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If I have to rate my digital content surely Amazon shouldn't be selling sodium-nitrite to minors as they unlikely to use it for preserving processed meats. Appa

If I have to rate my digital content surely Amazon shouldn't be selling sodium-nitrite to minors as they unlikely to use it for preserving processed meats. Apparently their recommendation engine blindly picked up on the trend that people are buying it for suicide, and it started recommending it for that. In 2022 there is just no excuse for this, nobody should be deploying software in production that is capable of this kind of harm. They had decades to iron out these kinks.

ghostpepper 4y ago
It’s not just the chemical, it’s also a second drug to prevent vomiting and instructions on how to Jill yourself. It’s literally a suicide kit, and it’s appalling that they would sell it to anyone let alone teens.
- jackblemming 4y ago
  Some people believe in the right to suicide. I don’t think that’s appalling at all. What’s appalling is how America prolongs the suffering of terminally ill or those with horrific chronic diseases who want out. Agreed on the teen part though.
  - spir 4y ago
    I believe in the right to suicide, and I also think transaction costs matter. What if we had 25-cent suicide booths a la Futurama on every street corner? Sometimes people are going through hard times, and it needs to be easier to seek help and connect with other humans who care than it is to off yourself.
    - chrisseaton 4y ago
      If you believe in a right to suicide, don't you believe in a right to making it as low cost and accessible as possible? If you have to afford it and you have to get past a gatekeeper it doesn't seem much of a right.
      - stale2002 4y ago
        You are being obtuse. The point here is that someone shouldn't be able to decide, in the course of 5 seconds, to engage in a permanent decision like this. The reason being, that people make mistakes in the course of 5 seconds, that they regret. So, instead of that, we should be pretty sure before allowing people to make such permanent decision. Such as, for example, by having a doctor talk to the person. This is why the OP mentioned the TV show Futurama. Because in the comedy TV show, people could decide in 5 seconds to do that. And the reason why it was in a comedy TV show, is because that is bad, and absurd, and that's why it is funny.
        chrisseaton 4y ago
        > The point here is that someone shouldn't be able to decide, in the course of 5 seconds, to engage in a permanent decision like this. Is it a right or not? > we should be pretty sure In what sense is it a right if someone else has to agree to it?
        stale2002 4y ago
        So, you see zero problem with someone spending 5 seconds to think about a decision and then taking a permanent decision like that? Really? Or are you just hyper focusing on an irrelevant dictionary definition of the single word "right", that nobody else was using? That is why I said you were being obtuse. You focusing on a single word is missing the point, and I don't know why you would focus on the word like that.
        chrisseaton 4y ago
        > Really? Yeah really. What right should I have to tell them to do something or not do something with their own body and life?
        stale2002 4y ago
        Well then you basically do not care about suicidal people. Because, if you had ever spoken to anyone who has felt suicidal, you will see that most of them admit that they have had couple second lapses in judgement and are extremely glad that they did not have a 5 second suicide button that they could press. So, me, being someone who actually cares about these people, and who has spoken to them, know that most people who are suicidal do not want to be given this option. You would know this if you had ever spoken to someone in your life, ever, who has had depressive or suicidal thoughts.
  - lolinder 4y ago
    Some people believe in the right to doctor-assisted suicide. I don't know anyone who advocates that suicide drugs should be available over the counter to anyone who's feeling suicidal today.
    - guerrilla 4y ago
      > I don't know anyone who advocates that suicide drugs should be available over the counter to anyone who's feeling suicidal today. Seems like that would fall under basic bodily autonomy. Why should a doctor gatekeep something so important...
      - chalst 4y ago
        Because teenagers with suicidal thoughts are most often lacking the sense of perspective about their situation they would gain with maturity. This is a case where rigidly-based reasoning about rights fails the common-sense test.
        WalterBright 4y ago
        The full set of human rights is for legally consenting adults. Minors have only a subset of those rights.
    - chmod775 4y ago
      > I don't know anyone who advocates that suicide drugs should be available over the counter to anyone who's feeling suicidal today. Chances are on HN you'll find people sufficiently detached from reality to advocate for this.
    - x86x87 4y ago
      Why is it legal to buy a gun but illegal to decide to end your own life? The hypocrisy is through the roof. How are we free if we are forced to live? Btw: we should not encourage suicide. I think we need to help people that are in a position where they are considering and also there are things that are deeply f'ed with our society to begin with that slowly push people to this (ie helping suicidal people is a drop in the bucket if we don't fix fundamental issues)
  - bastawhiz 4y ago
    I strongly believe in the right to assisted suicide for the terminally ill, but I also believe that it shouldn't be as easy as placing an order on Amazon. Suicide is overwhelmingly an issue with folks who are mentally unwell, not physiologically. There's no excuse for what Amazon is doing here.
    - guerrilla 4y ago
      And why would you deny the same right to mentally ill? It's just as much suffering as any other chronic illness sometimes more. Either you believe in bodily autonomy or you don't.
      - tsimionescu 4y ago
        It's obvious you have no idea what you're talking about, so ideally you should really stop talking. Try speaking to someone who has experienced suicidal ideation and how afraid they are they may actually do it in a moment of insanity.
        guerrilla 4y ago
        > afraid they are they may actually do it in a moment of insanity. That's certainly not a universal experience. There are rational and valid reasons a mentally ill person may want to die and other people should not deny them that right. It's inhumane torture and a complete disrespect of their personhood to disregard deny their capacity to so reason and force them to live in suffering.
        tsimionescu 4y ago
        There are, but they are vastly outnumbered by the non-rational ones. There are extremely common drugs used to treat depression (SSRIs) that cause suicidal tendencies in people younger than 24, for example. Depression itself causes suicidal ideation, as do many psychosis. If you actually want to help someone suffering from this, you must check that their desire to die persists for a long enough time, and is not simply a psychotic episode that they would regret later. This is often easily distinguishable, as people who start having thoughts of suicide are often terrified of actually following through just moments later. It is also extremely well established fact that the vast majority of people whose suicide attempts are thwarted are thankful for it, and that cutting access to the easiest suicide methods drastically reduces the total rate of suicides: most people who commit suicide don't want to die, they are just having an irrational episode.
  - archon1410 4y ago
    My first thought was that maybe the parents should blame themselves instead of figurative rope-sellers for being a failure of a parent who let their kids go to the point where they attempt suicide, while claiming they were not even "aware of it". But that's probably too jaded for here.
    - Lightbody 4y ago
      Yeah that’s super jaded. Seriously consider stepping back and thinking about how much grief the parents are going through. I have a young child who has voiced suicidal thoughts and and it’s so fucking hard. The pandemic has been really rough on a lot of kids. Thank god we are we’re finally able to get professional help (after almost a year of waiting for an available therapist). You don’t know shit about the circumstances of these families, and jumping to the conclusion that the parents are at fault and not at least considering that a $1T company could lift a finger is kinda messed up. Sorry for the angry tone but I’m seeing a few folks make comments like yours and it’s infuriating. This isn’t some joke topic and the Silicon Valley contrarian attitude really is frustrating to see on this thread.
      - catiopatio 4y ago
        This isn’t a contrarian attitude, it’s a “parent your own children instead of insisting corporations parent all of us” attitude. I feel for the parents’ grief. I also understand how difficult parenting a troubled teenager must be. I also categorically reject the idea that Amazon is culpable, and I think that these particular parents, in their grief, are merely attempting to externalize their feelings of guilt. They want to rage at something or someone other than themselves.
        x86x87 4y ago
        Why not both? Parent your children + require sensible safeguards
        Lightbody 4y ago
        Asking Amazon to not bundle these product and instead put up a suicide hotline suggestion instead is not “insisting corporations parent all of us”. It’s insisting on basic decency. And I *AM* parenting my children when I insist on this. The only thing I’m thinking about is if my kid goes to a dark place again and starts searching the internet. But please: why don’t you tell me how to be better parent to prevent this?
  - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
    That doesn't make it ok to sell suicide kits to teenagers. Stop defending actions because it's somewhat tangentially related to something else you think should be allowed.
- throwabroa545 4y ago
  - tux3 4y ago
    "We should improve society somewhat" "And yet you participate in society!"
    - BrotherBisquick 4y ago
      Based commie comic
- akudha 4y ago
  At their scale, it is entirely possible that this wasn’t malice, just bad algorithms/poor testing. All they had to do was say sorry and fix the recommendations. Instead, they’re lawyering up for a fight. Just how much profit are they making from these kits? Must be negligible to them? I don’t understand why they think it is worth fighting this? Or is it their policy to always fight, never back down, never say sorry etc? I honestly don’t understand. Even ignoring ethics and looking at it from only economics, it doesn’t make sense to me. What am I missing?
- formerly_proven 4y ago
  The combination of items is a suicide kit, but as far as I can tell Amazon didn't have a literal "suicide kit" item (chemical + drug + scale + booklet) in the catalog, it's just about "others who bought this also bought...".
  - nerevarthelame 4y ago
    What difference does that make? If a child was buying this this chemical from Wal-Mart and the cashier checking them out said, "Oh, looks like you're trying to commit suicide. Have you considered buying some medication to keep those toxic chemicals down, or a book that will walk you through everything?" wouldn't you find that at all problematic? If we can hold companies liable for what their employees recommend, I don't know why we wouldn't also hold them liable for what their recommendation engines recommend.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- moistly 4y ago
  > instructions on how to Jill yourself Ah, la petit mort, c’est bon!
annoyingnoob 4y ago
> In 2022 there is just no excuse for this To me, its shows the limitations of 'AI' in 2022. We keep calling software 'intelligent' and saying things like 'we don't know exactly how it works', we tell people that it is going to take their jobs - that all seems like hubris to me. Situations like this prove that AI is not intelligent at all and has a long way to go before it is anything like intelligent.
andybak 4y ago
> nobody should be deploying software in production that is capable of this kind of harm. This "kind" of harm seems to hide a huge amount of complexity. Let's assume the algorithm starts off on day 1 just looking for purchases that tend to appear in clusters. There's a potentially unbounded number of clusters that could be regarded as harmful. The options are surely: 1. Be vigilant and special case items one by one. I presume they are doing this. Maybe they aren't putting enough resources behind it or not reacting quickly enough but even if they were then things would always slip through. 2. Never use any kind of bundling algorithm ever. (1) is a forever ongoing task so it doesn't sound like you're referring to that as that's not something where you can "iron out the kinks". However it also doesn't sound like you mean (2) as you seem to be saying there's a way to fix this once and for all. Is there a third option I haven't thought of? EDIT - I guess maybe all "bundles" could require human curation before they are allowed to be displayed. It would be a gargantuan task but it's a valid third option.
- CPLX 4y ago
  Nothing slipped through. Amazon has been fully informed about it, is doing it on purpose, and is engaging in expensive legal battles to be allowed to keep doing it. This story is so much worse than the headline suggests, despite that seeming impossible.
  - iancmceachern 4y ago
    Why on earth would they do so? I believe you 100%, but why Jeff, why?
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Precedent. If they artificially limit their "AI" from outside pressure, then they will have admitted that they can do it, and they'll get pressured to do it more and more. They don't want to deal with that, and would rather wait until a law is passed "forcing" them to do so - coincidentally Amazon will be best positioned to comply with that law and for some reason it'll only ever be used to go after smaller competitors.
haswell 4y ago
While I agree that it seems very problematic that these ingredients are so accessible, I also have to challenge this: > They had decades to iron out these kinks. Aren’t the developments in algorithms that lead to these kinds of unexpected outcomes a bit more recent? This seems similar to the content moderation problems the social media giants are having. The sheer volume of products in Amazon’s marketplace is such that these kinds of things seem bound to happen when applying recommendation engines. This is not to imply that such recommendations are acceptable, but my primarily contention is that this doesn’t seem like a problem that has been well solved anywhere yet.
- indymike 4y ago
  > Aren’t the developments in algorithms that lead to these kinds of unexpected outcomes a bit more recent? No. Unexpected outcomes are pretty normal for search engines (and really, any complex computer system) since... forever, and really, the solution, regardless of input is is really easy: on input if (keyword in prohibited_phrases) disable recommendations, and on output if (keyword in recommendation_results) disable recommendations to user. I do believe this was solved sometime prior to E. F. Codd's 1970 "Relational Completeness of Data Base Sublanguages".
  - haswell 4y ago
    I was referring to the product pairings, not the search result autocompletion (which does seem like a pretty glaring problem). Cutting off a search early is easy. Deciding that “even though these are commonly purchased together, this pairing shouldn’t be shown” seems like a fundamentally different problem.
    - indymike 4y ago
      Dropping results is easy to do, too. Figuring out what shouldn't be paired? That's a curation problem.
      - haswell 4y ago
ufo 4y ago
Furthermore, according to the article, the sodium nitrate mentioned in the lawsuit has a higher purity (99%) than the sodium nitrate used or processing meat (6%).
- prpl 4y ago
  Nitrite, not nitrate. I think it’s because the other is mixed with salt (Prague Powder #1). You aren’t buying sodium nitrite though - you are buying prague powder. It’s packaged that way specifically.
skeeter2020 4y ago
>> as they unlikely to use it for preserving processed meats Maybe, but as long ago as at age 12 I was buying it from the local pharmacy to make awesome smoke bombs. >> In 2022 there is just no excuse for this, nobody should be deploying software in production that is capable of this kind of harm You realize the #1 founding reason of the internet outside of sharing academic research was to distribute an entire "book" capable of this type of harm?
- bastawhiz 4y ago
  The purity of the chemical that Amazon is selling is high enough to make it inappropriate for virtually any other (consumer) use case besides suicide. This isn't the same as what you bought when you were 12.
  - yababa_y 4y ago
    please explain how increased purity makes the compound less suitable, not MORE, for household use? our “kitchen lab” has all sorts of chemically pure ingredients and I feel comfortable knowing there aren’t random impurities in my “house grade” feedstocks.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - bastawhiz 4y ago
      The purity of food grade sodium nitrate is 6% percent, and then you mix it with salt. The purity of what Amazon is selling is ~99%. Purity here doesn't mean the rest is impurities, it means the percent of what you're buying is that compound. The rest is usually common salt, in this case. The reason it's done like this is so mixing up a teaspoon and a tablespoon isn't a lethal difference. The LD_lo of sodium nitrite is a bit over 5g for a 75kg person. You use an ounce of 6% sodium nitrite to cure about 25kg of meat. That's about 28g, or 1.7g of pure sodium nitrite. The equivalent lethal dose of what Amazon is selling is equal to ~three ounces of the stuff you use for food (enough for 75kg of meat), which ends up looking like a teaspoon at 99% purity. Do you have the confidence to correctly use a compound to cure meat where (for household use) curing 5kg requires so little chemical that you'd need to pinch it onto a scale?
fuckstick 4y ago
> If I have to rate my digital content surely Amazon shouldn't be selling sodium-nitrite to minors as they unlikely to use it for preserving processed meats. Did you actually think about this for more than a second. Despite all this moral panic bullshit I would wager the majority of minors purchasing sodium nitrite are doing so for its legitimate uses. Teenagers with cooking or aquarium hobbies are not that rare - sodium nitrite suicides seem to have been in the single to low double digits for most countries - which when they report 150 to 200 percent increases over the year sounds all the more sensational. This is stupid. Might as well ban ropes. Some of you might want to look up the stats on intentional and unintentional Tylenol toxicity and number of deaths - it is 1000s and 100s more respectively.
- amilios 4y ago
  The article says that the Amazon recommendation algorithm was also recommending along with the sodium nitrite, "a scale to measure a lethal dose, a drug to prevent vomiting, and a book with instructions on how to use the chemical to attempt suicide". This is beyond just suggesting the chemical itself, this is almost suggesting to certain users to commit suicide.
  - x86x87 4y ago
    The way I imagine this working is: you buy X,Y and Z. If enough people buy these together (along with other things) the algo will deduce that if you buy X you also probably want Y and Z. It will recommend them. This is not new and there are plenty examples.
  - fuckstick 4y ago
    I mean I don’t automatically believe this bullshit based on the source - it’s coming from a law firm with very specific priorities in producing a narrative. Having known about 60 minutes scandals over the years I am just as likely to believe they withheld this story because the facts didn’t even meet their questionable standards. Some emotional grieving parents and a law firm are all you need to them turn that into another media circus. Maybe their recommendation system was aggregating. Or maybe it was just suggesting specific things the user had viewed or purchased recently. I’ll withhold judgement until less charged “facts” are out in the open. For a forum that so often likes to cite Gell Man amnesia - how about fucking now?
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> Amazon shouldn't be selling sodium-nitrite to minors The category of things that "might be harmful to minors" is impossibly broad. I suspect Amazon will be removing this chemical from their listings, just as Amazon and eBay constantly add new items to their banned items list. There are several chemicals that I ordered from Amazon in the past that now can't be found online, and I expect it's only a matter of time until pure sodium nitrite also disappears. The bigger question is: Should we be forcing every online marketplace to perform strict age verification of every customer? From the article: > Kristine was able to create an Amazon account even though she was under 18, skirting Amazon rules against underage account holders—the lawsuit notes that Amazon does not verify age. If a minor can get ahold of a credit card, it's not hard to imagine that they can also get ahold of their parent's drivers license to go through an arbitrary age verification too. Even if they did perform age verification on accounts, how would you expect Amazon to verify that the person pressing the Checkout button is actually the parent, and not a minor who sat down at their parents' computer and went to Amazon.com? It's really easy to make blanket dismissals of difficult situations in comments ("Amazon shouldn't be selling X to minors...") but the reality is that the only way to prevent these things is to remove them entirely from the marketplace. Amazon does remove a lot of potentially misused medications and chemicals from their marketplace, but the list is never going to perfectly capture every single combination of items that might trend as being harmful. What would you propose as a practical solution? A blanket ban on anything that might be harmful?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

ghostpepper 4y ago

It’s not just the chemical, it’s also a second drug to prevent vomiting and instructions on how to Jill yourself. It’s literally a suicide kit, and it’s appalling that they would sell it to anyone let alone teens.

jackblemming 4y ago
Some people believe in the right to suicide. I don’t think that’s appalling at all. What’s appalling is how America prolongs the suffering of terminally ill or those with horrific chronic diseases who want out. Agreed on the teen part though.
- spir 4y ago
  I believe in the right to suicide, and I also think transaction costs matter. What if we had 25-cent suicide booths a la Futurama on every street corner? Sometimes people are going through hard times, and it needs to be easier to seek help and connect with other humans who care than it is to off yourself.
  - chrisseaton 4y ago
    If you believe in a right to suicide, don't you believe in a right to making it as low cost and accessible as possible? If you have to afford it and you have to get past a gatekeeper it doesn't seem much of a right.
    - stale2002 4y ago
      You are being obtuse. The point here is that someone shouldn't be able to decide, in the course of 5 seconds, to engage in a permanent decision like this. The reason being, that people make mistakes in the course of 5 seconds, that they regret. So, instead of that, we should be pretty sure before allowing people to make such permanent decision. Such as, for example, by having a doctor talk to the person. This is why the OP mentioned the TV show Futurama. Because in the comedy TV show, people could decide in 5 seconds to do that. And the reason why it was in a comedy TV show, is because that is bad, and absurd, and that's why it is funny.
      - chrisseaton 4y ago
        > The point here is that someone shouldn't be able to decide, in the course of 5 seconds, to engage in a permanent decision like this. Is it a right or not? > we should be pretty sure In what sense is it a right if someone else has to agree to it?
        stale2002 4y ago
        So, you see zero problem with someone spending 5 seconds to think about a decision and then taking a permanent decision like that? Really? Or are you just hyper focusing on an irrelevant dictionary definition of the single word "right", that nobody else was using? That is why I said you were being obtuse. You focusing on a single word is missing the point, and I don't know why you would focus on the word like that.
        chrisseaton 4y ago
        > Really? Yeah really. What right should I have to tell them to do something or not do something with their own body and life?
        stale2002 4y ago
        Well then you basically do not care about suicidal people. Because, if you had ever spoken to anyone who has felt suicidal, you will see that most of them admit that they have had couple second lapses in judgement and are extremely glad that they did not have a 5 second suicide button that they could press. So, me, being someone who actually cares about these people, and who has spoken to them, know that most people who are suicidal do not want to be given this option. You would know this if you had ever spoken to someone in your life, ever, who has had depressive or suicidal thoughts.
- lolinder 4y ago
  Some people believe in the right to doctor-assisted suicide. I don't know anyone who advocates that suicide drugs should be available over the counter to anyone who's feeling suicidal today.
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    > I don't know anyone who advocates that suicide drugs should be available over the counter to anyone who's feeling suicidal today. Seems like that would fall under basic bodily autonomy. Why should a doctor gatekeep something so important...
    - chalst 4y ago
      Because teenagers with suicidal thoughts are most often lacking the sense of perspective about their situation they would gain with maturity. This is a case where rigidly-based reasoning about rights fails the common-sense test.
      - WalterBright 4y ago
        The full set of human rights is for legally consenting adults. Minors have only a subset of those rights.
  - chmod775 4y ago
    > I don't know anyone who advocates that suicide drugs should be available over the counter to anyone who's feeling suicidal today. Chances are on HN you'll find people sufficiently detached from reality to advocate for this.
  - x86x87 4y ago
    Why is it legal to buy a gun but illegal to decide to end your own life? The hypocrisy is through the roof. How are we free if we are forced to live? Btw: we should not encourage suicide. I think we need to help people that are in a position where they are considering and also there are things that are deeply f'ed with our society to begin with that slowly push people to this (ie helping suicidal people is a drop in the bucket if we don't fix fundamental issues)
- bastawhiz 4y ago
  I strongly believe in the right to assisted suicide for the terminally ill, but I also believe that it shouldn't be as easy as placing an order on Amazon. Suicide is overwhelmingly an issue with folks who are mentally unwell, not physiologically. There's no excuse for what Amazon is doing here.
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    And why would you deny the same right to mentally ill? It's just as much suffering as any other chronic illness sometimes more. Either you believe in bodily autonomy or you don't.
    - tsimionescu 4y ago
      It's obvious you have no idea what you're talking about, so ideally you should really stop talking. Try speaking to someone who has experienced suicidal ideation and how afraid they are they may actually do it in a moment of insanity.
      - guerrilla 4y ago
        > afraid they are they may actually do it in a moment of insanity. That's certainly not a universal experience. There are rational and valid reasons a mentally ill person may want to die and other people should not deny them that right. It's inhumane torture and a complete disrespect of their personhood to disregard deny their capacity to so reason and force them to live in suffering.
        tsimionescu 4y ago
        There are, but they are vastly outnumbered by the non-rational ones. There are extremely common drugs used to treat depression (SSRIs) that cause suicidal tendencies in people younger than 24, for example. Depression itself causes suicidal ideation, as do many psychosis. If you actually want to help someone suffering from this, you must check that their desire to die persists for a long enough time, and is not simply a psychotic episode that they would regret later. This is often easily distinguishable, as people who start having thoughts of suicide are often terrified of actually following through just moments later. It is also extremely well established fact that the vast majority of people whose suicide attempts are thwarted are thankful for it, and that cutting access to the easiest suicide methods drastically reduces the total rate of suicides: most people who commit suicide don't want to die, they are just having an irrational episode.
- archon1410 4y ago
  My first thought was that maybe the parents should blame themselves instead of figurative rope-sellers for being a failure of a parent who let their kids go to the point where they attempt suicide, while claiming they were not even "aware of it". But that's probably too jaded for here.
  - Lightbody 4y ago
    Yeah that’s super jaded. Seriously consider stepping back and thinking about how much grief the parents are going through. I have a young child who has voiced suicidal thoughts and and it’s so fucking hard. The pandemic has been really rough on a lot of kids. Thank god we are we’re finally able to get professional help (after almost a year of waiting for an available therapist). You don’t know shit about the circumstances of these families, and jumping to the conclusion that the parents are at fault and not at least considering that a $1T company could lift a finger is kinda messed up. Sorry for the angry tone but I’m seeing a few folks make comments like yours and it’s infuriating. This isn’t some joke topic and the Silicon Valley contrarian attitude really is frustrating to see on this thread.
    - catiopatio 4y ago
      This isn’t a contrarian attitude, it’s a “parent your own children instead of insisting corporations parent all of us” attitude. I feel for the parents’ grief. I also understand how difficult parenting a troubled teenager must be. I also categorically reject the idea that Amazon is culpable, and I think that these particular parents, in their grief, are merely attempting to externalize their feelings of guilt. They want to rage at something or someone other than themselves.
      - x86x87 4y ago
        Why not both? Parent your children + require sensible safeguards
      - Lightbody 4y ago
        Asking Amazon to not bundle these product and instead put up a suicide hotline suggestion instead is not “insisting corporations parent all of us”. It’s insisting on basic decency. And I *AM* parenting my children when I insist on this. The only thing I’m thinking about is if my kid goes to a dark place again and starts searching the internet. But please: why don’t you tell me how to be better parent to prevent this?
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  That doesn't make it ok to sell suicide kits to teenagers. Stop defending actions because it's somewhat tangentially related to something else you think should be allowed.
throwabroa545 4y ago
- tux3 4y ago
  "We should improve society somewhat" "And yet you participate in society!"
  - BrotherBisquick 4y ago
    Based commie comic
akudha 4y ago
At their scale, it is entirely possible that this wasn’t malice, just bad algorithms/poor testing. All they had to do was say sorry and fix the recommendations. Instead, they’re lawyering up for a fight. Just how much profit are they making from these kits? Must be negligible to them? I don’t understand why they think it is worth fighting this? Or is it their policy to always fight, never back down, never say sorry etc? I honestly don’t understand. Even ignoring ethics and looking at it from only economics, it doesn’t make sense to me. What am I missing?
formerly_proven 4y ago
The combination of items is a suicide kit, but as far as I can tell Amazon didn't have a literal "suicide kit" item (chemical + drug + scale + booklet) in the catalog, it's just about "others who bought this also bought...".
- nerevarthelame 4y ago
  What difference does that make? If a child was buying this this chemical from Wal-Mart and the cashier checking them out said, "Oh, looks like you're trying to commit suicide. Have you considered buying some medication to keep those toxic chemicals down, or a book that will walk you through everything?" wouldn't you find that at all problematic? If we can hold companies liable for what their employees recommend, I don't know why we wouldn't also hold them liable for what their recommendation engines recommend.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
moistly 4y ago
> instructions on how to Jill yourself Ah, la petit mort, c’est bon!

annoyingnoob 4y ago

> In 2022 there is just no excuse for this To me, its shows the limitations of 'AI' in 2022. We keep calling software 'intelligent' and saying things like 'we don't know exactly how it works', we tell people that it is going to take their jobs - that all seems like hubris to me. Situations like this prove that AI is not intelligent at all and has a long way to go before it is anything like intelligent.

andybak 4y ago

> nobody should be deploying software in production that is capable of this kind of harm. This "kind" of harm seems to hide a huge amount of complexity. Let's assume the algorithm starts off on day 1 just looking for purchases that tend to appear in clusters. There's a potentially unbounded number of clusters that could be regarded as harmful. The options are surely: 1. Be vigilant and special case items one by one. I presume they are doing this. Maybe they aren't putting enough resources behind it or not reacting quickly enough but even if they were then things would always slip through. 2. Never use any kind of bundling algorithm ever. (1) is a forever ongoing task so it doesn't sound like you're referring to that as that's not something where you can "iron out the kinks". However it also doesn't sound like you mean (2) as you seem to be saying there's a way to fix this once and for all. Is there a third option I haven't thought of? EDIT - I guess maybe all "bundles" could require human curation before they are allowed to be displayed. It would be a gargantuan task but it's a valid third option.

CPLX 4y ago
Nothing slipped through. Amazon has been fully informed about it, is doing it on purpose, and is engaging in expensive legal battles to be allowed to keep doing it. This story is so much worse than the headline suggests, despite that seeming impossible.
- iancmceachern 4y ago
  Why on earth would they do so? I believe you 100%, but why Jeff, why?
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Precedent. If they artificially limit their "AI" from outside pressure, then they will have admitted that they can do it, and they'll get pressured to do it more and more. They don't want to deal with that, and would rather wait until a law is passed "forcing" them to do so - coincidentally Amazon will be best positioned to comply with that law and for some reason it'll only ever be used to go after smaller competitors.

haswell 4y ago

While I agree that it seems very problematic that these ingredients are so accessible, I also have to challenge this: > They had decades to iron out these kinks. Aren’t the developments in algorithms that lead to these kinds of unexpected outcomes a bit more recent? This seems similar to the content moderation problems the social media giants are having. The sheer volume of products in Amazon’s marketplace is such that these kinds of things seem bound to happen when applying recommendation engines. This is not to imply that such recommendations are acceptable, but my primarily contention is that this doesn’t seem like a problem that has been well solved anywhere yet.

indymike 4y ago
> Aren’t the developments in algorithms that lead to these kinds of unexpected outcomes a bit more recent? No. Unexpected outcomes are pretty normal for search engines (and really, any complex computer system) since... forever, and really, the solution, regardless of input is is really easy: on input if (keyword in prohibited_phrases) disable recommendations, and on output if (keyword in recommendation_results) disable recommendations to user. I do believe this was solved sometime prior to E. F. Codd's 1970 "Relational Completeness of Data Base Sublanguages".
- haswell 4y ago
  I was referring to the product pairings, not the search result autocompletion (which does seem like a pretty glaring problem). Cutting off a search early is easy. Deciding that “even though these are commonly purchased together, this pairing shouldn’t be shown” seems like a fundamentally different problem.
  - indymike 4y ago
    Dropping results is easy to do, too. Figuring out what shouldn't be paired? That's a curation problem.
    - haswell 4y ago

ufo 4y ago

Furthermore, according to the article, the sodium nitrate mentioned in the lawsuit has a higher purity (99%) than the sodium nitrate used or processing meat (6%).

prpl 4y ago
Nitrite, not nitrate. I think it’s because the other is mixed with salt (Prague Powder #1). You aren’t buying sodium nitrite though - you are buying prague powder. It’s packaged that way specifically.

skeeter2020 4y ago

>> as they unlikely to use it for preserving processed meats Maybe, but as long ago as at age 12 I was buying it from the local pharmacy to make awesome smoke bombs. >> In 2022 there is just no excuse for this, nobody should be deploying software in production that is capable of this kind of harm You realize the #1 founding reason of the internet outside of sharing academic research was to distribute an entire "book" capable of this type of harm?

bastawhiz 4y ago
The purity of the chemical that Amazon is selling is high enough to make it inappropriate for virtually any other (consumer) use case besides suicide. This isn't the same as what you bought when you were 12.
- yababa_y 4y ago
  please explain how increased purity makes the compound less suitable, not MORE, for household use? our “kitchen lab” has all sorts of chemically pure ingredients and I feel comfortable knowing there aren’t random impurities in my “house grade” feedstocks.
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - bastawhiz 4y ago
    The purity of food grade sodium nitrate is 6% percent, and then you mix it with salt. The purity of what Amazon is selling is ~99%. Purity here doesn't mean the rest is impurities, it means the percent of what you're buying is that compound. The rest is usually common salt, in this case. The reason it's done like this is so mixing up a teaspoon and a tablespoon isn't a lethal difference. The LD_lo of sodium nitrite is a bit over 5g for a 75kg person. You use an ounce of 6% sodium nitrite to cure about 25kg of meat. That's about 28g, or 1.7g of pure sodium nitrite. The equivalent lethal dose of what Amazon is selling is equal to ~three ounces of the stuff you use for food (enough for 75kg of meat), which ends up looking like a teaspoon at 99% purity. Do you have the confidence to correctly use a compound to cure meat where (for household use) curing 5kg requires so little chemical that you'd need to pinch it onto a scale?

fuckstick 4y ago

> If I have to rate my digital content surely Amazon shouldn't be selling sodium-nitrite to minors as they unlikely to use it for preserving processed meats. Did you actually think about this for more than a second. Despite all this moral panic bullshit I would wager the majority of minors purchasing sodium nitrite are doing so for its legitimate uses. Teenagers with cooking or aquarium hobbies are not that rare - sodium nitrite suicides seem to have been in the single to low double digits for most countries - which when they report 150 to 200 percent increases over the year sounds all the more sensational. This is stupid. Might as well ban ropes. Some of you might want to look up the stats on intentional and unintentional Tylenol toxicity and number of deaths - it is 1000s and 100s more respectively.

amilios 4y ago
The article says that the Amazon recommendation algorithm was also recommending along with the sodium nitrite, "a scale to measure a lethal dose, a drug to prevent vomiting, and a book with instructions on how to use the chemical to attempt suicide". This is beyond just suggesting the chemical itself, this is almost suggesting to certain users to commit suicide.
- x86x87 4y ago
  The way I imagine this working is: you buy X,Y and Z. If enough people buy these together (along with other things) the algo will deduce that if you buy X you also probably want Y and Z. It will recommend them. This is not new and there are plenty examples.
- fuckstick 4y ago
  I mean I don’t automatically believe this bullshit based on the source - it’s coming from a law firm with very specific priorities in producing a narrative. Having known about 60 minutes scandals over the years I am just as likely to believe they withheld this story because the facts didn’t even meet their questionable standards. Some emotional grieving parents and a law firm are all you need to them turn that into another media circus. Maybe their recommendation system was aggregating. Or maybe it was just suggesting specific things the user had viewed or purchased recently. I’ll withhold judgement until less charged “facts” are out in the open. For a forum that so often likes to cite Gell Man amnesia - how about fucking now?

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

> Amazon shouldn't be selling sodium-nitrite to minors The category of things that "might be harmful to minors" is impossibly broad. I suspect Amazon will be removing this chemical from their listings, just as Amazon and eBay constantly add new items to their banned items list. There are several chemicals that I ordered from Amazon in the past that now can't be found online, and I expect it's only a matter of time until pure sodium nitrite also disappears. The bigger question is: Should we be forcing every online marketplace to perform strict age verification of every customer? From the article: > Kristine was able to create an Amazon account even though she was under 18, skirting Amazon rules against underage account holders—the lawsuit notes that Amazon does not verify age. If a minor can get ahold of a credit card, it's not hard to imagine that they can also get ahold of their parent's drivers license to go through an arbitrary age verification too. Even if they did perform age verification on accounts, how would you expect Amazon to verify that the person pressing the Checkout button is actually the parent, and not a minor who sat down at their parents' computer and went to Amazon.com? It's really easy to make blanket dismissals of difficult situations in comments ("Amazon shouldn't be selling X to minors...") but the reality is that the only way to prevent these things is to remove them entirely from the marketplace. Amazon does remove a lot of potentially misused medications and chemicals from their marketplace, but the list is never going to perfectly capture every single combination of items that might trend as being harmful. What would you propose as a practical solution? A blanket ban on anything that might be harmful?

deleted 4y ago
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