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Humans are instinctively drawn to a lot of things that are really bad for us in significant amounts, because we are designed to fit into an environment where th

by m12k 5y ago

Humans are instinctively drawn to a lot of things that are really bad for us in significant amounts, because we are designed to fit into an environment where those things are scarce. Sugar, fat, inactivity, "interesting news", outrage. These all steal our attention because that response helped our ancestors survive and pick out these rare but important treats. But in typical human fashion we've now crafted a world that gives us these things all the time, and it's making us sick and miserable as a result. "But we're just giving the people what they want" some might say. Well, depends on the definition of "want". In a taste test, junk food would win over broccoli for me, hands down - but it's broccoli that ends up on my table more often than not, because it's what makes me happier and healthier in the long run. It wasn't until my thirties before I realized just how sluggish I got after eating junk food. But if Facebook was running our diets, their algorithm would long since have "optimized" its way to junk food for all of us. Sometimes the worst thing you can do is give people exactly what they ask for. Being healthy in a world like the one we've created requires much, much more restraint and self-discipline than it used to. "The algorithm" is basically the digital incarnation of the little devil on our shoulder whispering that we should treat ourselves.

agent008t 5y ago
I agree with you, particularly when it comes to information consumption. On-demand services are bad enough; cleverly optimized services that push content are even worse. But in some ways, if you hang out in the right circles, being healthy is a lot easier today. Alcohol consumption seems to be down, people exercise a lot more, being out of shape in your 30s is not seen as 'the norm'. So it is probably easier psychologically to go for a jog now when parks are full of joggers than to do it in 1950s when people would think a 30-something person out for a jog is a bit strange. In this way, healthy fads can actually be very positive. I find it very likely that in the near future a culture will emerge that tries to minimize the use of technology and information hygiene becomes a part of 'normal' life.
wepple 5y ago
> But if Facebook was running our diets, their algorithm would long since have "optimized" its way to junk food for all of us. I really, really like this comparison. If we fed our bodies in the same way we let tech company algorithms feed our minds, we’d have three Big Macs for breakfast washed down with a shot of whiskey and a couple lines of cocaine
- uCantCauseUCant 5y ago
  Traditional american breakfast..
  - zepto 5y ago
    The traditional American breakfast is great if you need carbs to do manual labor.
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  When I read that, I kind of thought "hasn't that already happened"? The most enduring symbol of American capitalism is caffeinated sugar water. Our athletics competitions are sponsored by fast food conpanies. We live in an obesogenic environment. Yeah, people with reserves of health, wealth and wisdom can buck the trends by applying time and energy to fighting against the tide but if the average person is falling for this stuff, the battle's already lost as the insanity becomes normal.
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    It's not because there is a shortage of healthy alternatives. It's because people are free to choose.
    - troyvit 5y ago
      Yeah people are free to choose but to go full circle many of us let ourselves be manipulated by advertising[0] and dark patterns[1] to make unhealthy choices. That's why USA is so obese. When I look at countries like Japan I don't see a limit in food choices, but I see a lot more healthy people. [0] https://theconversation.com/how-marketers-condition-us-to-buy-more-junk-food-43466 https://theconversation.com/how-marketers-condition-us-to-bu... [1] https://cspinet.org/protecting-our-health/nutrition/unhealthy-checkout/8-ways-supermarkets-make-you-buy-more https://cspinet.org/protecting-our-health/nutrition/unhealth...
    - simplify 5y ago
      I might argue someone is not "free to choose" if they haven't been taught how to spot dark patterns in rhetoric and advertising.
mojuba 5y ago
Very well put! I have another related theory that goes: Over time, everything converges into mediocrity. By everything I mean products sold to us, entertainment, media, the Internet itself. Look at the car designs of the 1970s and now. Look at cinematography then and now. As soon as marketing steps in and start telling otherwise innovative companies or artists how to sell, things begin slowly converging into mediocrity. The semi-formal proof is that because the humanity as a whole is mediocre almost by definition, hence if you want to expand your markets (the ice-cream saleman's problem) you'd grab the middle of the bell curve first: it's where the bigger part of the market is! I don't know if it makes sense, just something I've been thinking about a lot lately.
- mlac 5y ago
  I was driving to work (a foreign experience) and Joe Walsh was singing about a Maserati. And it made me thing “man, if you grew up in middle America, hearing about a Maserati, you might not even know what it was, let alone that it existed”. Now you can hit Google and see millions of pictures, join the fan club, watch hours of videos and reviews, and become an arm chair Maserati expert. Which is cool, but if sort of takes away the mystique behind things. You wouldn’t even know how it was spelled unless you had the album itself and the artist included lyrics. Similarly with guitar, it would have been almost impossible to figure out what type of pedal someone was using to get “that sound” without interacting with other humans in person. And I think that served as a filter for people who cared and also led to interesting introductions and local experts (music shops and store owners, etc). I think that’s what we lose. And while I think converging to average makes sense, I think peoples tastes have shifted to quality in more areas, because they can quickly google and see what the best looks like. And most people will use debt to get there.
  - mojuba 5y ago
    > I think peoples tastes have shifted to quality in more areas, I'm genuinely curious if there's any data or research to support this. Because in my view the tastes remain more or less the same, just the information noise around us is now bigger.
howaboutnope 5y ago
> Sometimes the worst thing you can do is give people exactly what they ask for. Alan Moore said this in the context of poetry, but with the caveat that everybody is sometimes part of "the" audience, and that every fully fledged human adult should sometimes be "the" artist, I think he has a hugely important point: > It’s not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience. They would be the artists. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need.
stonemetal12 5y ago
Isn't that more because of what they are optimizing for than the fact that they are optimizing? To continue the food analogy engagement is blood sugar levels and they are seeing how high they can crank it. If they optimized for "happier and healthier in the long run" then they would probably loose short term engagement spikes, but have fewer people quitting for health reasons. Basically they could be broccoli if they wanted to be but they choose to be soda.
- zug_zug 5y ago
  Well with food there are readily available numbers that approximate the long-term-effect of food (e.g. saturated fat, preservatives, vitamins, glycemic index). Does a company really have a way to quantify the emotional impact on its users of a code change? And if it did, would they optimize for that or focus on profit margin?
- m12k 5y ago
  Well, yes, they could certainly try. But "happier and healthier in the long run" is much harder for them to measure than "has responded to instant gratification". It's much harder to A/B test effectively at longer time scales and make the ML model reinforce the right things. But also, "healthier" might involve creating less engagement "content" for them to feed to others, lowering the network effects of the whole platform. And if they successfully go that route, they open a flank to anyone willing to just keep spiking blood sugar as much as possible (TikTok?). There's a reason McDonalds are still selling Big Macs, and it's not that they don't know what healthy nutrition looks like.
  - TheMightyLlama 5y ago
    The problem here is that if there was one single company that wanted to exit the standard approach and create less engaging content they would be more likely to fail. The companies that are creating content which optimises to the most engaging content will drown out the one "healthy" one.
  - 1_2__5 5y ago
    I work in SRE where a pretty common expression is “what gets measured gets fixed”. I used to take that as at least mildly inspirational, and to mean that more and better monitoring leads to more things being fixed. And to some extent that’s true. In recent years though I’ve come to see the downsides of that mantra as outweighing the good of it. Because some things are either extraordinarily difficult or expensive to measure, or because understanding what the measurement is demonstrating is beyond the intellectual reach or experience of many people. By the latter sentiment I mean, it’s not enough to just show a number or a graph, it has to be interpreted, and for some things that interpretation is very challenging if you’re not a (or the) expert in that system. As a result, it’s more like “easy to measure and understand things get fixed, everything else gets ignored”. It disdains or glosses over the idea that maybe a person or team’s subjective opinion about what’s important to fix carries any weight at all, because if it was really so important, surely they’d be able to demonstrate that in a form that someone (possibly willfully) ignorant of the system can understand. I see the same forces at work here, in marketing and a/b testing. The simple to understand metrics are what are optimized, while the more complicated ones get ignored or drowned out. The longer term benefits are hard to measure, and more importantly, hard to understand and interpret.

by m12k 5y ago

agent008t 5y ago

I agree with you, particularly when it comes to information consumption. On-demand services are bad enough; cleverly optimized services that push content are even worse. But in some ways, if you hang out in the right circles, being healthy is a lot easier today. Alcohol consumption seems to be down, people exercise a lot more, being out of shape in your 30s is not seen as 'the norm'. So it is probably easier psychologically to go for a jog now when parks are full of joggers than to do it in 1950s when people would think a 30-something person out for a jog is a bit strange. In this way, healthy fads can actually be very positive. I find it very likely that in the near future a culture will emerge that tries to minimize the use of technology and information hygiene becomes a part of 'normal' life.

wepple 5y ago

> But if Facebook was running our diets, their algorithm would long since have "optimized" its way to junk food for all of us. I really, really like this comparison. If we fed our bodies in the same way we let tech company algorithms feed our minds, we’d have three Big Macs for breakfast washed down with a shot of whiskey and a couple lines of cocaine

uCantCauseUCant 5y ago
Traditional american breakfast..
- zepto 5y ago
  The traditional American breakfast is great if you need carbs to do manual labor.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
When I read that, I kind of thought "hasn't that already happened"? The most enduring symbol of American capitalism is caffeinated sugar water. Our athletics competitions are sponsored by fast food conpanies. We live in an obesogenic environment. Yeah, people with reserves of health, wealth and wisdom can buck the trends by applying time and energy to fighting against the tide but if the average person is falling for this stuff, the battle's already lost as the insanity becomes normal.
- missedthecue 5y ago
  It's not because there is a shortage of healthy alternatives. It's because people are free to choose.
  - troyvit 5y ago
    Yeah people are free to choose but to go full circle many of us let ourselves be manipulated by advertising[0] and dark patterns[1] to make unhealthy choices. That's why USA is so obese. When I look at countries like Japan I don't see a limit in food choices, but I see a lot more healthy people. [0] https://theconversation.com/how-marketers-condition-us-to-buy-more-junk-food-43466 https://theconversation.com/how-marketers-condition-us-to-bu... [1] https://cspinet.org/protecting-our-health/nutrition/unhealthy-checkout/8-ways-supermarkets-make-you-buy-more https://cspinet.org/protecting-our-health/nutrition/unhealth...
  - simplify 5y ago
    I might argue someone is not "free to choose" if they haven't been taught how to spot dark patterns in rhetoric and advertising.

mojuba 5y ago

Very well put! I have another related theory that goes: Over time, everything converges into mediocrity. By everything I mean products sold to us, entertainment, media, the Internet itself. Look at the car designs of the 1970s and now. Look at cinematography then and now. As soon as marketing steps in and start telling otherwise innovative companies or artists how to sell, things begin slowly converging into mediocrity. The semi-formal proof is that because the humanity as a whole is mediocre almost by definition, hence if you want to expand your markets (the ice-cream saleman's problem) you'd grab the middle of the bell curve first: it's where the bigger part of the market is! I don't know if it makes sense, just something I've been thinking about a lot lately.

mlac 5y ago
I was driving to work (a foreign experience) and Joe Walsh was singing about a Maserati. And it made me thing “man, if you grew up in middle America, hearing about a Maserati, you might not even know what it was, let alone that it existed”. Now you can hit Google and see millions of pictures, join the fan club, watch hours of videos and reviews, and become an arm chair Maserati expert. Which is cool, but if sort of takes away the mystique behind things. You wouldn’t even know how it was spelled unless you had the album itself and the artist included lyrics. Similarly with guitar, it would have been almost impossible to figure out what type of pedal someone was using to get “that sound” without interacting with other humans in person. And I think that served as a filter for people who cared and also led to interesting introductions and local experts (music shops and store owners, etc). I think that’s what we lose. And while I think converging to average makes sense, I think peoples tastes have shifted to quality in more areas, because they can quickly google and see what the best looks like. And most people will use debt to get there.
- mojuba 5y ago
  > I think peoples tastes have shifted to quality in more areas, I'm genuinely curious if there's any data or research to support this. Because in my view the tastes remain more or less the same, just the information noise around us is now bigger.

howaboutnope 5y ago

> Sometimes the worst thing you can do is give people exactly what they ask for. Alan Moore said this in the context of poetry, but with the caveat that everybody is sometimes part of "the" audience, and that every fully fledged human adult should sometimes be "the" artist, I think he has a hugely important point: > It’s not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience. They would be the artists. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need.

stonemetal12 5y ago

Isn't that more because of what they are optimizing for than the fact that they are optimizing? To continue the food analogy engagement is blood sugar levels and they are seeing how high they can crank it. If they optimized for "happier and healthier in the long run" then they would probably loose short term engagement spikes, but have fewer people quitting for health reasons. Basically they could be broccoli if they wanted to be but they choose to be soda.

zug_zug 5y ago
Well with food there are readily available numbers that approximate the long-term-effect of food (e.g. saturated fat, preservatives, vitamins, glycemic index). Does a company really have a way to quantify the emotional impact on its users of a code change? And if it did, would they optimize for that or focus on profit margin?
m12k 5y ago
Well, yes, they could certainly try. But "happier and healthier in the long run" is much harder for them to measure than "has responded to instant gratification". It's much harder to A/B test effectively at longer time scales and make the ML model reinforce the right things. But also, "healthier" might involve creating less engagement "content" for them to feed to others, lowering the network effects of the whole platform. And if they successfully go that route, they open a flank to anyone willing to just keep spiking blood sugar as much as possible (TikTok?). There's a reason McDonalds are still selling Big Macs, and it's not that they don't know what healthy nutrition looks like.
- TheMightyLlama 5y ago
  The problem here is that if there was one single company that wanted to exit the standard approach and create less engaging content they would be more likely to fail. The companies that are creating content which optimises to the most engaging content will drown out the one "healthy" one.
- 1_2__5 5y ago
  I work in SRE where a pretty common expression is “what gets measured gets fixed”. I used to take that as at least mildly inspirational, and to mean that more and better monitoring leads to more things being fixed. And to some extent that’s true. In recent years though I’ve come to see the downsides of that mantra as outweighing the good of it. Because some things are either extraordinarily difficult or expensive to measure, or because understanding what the measurement is demonstrating is beyond the intellectual reach or experience of many people. By the latter sentiment I mean, it’s not enough to just show a number or a graph, it has to be interpreted, and for some things that interpretation is very challenging if you’re not a (or the) expert in that system. As a result, it’s more like “easy to measure and understand things get fixed, everything else gets ignored”. It disdains or glosses over the idea that maybe a person or team’s subjective opinion about what’s important to fix carries any weight at all, because if it was really so important, surely they’d be able to demonstrate that in a form that someone (possibly willfully) ignorant of the system can understand. I see the same forces at work here, in marketing and a/b testing. The simple to understand metrics are what are optimized, while the more complicated ones get ignored or drowned out. The longer term benefits are hard to measure, and more importantly, hard to understand and interpret.