 6y ago
        > able to critically engage with difficult ideas Discussing the different sides of difficult ideas in a classroom setting is not critical thinking. The ideas don’t even need to be “difficult” to practice critical thinking on. Humanities does focus a lot on teaching students the current critical views of lots of things in society. But they focus far too much on the substance of the critiques rather than the process of generating and meaningfully evaluating them.
        gmadsen 6y ago
        I think you are making general assumptions that are not universally true. I know its the hot take to consider any humanities program to be brain washing kids into SJWs. Philosophy's basic main tenet is to critically engage with ideas. ONE aspect of that is to engage ideas in the politic sense
  - EVdotIO 6y ago
    If the biggest names in the game are ads and finance, you'll find a justification to climb your way into that job. What else are you supposed to do? A comfy middle class life is not a guarantee, and any ambiguous notions of moral duty are quickly discarded to secure some semblance of security.
    - taurath 6y ago
      So you take your money and then leave. But most don’t, they see the next income level coming up all the time. Are they at the “housing security in the Bay Area” leave or “retire at 40 or before/own a large boat/small plane”?
  - cat199 6y ago
    Much of humanities these days is indoctrination into 'official' critical thinking blindspots, so I'm not sure if I'd agree.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
    Yeah, I really doubt that reading any given book has an impact morality other than inducing a sort of selection effect (i.e. people who are not interested in the environment won't read The Silent Spring unless compelled to do so in high school). I'm assuming by your concurrence with the comment above you and your association of that comment with "blindspots of morality" that you believe advertising is immoral. Forgive me if this is mistaken, but hopefully it's clear at least how I came by this impression. I am here to tell you that a person can be a reader of Orwell, or Mieville, or whoever, and still not agree with you on a position like the one you've implicitly espoused. You can have similar base principles as someone and come to very different moral conclusions based on a number of things, like access to different data or relatively subtle nuances in you take on some of those principles.
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      Any given book? The comment wasn't talking about particular books. Or even necessarily books at all.
      - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
        "reading" and "the humanities" basically implies books or plays. Sorry if you don't see it what way, but I do.
        Dylan16807 6y ago
        "anything that isn't 538 or a tech blog" implies more than that to me, but I'd rather you focus on the other part of what I said. They're not asking for someone to read some particular books they like, but to go reading around and sampling the variety. Your criticism only really applies to the former.
        asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
        My presumption is the notion is that if people would read the correct things, their minds would be expanded in the correct direction and suddenly they too would see that advertising is wrong (or any other preferred moral position). But let's say you're right and the person's idea was that if people would just read enough they'd come to the correct conclusion. Either way, it is not correct. That's now how reading works. You can find someone with any moral perspective who is widely read. Being widely read unlikely implies any moral perspective besides as a proxy for affluence and education.
  - roca 6y ago
    The humanities aren't especially good at promoting critical thinking. A very large amount of (I do not use this term lightly) bullshit flourishes in the humanities. The Sokal hoax was 25 years ago and the conditions that provoked it have not improved.
    - jonahx 6y ago
      It was reproduced to even more dramatic effect just a few years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair
    - lasagnaphil 6y ago
      The Sokal hoax (and the sequel linked by the commenter below) exposes the negligence of mostly America-centric journals centered in sexuality/race/identity. But that really doesn’t represent the entirety of continental philosophy, and that shouldn’t be an excuse to ditch your education on humanities as a whole. There’s a lot of bullshit papers in every field (including computer science) now, due to the corporatization of universities and its chase for numerical metrics. It’s our job as independent thinkers to wade through the bullshit, find the hidden gems, and arrive at our own conclusions. My current take is that if you’re actually trying to find some serious philosophy, don’t look at journal papers but actual full books by philosophers (which is becoming rarer and rarer due to the incentives to pump out high-metric papers).
    - AlexCoventry 6y ago
      Not to mention the unbelievably exploitative humanities academia job market. Anyone doing a humanities PhD at this point needs either independent wealth or pathological ignorance of how callously the academy is treating the careers of new scholars. You'd think training in critical thinking would protect you against faith in a blatantly callous institution.
  - fergie 6y ago
    Philosophy and Sociology undergrad here. Nope. With the possible exception of moral philosophy. And even then, you get most "points" for making sound arguments for (what most people would consider to be) morally dubious standpoints, which is precisely the dynamic in play at all of these ethically bankrupt tech companies.
    - krageon 6y ago
      > morally dubious [...] ethically bankrupt People can think different things than you or do things that you don't find acceptable and still conform to their own system of ethics (or model of morality). You may not approve, but that doesn't make "ethically bankrupt" a meaningful value judgement. It almost doesn't say anything at all, except perhaps about your views on ethical and moral absolutism.
  - cafard 6y ago
    A lot of people with a solid grounding in the humanities have done really nasty things.
- vkou 6y ago
  Did those engineers tell you that people enjoyed looking at ads, or did they tell you that people prefer looking at ads that are relevant to their search, when they made that search with commercial intent? I have never heard anyone claim the first (Mind you, I don't go out of my way to ask people to say incredibly stupid things), but I have frequently heard the second statement getting misrepresented as the first. [1][2] And there's also an entire canyon of statements on the spectrum[3] between the two, many of which I have heard. [1] Mostly by engineers on, ah, this website. [2] It's rather easy to make such a misrepresentation, just do a direct quote that drops everything after the word 'ads'. [3] 'People prefer looking at ads[2] over paying', 'People prefer looking at X ads[2] over Y ads', etc, etc, etc.
  - lifeisstillgood 6y ago
    >>> prefer looking at ads that are relevant to their search, when they made that search with commercial intent? This is a good distinction, if it also contains the nub of the problem - "with commercial intent". FAANG have very little (no, they have no) way of telling if my intent is commercial or just day to day existence. I spend most of my life not wanting to buy stuff, and yet most of my online interaction assumes that I am wallet out ready to buy ... something. (I assume (as a straight man) this is what most women feel like on a night out.) this is also why I think duckduckgo has the right approach - for all FAANGs targeting based in behaviour etc, they are trying 99% of the time not to present the best match given commercial intent but they are trying to convert non-commercial behaviour into commercial behaviour. No wonder the ad conversion rates are poor. And we could get pretty much same response rates with context-only ads ala duckduckgo - or even a tag in google like "shopping: men's trainers" In short FAANG are like those guys trying to "neg" women into sex. All the effort is in the wrong place.
    - vkou 6y ago
      If you are searching for 'good hotel in x' or 'mechanic in y', it's a pretty safe bet to say that you probably have commercial intent. If you live a truly ascetic life, it's possible that you don't make those kinds of searches.
- Swizec 6y ago
  It’s very hard to make a person realize something when their paycheck depends on them not realizing it.
- exikyut 6y ago
  It would be extremely interesting to see what sort of conditioning or other source of behavioral differentiation (??) causes these people to simply not stumble on the overwhelming mountains of similar sentiment on the internet.
heavenlyblue 6y ago
> I think it's like boiling the frog. You can’t boil a frog like that.
- celticninja 6y ago
  But the saying is the saying regardless.
- whoooooo123 6y ago
  And ostriches don't really stick their heads in the sand, and lemmings don't really jump off trees. Do we both get a medal?
  - kbenson 6y ago
    > lemmings don't really jump off trees Trees? Isn't the traditional myth they jump off cliffs to drown in the ocean, as exemplified by the old Disney documentary where they filmed it, but in reality it was a river they were crossing, and the species depicted isn't even known to migrate?[1] Not trying to be pedantic, it's just interesting how these things shift and mutate over time and culture. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Wilderness_(film)#Controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Wilderness_(film)#Contro...
    - whoooooo123 6y ago
      You are correct, and I have no idea why I wrote "trees".
- hawk_ 6y ago
  sure, but don't throw away the baby with the bathwater.
- Y_Y 6y ago
  You just need to secure the lid.
- jonny_eh 6y ago
  What should be said instead?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rossdavidh 6y ago
I feel obliged to point out that frogs, when put into a pan of water which is very slowly heated up, do in fact jump out when it gets too hot, contrary to the old story. But, perhaps humans are occasionally not as smart as frogs? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
- olyjohn 6y ago
  I haven't seen anybody sit in a hot tub until they died, usually we get too hot and then get out. That's nowhere near boiling. Obviously, the boiling frog trope isn't intended to be taken literally.
AlexCoventry 6y ago
> Members of the FAANG group of companies indulge in quite egregious practices from an outsider's (wider society) perspective but insiders feel it's normal. What practices do you have in mind?
- mvzvm 6y ago
  Yes, please, I am very interested in what the OP meant here...?

by hawk_ 6y ago

taurath 6y ago

They also are sitting around listening to leaderships carefully crafted justification day in and day out. I’ve had otherwise smart engineers who work in advertising tell me that people enjoy looking them, and any criticism of “user engagement at any cost” is met with bewilderment.

canadianfella 6y ago
Looking them?
DC-3 6y ago
I honestly believe these sorts of blindspots of morality and critical thinking are due to under-exposure to the humanities. A lot of guys in tech could do with reading something - anything - that isn't 538 or a tech blog.
- exolymph 6y ago
  I don't think this would go quite how you expect. Consider that Peter Thiel is a popularizer of Rene Girard.
- kortilla 6y ago
  Humanities don’t teach critical thinking anymore than a standard engineering degree. Standard engineering degrees include courses on ethics, basic logic, etc. If you don’t pick up the ability to think critically from that, you’re certainly not going to get it researching humanities.
  - danielheath 6y ago
    Engineering degrees include one, perhaps two courses on those topics. You can scrape a bare pass on the second try without taking in the material and graduate in 3.5 years instead of 3. In a well-run humanities degree you would never pass the first year without being able to critically engage with difficult ideas, although I would have no trouble believing there are institutions that offer poorly-run ones.
    - Grimm1 6y ago
      I have a B.S. CS from NYU and I think I had 6 humanities, two specifically dealing with critically engaging with different and difficult ideas, 1 ethics, an additional writing course and two electives from what I recall. I imagine there are many more engineering degrees with requirements like mine. As an aside I also minored in philosophy and I know of multiple engineers who have done similar. I think painting with broad generalities does your point a disservice. I'll also raise the point a lot more people simply don't care or don't believe these things to be unethical than I think a lot of people are willing to admit.
    - kortilla 6y ago
      > able to critically engage with difficult ideas Discussing the different sides of difficult ideas in a classroom setting is not critical thinking. The ideas don’t even need to be “difficult” to practice critical thinking on. Humanities does focus a lot on teaching students the current critical views of lots of things in society. But they focus far too much on the substance of the critiques rather than the process of generating and meaningfully evaluating them.
      - gmadsen 6y ago
        I think you are making general assumptions that are not universally true. I know its the hot take to consider any humanities program to be brain washing kids into SJWs. Philosophy's basic main tenet is to critically engage with ideas. ONE aspect of that is to engage ideas in the politic sense
- EVdotIO 6y ago
  If the biggest names in the game are ads and finance, you'll find a justification to climb your way into that job. What else are you supposed to do? A comfy middle class life is not a guarantee, and any ambiguous notions of moral duty are quickly discarded to secure some semblance of security.
  - taurath 6y ago
    So you take your money and then leave. But most don’t, they see the next income level coming up all the time. Are they at the “housing security in the Bay Area” leave or “retire at 40 or before/own a large boat/small plane”?
- cat199 6y ago
  Much of humanities these days is indoctrination into 'official' critical thinking blindspots, so I'm not sure if I'd agree.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  Yeah, I really doubt that reading any given book has an impact morality other than inducing a sort of selection effect (i.e. people who are not interested in the environment won't read The Silent Spring unless compelled to do so in high school). I'm assuming by your concurrence with the comment above you and your association of that comment with "blindspots of morality" that you believe advertising is immoral. Forgive me if this is mistaken, but hopefully it's clear at least how I came by this impression. I am here to tell you that a person can be a reader of Orwell, or Mieville, or whoever, and still not agree with you on a position like the one you've implicitly espoused. You can have similar base principles as someone and come to very different moral conclusions based on a number of things, like access to different data or relatively subtle nuances in you take on some of those principles.
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    Any given book? The comment wasn't talking about particular books. Or even necessarily books at all.
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
      "reading" and "the humanities" basically implies books or plays. Sorry if you don't see it what way, but I do.
      - Dylan16807 6y ago
        "anything that isn't 538 or a tech blog" implies more than that to me, but I'd rather you focus on the other part of what I said. They're not asking for someone to read some particular books they like, but to go reading around and sampling the variety. Your criticism only really applies to the former.
        asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
        My presumption is the notion is that if people would read the correct things, their minds would be expanded in the correct direction and suddenly they too would see that advertising is wrong (or any other preferred moral position). But let's say you're right and the person's idea was that if people would just read enough they'd come to the correct conclusion. Either way, it is not correct. That's now how reading works. You can find someone with any moral perspective who is widely read. Being widely read unlikely implies any moral perspective besides as a proxy for affluence and education.
- roca 6y ago
  The humanities aren't especially good at promoting critical thinking. A very large amount of (I do not use this term lightly) bullshit flourishes in the humanities. The Sokal hoax was 25 years ago and the conditions that provoked it have not improved.
  - jonahx 6y ago
    It was reproduced to even more dramatic effect just a few years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair
  - lasagnaphil 6y ago
    The Sokal hoax (and the sequel linked by the commenter below) exposes the negligence of mostly America-centric journals centered in sexuality/race/identity. But that really doesn’t represent the entirety of continental philosophy, and that shouldn’t be an excuse to ditch your education on humanities as a whole. There’s a lot of bullshit papers in every field (including computer science) now, due to the corporatization of universities and its chase for numerical metrics. It’s our job as independent thinkers to wade through the bullshit, find the hidden gems, and arrive at our own conclusions. My current take is that if you’re actually trying to find some serious philosophy, don’t look at journal papers but actual full books by philosophers (which is becoming rarer and rarer due to the incentives to pump out high-metric papers).
  - AlexCoventry 6y ago
    Not to mention the unbelievably exploitative humanities academia job market. Anyone doing a humanities PhD at this point needs either independent wealth or pathological ignorance of how callously the academy is treating the careers of new scholars. You'd think training in critical thinking would protect you against faith in a blatantly callous institution.
- fergie 6y ago
  Philosophy and Sociology undergrad here. Nope. With the possible exception of moral philosophy. And even then, you get most "points" for making sound arguments for (what most people would consider to be) morally dubious standpoints, which is precisely the dynamic in play at all of these ethically bankrupt tech companies.
  - krageon 6y ago
    > morally dubious [...] ethically bankrupt People can think different things than you or do things that you don't find acceptable and still conform to their own system of ethics (or model of morality). You may not approve, but that doesn't make "ethically bankrupt" a meaningful value judgement. It almost doesn't say anything at all, except perhaps about your views on ethical and moral absolutism.
- cafard 6y ago
  A lot of people with a solid grounding in the humanities have done really nasty things.
vkou 6y ago
Did those engineers tell you that people enjoyed looking at ads, or did they tell you that people prefer looking at ads that are relevant to their search, when they made that search with commercial intent? I have never heard anyone claim the first (Mind you, I don't go out of my way to ask people to say incredibly stupid things), but I have frequently heard the second statement getting misrepresented as the first. [1][2] And there's also an entire canyon of statements on the spectrum[3] between the two, many of which I have heard. [1] Mostly by engineers on, ah, this website. [2] It's rather easy to make such a misrepresentation, just do a direct quote that drops everything after the word 'ads'. [3] 'People prefer looking at ads[2] over paying', 'People prefer looking at X ads[2] over Y ads', etc, etc, etc.
- lifeisstillgood 6y ago
  >>> prefer looking at ads that are relevant to their search, when they made that search with commercial intent? This is a good distinction, if it also contains the nub of the problem - "with commercial intent". FAANG have very little (no, they have no) way of telling if my intent is commercial or just day to day existence. I spend most of my life not wanting to buy stuff, and yet most of my online interaction assumes that I am wallet out ready to buy ... something. (I assume (as a straight man) this is what most women feel like on a night out.) this is also why I think duckduckgo has the right approach - for all FAANGs targeting based in behaviour etc, they are trying 99% of the time not to present the best match given commercial intent but they are trying to convert non-commercial behaviour into commercial behaviour. No wonder the ad conversion rates are poor. And we could get pretty much same response rates with context-only ads ala duckduckgo - or even a tag in google like "shopping: men's trainers" In short FAANG are like those guys trying to "neg" women into sex. All the effort is in the wrong place.
  - vkou 6y ago
    If you are searching for 'good hotel in x' or 'mechanic in y', it's a pretty safe bet to say that you probably have commercial intent. If you live a truly ascetic life, it's possible that you don't make those kinds of searches.
Swizec 6y ago
It’s very hard to make a person realize something when their paycheck depends on them not realizing it.
exikyut 6y ago
It would be extremely interesting to see what sort of conditioning or other source of behavioral differentiation (??) causes these people to simply not stumble on the overwhelming mountains of similar sentiment on the internet.

heavenlyblue 6y ago

> I think it's like boiling the frog. You can’t boil a frog like that.

celticninja 6y ago
But the saying is the saying regardless.
whoooooo123 6y ago
And ostriches don't really stick their heads in the sand, and lemmings don't really jump off trees. Do we both get a medal?
- kbenson 6y ago
  > lemmings don't really jump off trees Trees? Isn't the traditional myth they jump off cliffs to drown in the ocean, as exemplified by the old Disney documentary where they filmed it, but in reality it was a river they were crossing, and the species depicted isn't even known to migrate?[1] Not trying to be pedantic, it's just interesting how these things shift and mutate over time and culture. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Wilderness_(film)#Controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Wilderness_(film)#Contro...
  - whoooooo123 6y ago
    You are correct, and I have no idea why I wrote "trees".
hawk_ 6y ago
sure, but don't throw away the baby with the bathwater.
Y_Y 6y ago
You just need to secure the lid.
jonny_eh 6y ago
What should be said instead?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

rossdavidh 6y ago

I feel obliged to point out that frogs, when put into a pan of water which is very slowly heated up, do in fact jump out when it gets too hot, contrary to the old story. But, perhaps humans are occasionally not as smart as frogs? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog

olyjohn 6y ago
I haven't seen anybody sit in a hot tub until they died, usually we get too hot and then get out. That's nowhere near boiling. Obviously, the boiling frog trope isn't intended to be taken literally.

AlexCoventry 6y ago

> Members of the FAANG group of companies indulge in quite egregious practices from an outsider's (wider society) perspective but insiders feel it's normal. What practices do you have in mind?

mvzvm 6y ago
Yes, please, I am very interested in what the OP meant here...?