When Good Intentions Backfire | Hacker News Reader

When Good Intentions Backfire

points.datasociety.net

47 pointskawera17 comments

  There’s a reason that no one can tell you exactly how Google’s search engine or Facebook’s news feed works. Sure, the PR folks will tell you that it’s proprietary code. But the ugly truth is that the code has been patched to smithereens to address countless types of manipulation and gamification

I'm pretty sure the real reason no one can tell you how search works is because doing so would make it much much easier to game the system and do exactly what this author seems worried about.

Oh right, and also because it's worth billions.

It's probably a combination of the two. It would take tens of hundreds of man-hours to write a meaningful explanation of exactly how search acts, and doing so would provide no use to Google.

> no use to Google

And little use to anyone except consultancies that will charge someone through the nose to help game the system.

That reads like the introduction to something that could be good. But the meat isn't there yet. Maybe he needs to write a book.

*she

and it looks like she's already written a few :)

http://www.danah.org/

You (and the author) might get a lot out of reading Seeing Like a State.

> That reads like the introduction to something that could be good. But the meat isn't there yet. Maybe he needs to write a book.

I think the essay is meant to be a thought provoking piece, not a how-to guide.

"My goal in writing these essays is not because I know the solutions to some of the most complex problems that we face — I don’t — but because I think that we need to start thinking about these puzzles sideways, upside down, and from non-Euclidean spaces"

I think society would be in a much better place if people conceptualized the ides in this article and held them close to heart. I may be a cynic, but I feel even this piece, long on question and short on answers is full of thoughts that many people never consider. And certainly not to the degree that they should.

"Objectivity" doesn't mean that all statements should go unchallenged in media, nor that all sides of an argument should get equal time or treatment. There exists such a thing as objective, empirically verifiable truth, and media owes its audience doing so.

True, but on the other hand people seem to believe their own opinions are "objective truth" more often than is justified.

This being the case, perhaps it's a nice idea to err on the other side for a change.

The audience does not pay the media nearly enough for it to even attempt to uncover "objective, empirically verifiable truth".

An awful lot of evil is done by people with the best of intentions. For example, Lenin said: "In order to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs" to justify mass murder.

Best short discussion I've seen on "ends justify the means": https://strongfemaleprotagonist.com/issue-6/page-112-2/

Lenin did not had good intentions. Neither did Stalin nor did Hitler nor Mussolini. These guys were comfortable with murder for pretty much any reason or personal ambition.

FYI, that's a misattributed quote.

Lesson of the day: stop being good.

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