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You know, this exact same idea could be done in such a way that doesn't dehumanize the, uh, humans. In fact, I bet your mileage would even increase if you coul

You know, this exact same idea could be done in such a way that doesn't dehumanize the, uh, humans. In fact, I bet your mileage would even increase if you could figure out a way to actually respect even the grunt laborers. That is, I like the idea of streamlining your workflow, of compartmentalizing, of assembly lining. I like the ideas of integrating that which can be fully automated with what cannot. And of making tools to increase these objectives But your teams will see the labels on the tools, and the sites that vend them. If they feel they are being "cogged", they will work like cogs. The site should mix the terms that describe their goal, with terms that respect humans as humans. It would sell better to the workers, and I suspect that in smaller companies and companies that have smaller teams, would sell better to the managers as well.

fny 6y ago
> If they feel they are being "cogged", they will work like cogs Most people who get into Turking know they're going to be cogs, and honestly, the only thing they care about is getting paid properly for it. No pie-in-the-sky marketing BS is going to make up for sub minimum wage compensation.
- ath92 6y ago
  Getting paid properly is important of course, but intrinsic motivation (of which a sense of autonomy is an important driver) is very important to keep workers happy, independent of whether they're doing crowdsourcing work or just a regular job. I find it hard to believe that this platform will be competing against Amazon Mechanical Turk on price, so they'll have to compete in other dimensions. Increasing worker motivation to improve the quality of the output is a win-win for all the stakeholders, so IMO it's worth pursuing.
  - Closi 6y ago
    Good luck convincing workers that they are self-actualising while transcribing financial records from hard-to-read receipts. If you are running a team doing this sort of work, it's better to be straight up with them and say "you know, this work is boring and repetitive, but we have a good team, look after each other, and you can listen to a podcast at the same time".
- prepend 6y ago
  > No pie-in-the-sky marketing BS is going to make up for sub minimum wage compensation. Comically marketing BS is frequently created by consultants who cost money. Money that doesn’t go towards higher wages, or worker bonuses, or coffee in the beak room, etc
- brobdingnagians 6y ago
  I think their biggest concern is getting paid. But I don't think it's good for people to accept dehumanisation, even if they seem to be okay with it. Subconscious acceptance of things like that can mess people up. They are free to accept it, but I think we should carefully consider what we are doing to people's self image. People with a feeling of creative control and ownership or having a stake in success tend to do a better job too. Self esteem definitely helps productivity.
- raddan 6y ago
  Some of our prior work, AutoMan, (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2927928 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2927928, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/voxpl-programming-wisdom-crowd/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/voxpl-p...) which developed this very idea (almost a decade ago!), explicitly addresses many of the issues around exploitative practices. By default the system pays the minimum wage. We usually paid workers quite a bit more than minimum wage while developing the system. You can read more about it in our CACM letter response (http://www.cs.williams.edu/~dbarowy/acknowledge_crowdworkers.pdf); http://www.cs.williams.edu/~dbarowy/acknowledge_crowdworkers... scroll down the the bit titled "Acknowledge Crowdworkers in Crowdwork Research". Also, while it does not have the convenience of being a web service, you can download and use AutoMan now (https://docs.automanlang.org/ https://docs.automanlang.org/). Most importantly, AutoMan provides statistical quality guarantees. It looks like Human Lambdas uses a manual auditing approach, which does not scale. It's surprisingly common for some crowdsourcing tasks to be as hard to audit as it is to do them in the first place. For the kinds of tasks that AutoMan supports, this is basically a non-issue. I still actively maintain the library, and I am always happy to talk to people about use cases.
  - raddan 6y ago
    I should also add that the requester ratings site, Turkopticon (https://turkopticon.ucsd.edu/ https://turkopticon.ucsd.edu/), rated our jobs highly. I can't seem to find our reviews now (probably because we haven't run any jobs in awhile), but if someone can figure that out, you should see that workers were pretty happy with our system. I often got emails from workers asking for more work! Also, the throughput on a good job when using a properly designed system is insane. If I recall correctly, our case study on estimating calorie content from photos gathered thousands of labels in about 45 minutes.
BrianOnHN 6y ago
Sounds like a lot of work. Instead, let's just keep maximizing income inequality. This way there will always be someone in the position to treat humans like the cogs they are!
- rob74 6y ago
  ...and a steady supply of humans willing to be treated like cogs, because they desperately need the money.
  - BrianOnHN 6y ago
    Spot on. Welcome to the world of problems by design.
- skinnymuch 6y ago
  Which position are you taking? The OPs comment isn’t going to make income inequality any better. Does “respecting” people by not saying they are a cog when it is not true help or hurt income? I’m sure your sarcastic comment is pointing to one of these. I personally don’t enjoy giving some one no additional money or perks but pretending they are not cogs like OP is saying. You’re treating them like cogs by not paying them much.
  - BrianOnHN 6y ago
    The OPs comment does affect income inequality when implemented at scale. As easy as the implementation is for you and your team, those results have relatively little affect in the scheme of things. In order to make the suggestion a paradigm shift, money would be moved from the top to the bottom in an "at scale" implementation. Edit: paying your workers less per output has essentially been the last major management paradigm to drive growth over the past 20+ years. The counter examples (Costco) are the exception.
    - skinnymuch 6y ago
      Ah right. Agreed. Good points.
ramraj07 6y ago
This is the same kind of bs that companies like Uber (and professors) pull to glorify low wages with phrases that glorify below minimum wage work. I like OPs approach let’s be honest about what this work is, make sure you pay what they deserve and don’t try to deceive anyone with fancy accounting.
skinnymuch 6y ago
This sounds..not good. You know how I know how much of a cog some one is? How much they are being paid. Putting a bow on top of work that pays peanuts is worse in my opinion than being honest. Your tactics appear to try to manipulate underpaid or lowly paid cogs into not believing they are what the company and managers truly see them as - just that.
- prepend 6y ago
  My office took the DISC [0] personality profile and it revealed that there are some people who love compliments, just love them. Even if they aren’t genuine, they like hearing “You’re a rock star, I’m so grateful you’re here today” even if the person is completely unable to evaluate rockstar vs. non-rockstar. Even if they say it every day to everyone. And there are people who hate compliments. So it’s funny how within an org there are cogs (and non-cogs) who hate that they aren’t recognized and then there’s cogs who hate when they are recognized. Not sure the distribution in the population but it seems like the default mode is to shower complements that mean nothing other than the complimenter has some process for complimenting people. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DISC_assessment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DISC_assessment
  - skinnymuch 6y ago
    Haha this is a point I didn’t bring up but loosely in my opinion lends credence to why obfuscating cogs as cogs is morally wrong. The opposing view on here appears to be if you can compliment the cogs who enjoy that and keep them happy that way, things are better. This view is self serving and for the benefit of the higher ups. Not the cog. Thanks for this though. Interesting to think about. I’ve added your comment and the link to my DEVONthink wiki on status quo :)
    - text70 6y ago
      At that level, abstract logic becomes more important. Is it better to think of a flower in a field as part of a larger ecosystem, or characterize your company as a machine composed of cogs?

fny 6y ago

> If they feel they are being "cogged", they will work like cogs Most people who get into Turking know they're going to be cogs, and honestly, the only thing they care about is getting paid properly for it. No pie-in-the-sky marketing BS is going to make up for sub minimum wage compensation.

ath92 6y ago
Getting paid properly is important of course, but intrinsic motivation (of which a sense of autonomy is an important driver) is very important to keep workers happy, independent of whether they're doing crowdsourcing work or just a regular job. I find it hard to believe that this platform will be competing against Amazon Mechanical Turk on price, so they'll have to compete in other dimensions. Increasing worker motivation to improve the quality of the output is a win-win for all the stakeholders, so IMO it's worth pursuing.
- Closi 6y ago
  Good luck convincing workers that they are self-actualising while transcribing financial records from hard-to-read receipts. If you are running a team doing this sort of work, it's better to be straight up with them and say "you know, this work is boring and repetitive, but we have a good team, look after each other, and you can listen to a podcast at the same time".
prepend 6y ago
> No pie-in-the-sky marketing BS is going to make up for sub minimum wage compensation. Comically marketing BS is frequently created by consultants who cost money. Money that doesn’t go towards higher wages, or worker bonuses, or coffee in the beak room, etc
brobdingnagians 6y ago
I think their biggest concern is getting paid. But I don't think it's good for people to accept dehumanisation, even if they seem to be okay with it. Subconscious acceptance of things like that can mess people up. They are free to accept it, but I think we should carefully consider what we are doing to people's self image. People with a feeling of creative control and ownership or having a stake in success tend to do a better job too. Self esteem definitely helps productivity.
raddan 6y ago
Some of our prior work, AutoMan, (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2927928 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2927928, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/voxpl-programming-wisdom-crowd/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/voxpl-p...) which developed this very idea (almost a decade ago!), explicitly addresses many of the issues around exploitative practices. By default the system pays the minimum wage. We usually paid workers quite a bit more than minimum wage while developing the system. You can read more about it in our CACM letter response (http://www.cs.williams.edu/~dbarowy/acknowledge_crowdworkers.pdf); http://www.cs.williams.edu/~dbarowy/acknowledge_crowdworkers... scroll down the the bit titled "Acknowledge Crowdworkers in Crowdwork Research". Also, while it does not have the convenience of being a web service, you can download and use AutoMan now (https://docs.automanlang.org/ https://docs.automanlang.org/). Most importantly, AutoMan provides statistical quality guarantees. It looks like Human Lambdas uses a manual auditing approach, which does not scale. It's surprisingly common for some crowdsourcing tasks to be as hard to audit as it is to do them in the first place. For the kinds of tasks that AutoMan supports, this is basically a non-issue. I still actively maintain the library, and I am always happy to talk to people about use cases.
- raddan 6y ago
  I should also add that the requester ratings site, Turkopticon (https://turkopticon.ucsd.edu/ https://turkopticon.ucsd.edu/), rated our jobs highly. I can't seem to find our reviews now (probably because we haven't run any jobs in awhile), but if someone can figure that out, you should see that workers were pretty happy with our system. I often got emails from workers asking for more work! Also, the throughput on a good job when using a properly designed system is insane. If I recall correctly, our case study on estimating calorie content from photos gathered thousands of labels in about 45 minutes.

BrianOnHN 6y ago

Sounds like a lot of work. Instead, let's just keep maximizing income inequality. This way there will always be someone in the position to treat humans like the cogs they are!

rob74 6y ago
...and a steady supply of humans willing to be treated like cogs, because they desperately need the money.
- BrianOnHN 6y ago
  Spot on. Welcome to the world of problems by design.
skinnymuch 6y ago
Which position are you taking? The OPs comment isn’t going to make income inequality any better. Does “respecting” people by not saying they are a cog when it is not true help or hurt income? I’m sure your sarcastic comment is pointing to one of these. I personally don’t enjoy giving some one no additional money or perks but pretending they are not cogs like OP is saying. You’re treating them like cogs by not paying them much.
- BrianOnHN 6y ago
  The OPs comment does affect income inequality when implemented at scale. As easy as the implementation is for you and your team, those results have relatively little affect in the scheme of things. In order to make the suggestion a paradigm shift, money would be moved from the top to the bottom in an "at scale" implementation. Edit: paying your workers less per output has essentially been the last major management paradigm to drive growth over the past 20+ years. The counter examples (Costco) are the exception.
  - skinnymuch 6y ago
    Ah right. Agreed. Good points.

ramraj07 6y ago

This is the same kind of bs that companies like Uber (and professors) pull to glorify low wages with phrases that glorify below minimum wage work. I like OPs approach let’s be honest about what this work is, make sure you pay what they deserve and don’t try to deceive anyone with fancy accounting.

skinnymuch 6y ago

This sounds..not good. You know how I know how much of a cog some one is? How much they are being paid. Putting a bow on top of work that pays peanuts is worse in my opinion than being honest. Your tactics appear to try to manipulate underpaid or lowly paid cogs into not believing they are what the company and managers truly see them as - just that.

prepend 6y ago
My office took the DISC [0] personality profile and it revealed that there are some people who love compliments, just love them. Even if they aren’t genuine, they like hearing “You’re a rock star, I’m so grateful you’re here today” even if the person is completely unable to evaluate rockstar vs. non-rockstar. Even if they say it every day to everyone. And there are people who hate compliments. So it’s funny how within an org there are cogs (and non-cogs) who hate that they aren’t recognized and then there’s cogs who hate when they are recognized. Not sure the distribution in the population but it seems like the default mode is to shower complements that mean nothing other than the complimenter has some process for complimenting people. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DISC_assessment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DISC_assessment
- skinnymuch 6y ago
  Haha this is a point I didn’t bring up but loosely in my opinion lends credence to why obfuscating cogs as cogs is morally wrong. The opposing view on here appears to be if you can compliment the cogs who enjoy that and keep them happy that way, things are better. This view is self serving and for the benefit of the higher ups. Not the cog. Thanks for this though. Interesting to think about. I’ve added your comment and the link to my DEVONthink wiki on status quo :)
  - text70 6y ago
    At that level, abstract logic becomes more important. Is it better to think of a flower in a field as part of a larger ecosystem, or characterize your company as a machine composed of cogs?