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Comment by moomin | Hacker News Reader

Wow, I can't decide if this guy is more morally or intellectually bankrupt. Seriously, "sometimes data behaves unethically"?

Data doesn't do anything. Not even analysis or deep learning does anything. People (or programs written by people) execute decisions on the basis of data. It's still the people being unethical. Big data isn't some magic wand that absolves you of moral responsibility, but it's extremely interesting that at least one marketer at Facebook seems to believe it does.

And that's just one of the many things that manage to be simultaneously offensive and just plain incorrect in what is frankly, a pretty short article.

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You ought to continue to read past that. Because you missed his point. He goes on to basically question "ethics" entirely:

>What did this tool start spitting out? Every ethnic stereotype you can imagine....People who liked Jay Z were more likely to like Obama – it was one of the statistical truths Facebook couldn’t be seen espousing.

I disagreed. Jay Z is a millionaire music tycoon, so what if we associate him with the president? In our current world, there’s a long list of Truths That Cannot Be Stated Publicly, even though there’s plenty of data suggesting their correctness, and this was one of them.

African Americans living in postal codes with depressed incomes likely do respond disproportionately to ads for usurious “payday” loans. Hispanics between the ages of 18 and 25 probably do engage with ads singing the charms and advantages of military service.

Why should those examples of targeting be viewed as any less ethical than, say, ads selling $100 Lululemon yoga pants targeting thirtysomething women in affluent postal codes like San Francisco’s Marina district?

That's not questioning, that's rejecting wholesale without a proper argument as to why. And frankly I don't at all see the ethical analogy between luxury athleisure and payday loans, and it seems to me you'd have to be pretty damn fucking self-deluded to think they're remotely comparable.

it's a good that a demographic buys. that's the way that ethically bereft corporations see it. i would even guess that this is how zuck sees it. people who buy jay-z buy obama. people with lower income buy payday loans. there is nothing ethical about any of this unless you want to add the ethical dimension. corporations are expected not to. and yet the data is allowing them more and more to target these "opportunities".

i wanted to catch some flies over the weekend. i used some soap and vinegar as the vinegar attracts them and the soap breaks the surface tension to drown them. corporations act much the same way. perhaps we need to see them as predators rather than someone looking to solve our problems, much like flies should see me. i don't provide what they want, but they don't see it that way until it's too late.

we sell bad food to overweight people. facebook can help with that. we also sell diets to overweight people. facebook can help with that too. either we add an ethical dimension to business or quit criticizing marketers for doing what they are expected to be doing.

i would even go as far as to argue that a system based on desire is not a good system. as the case with the flies, we can be led to death through our desires and various drives that have another purpose, but have been subverted to achive different objectives. whether as individuals or as a civilization.

>>it's a good that a demographic buys.

Oxygen and carbon monoxide are both gases. One of them is poisonous to humans.

Corporations will sell you just enough rope to hang yourself unless the government steps in and tells them not to through regulation. But that's the antithesis of business, neo-liberal economics will argue. Canada still sells asbestos to third world countries for instance.

Apparently asbestos mining in Canada has ended.

Asbestos opponents and those weary of seeing Canada's mesothelioma rate rise celebrated in 2011 when the country's asbestos industry ground to a standstill. Canada's last two remaining active mines, the Jeffrey Mine in Asbestos, Quebec, and the Lac d'amiante du Canada in the nearby town of Thetford Mines, Quebec, shut down because of financial, labor and development issues — the first time in 130 years that the Canadian asbestos production stalled.[1]

1. https://www.asbestos.com/mesothelioma/canada/

Are you suggesting that pay day loans should be illegal or advertisements for them should? If not why not advertise them to the audience that is apparently interested in it?

There's a difference between an interest in yoga pants and an 'interest' in predatory loans or military service for lack of other options.

Yeah I get that it is unfortunate to say the least that people need/want these loans. However, what is the right thing to do about the loans? If they are predatory, maybe they should be illegal. But who am I to tell people what they can and cannot do with their money? That would be rather patronizing. If we assume that people getting these loans are grown adults why shouldn't we allow people offering them to advertise to the people most interested in them? Is it ethically "better" if even wealthy women from the Marina see the ads despite everyone knowing they don't care about pay day loans for purposes other than discussing then on HN? I think it's honestly a really hard ethical question that I don't see a obvious answer to.

If you're an advertising platform, you can choose what sort of products are advertised on it. All of them do. You can, quite reasonably, decline to advertise things that are unethical. For instance, predatory loans. You are choosing not to profit off the misery of others. This is not nearly as complicated as you make it out to be.

Will the target demographics universally and unequivocally benefit when online access to such loans is cut off?

Other choices might include an even more predatory local check-cashing place and a guy named Vinnie who seems to own a lot of baseball bats for someone that never plays baseball.

This doesn't 'cut off access'. Last year Google stopped advertising predatory lenders entirely. Targeting ads for predatory lenders at potentially vulnerable people is even worse. Again, this is a pretty straightforward thing, not a complex logic puzzle that requires careful derivation from fundamental axioms.

Not to detract or digress, but oxygen is damaging to cellular life as well, just long term. If nothing else gets you beforehand, with age as all mammals "we caramelize (glycation) & we go rancid" (oxidation). When photosynthesizing microorganisms emerged and oxygenated the planet, it likely wiped out 90% of life as it existed pre-oxygen (not multicellular back then --- which could well predominantly be an adaptation to protect weaker "inner" cells against oxygen, anyway --- the other great adaptation was proto-mitochondria getting an actual massive energy boost from burning oxygen rather than being burned by it, and here we are today!)

Which makes Zuck admirably qualified to be our next US President - his "Meet The Proles" tour is now in progress

Facebook: Connecting the world ... to advertisers!

yes, most things are goods that people can buy at their own discretion. However, payday loans are predatory and should not be considered in the same category as unhealthy food, expensive clothing, etc.

i could argue that addictive foods are similarly predatory. they have long lasting impact on the health of a person the same way that payday loans have on their economic health. predatory is arbitrary, the question is what is the impact of the harm. and can people be expected to control themselves or at least regulate themselves when presented with the option, so as to act in their best interest. for many things in the economy i don't believe this to be the case.

yet business gets done and the system at least appears to continue to function. people learn from their mistakes and move on if the damage isn't too great. or they get caught up and stuck and that's a problem that needs regulation.

>I don't at all see the ethical analogy between luxury athleisure and payday loans

The "athleisure" market has bilked people out of $35 billion dollars a year using offshore sweatshops to turn $1 into $20 a pop, mainly by amplifying people's insecurities day after day after day through mass advertising.

man, this hits home. i just recently got a pullover made by "Nike Golf" at work. It's a nice pullover. It's listed at somewhere between $37.50 and $150 on Amazon.

The box it came in? The same box that I used to see stuff delivered to the 99 cent store across the street at my old apartment.

It's amazing what athlete endorsements can do for brand value:

No one's saying they're saints. Just not quite as life-ruining to their consumers as payday loans. (Which is a really low bar to limbo under.)

Large profit margins and predatory loan practices are completely different ethically, though.

It's more than large profit margins, it's the constant deluge of propaganda every day that gnaws at people's insecurities. I'm too fat, I'm too skinny, I'm not strong enough, I'm not active enough, I'm not healthy enough, I don't exercise enough, I don't hydrate enough, I don't eat right enough, I'm not pretty enough, I'm not handsome enough, I'm not popular enough, ad nausium. Every day, to an entire population, for generations.

There's a saying in business, you don't sell product, you sell emotion. They are selling, "I want to feel better about myself." They can't sell that until they knock people down several notches. That's what it takes to get people to pay $40 for a shirt then can get for $7.

Just about everyone alive has grown up with that. Let that roll around in your head a while. I think it's worse in scope and what it does to the population.

I've never been screwed by a payday loan service, but I've certainly been subject to that type of advertising for as long as I've been alive, and it's gotten progressively more sophisticated.

Well to answer his question: because in the examples of African Americas and Hispanics, there's a power structure with its roots in the racist history of American capitalism, and profiting off of that power structure is definitely less ethical than getting an affluent woman to spend some of her disposable income.

So selling them the pay day loan is bad or advertising it or advertising it to them?

Oh believe me, I caught that bit. And my summary of the entire article stands.

To paraphrase what he's saying here: why is selling things to people who can easily afford them "ok" when exploiting the poverty of historically disadvantaged groups and getting them possibly maimed or killed is not ok?

The fact that he even thinks this approaches an interesting argument reinforces my point: intellectually and morally bankrupt. The guy isn't smart enough to realise that his unanswerable rhetorical questions have obvious answers.

> Big data isn't some magic wand that absolves you of moral responsibility, but it's extremely interesting that at least one marketer at Facebook seems to believe it does.

I suspect a large portion of this attitude comes from the fact that the marketers (tasked with enacting campaigns and strategies based on results of data science/machine learning), likely don't understand all of the statistical intricacies and pitfalls around underlying assumptions, and a lot of people already view data science as producing "magic" results (and assume that if it tools them so, it must be true).

Of course, this guy is likely morally bankrupt anyways, which doesn't help either.

It might be more correct to say "data reveals things that might be politically incorrect to state in public (or advertise based on).

He actually says exactly that.

Skim thru his book. He definitely has morally bankrupt covered. Also, was he an exec at Facebook?

He was a Product Manager (says right there in the article).

Skim? You should read it.

Data is the new supernatural ruling entity that spinned the world for fun and guess what is still interested in it

Of course data can behave unethically. For example, data might show that people of a particular race in a particular neighborhood have high concentration of bad credit scores. Though using this information to approve/deny loan applications might be illegal. And when algorithms are run on large datasets, are closed source, and their downstream effects are difficult to measure, then yes data/algorithms can behave unethically.

... Why wouldn't they just use the credit score?

Edit: The example of loans-neighborhood relationship is real. See http://www.dictionary.com/browse/redlining

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