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Comment by athenot | Hacker News Reader

> The problem is that when we outsource thinking to machines, we are really outsourcing thinking to the organisations that run the machines.

This is the money quote of this article, and it's been on my mind quite a bit as of late.

More than ever, we live in a world where there are many forces ready to take full advantage of our laziness. It takes a bit of introspection to really understand the tradeoffs that are appropriate. When it comes to Facebook, I'm really getting the feeling that my friendships have been hacked (and tainted) for someone else's profit. Fortunately, there is a way around: share important stuff in person instead of on FB—heck, I'm finding myself using email more these days—and keep Facebook usage for the few things it does well, like planning get-togethers.

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This, from Dune:

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

Worse!

"The machines themselves condition the users to employ each other the way they employ machines."

- God Emperor of Dune

Frank Herbert was a genius.

We cannot forget Momo [1] by Michael Ende with greymen buying the time of people: why are you wasting your time talking with your neighbour when you can profit from it?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momo_%28novel%29

I think the grey men in Momo are different; the grey men encourage people to save time by being more efficient (and thereby neglecting human relationships and the things that made them happy).

Facebook, on the other hand, encourages people to use their human relationships to waste time via superficial interactions with so that Facebook can profit directly from ad sales.

Some strategies work well against either threat; spend time with people away from the computer, don't go along with whatever everyone else is doing.

But they are exploiting different vices: the grey men exploit people's long term greed to entice them to accept an intolerable present, whereas Facebook exploits short-term procrastination and addiction psychology: "I wonder what's going on on Facebook right now... it'll just take a couple seconds to check." (This isn't unique to Facebook. I tend to waste a lot more time on Hacker News and Reddit than Facebook. At least HN doesn't have a profit motive, and I do learn a lot of interesting things here.)

edit: I'm not sure how this relates to the Dune quote, as it's been a long time since I read it and don't remember the context of that quote.

With the bozos running things in Dune, it might have been better with machines in charge.

Maybe that's just what you get after generations of royal and wealthy-elite inbreeding slowly but surely shrinks the available gene pool.

Which is exactly why Lynch was a brilliant choice to direct the first film adaptation: owing to his own artistic idiosyncrasies, he was able to convey how deeply strange such an inbred interstellar gentry might be, millennia into the future.

"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind." OCB

Yet so many readers of sci-fi that I know seem willingly oblivious to the risks of modern surveillance and centralization of power.

I left Facebook about two years ago now. I nearly immediately lost contact with all of the people I'd spent my time with in the city (outside of work). I don't chase them down for other reasons, but it is striking how much it supplanted everything else.

After returning an old work phone I'd made the mistake of not copying all of their numbers over. I moved elsewhere within the city, and so I don't run into them in the neighbourhood anymore.

I really enjoy not getting sucked into checking it and getting 100 notices about people who are friends of friends of friends. Life feels more at a healthy pace, even if it feels like I have fewer friends. I didn't like the constant FOMO it generated -- that for some reason I needed to either be the most expressive person on FB, or always chase other people's posts and doings. It's not for me.

I think the happy medium here, where you can still keep in touch with people but not get sucked into checking it all the time, is deleting the app from your phone. It used to be habit for me to unlock my phone and if I didn't have anything to do, just open the app and begin scrolling. Once that wasn't easily accessible I stopped completely. Now I only go on Facebook if I have a reason to, like looking someone up or checking the only group (fantasy sports) that is active. I also can still use messenger for those few people that prefer it.

I deleted the app because of the FOMO feeling that I was getting and now it's basically gone. I can still access it, but I check Facebook a maximum of once a day, minimum around once a week.

Maybe that's the happy medium for you, but for others, the happy medium is emailing, calling, or texting your friends to set up a dinner party or a round of golf, making sure to call your folks every week or two, and not worrying too much about those whose only effort to spend time with you is having clicked a button months/years ago.

If you don't communicate with the people, you can unfriend them.

I'm only on there for messenger now - calling is expensive when your friends are in different countries, and while texting is mostly free these days, it costs money when traveling. Email... People just don't check it as much anymore. So you're left with messenger.

If you are going to unfriend them, you may as well not use FB at all.

My wife's happy medium is, basically, to not login until a close relative or friend (usually her mother) phones and tells her there's something there to check; and at that time to batch process the latest events in her wall. This way she still is in contact with everyone she cares about, but it only eats a couple of hours of her week, at well defined blocks of time.

>I think the happy medium here, where you can still keep in touch with people but not get sucked into checking it all the time, is deleting the app from your phone. It used to be habit for me to unlock my phone and if I didn't have anything to do, just open the app and begin scrolling. Once that wasn't easily accessible I stopped completely. Now I only go on Facebook if I have a reason to, like looking someone up or checking the only group (fantasy sports) that is active. I also can still use messenger for those few people that prefer it.

The service goes out of its way to make you install the app too, which I find annoying. The mobile site doesn't actually allow you to check your private messages without installing Messenger.

Really the only thing I use it for at this point is for invitations to events, notices when bands I like are performing, and the like. But every day it seems like they make it harder to just be an intermittent user of the site.

I too don't use the app, but I use https://mbasic.facebook.com, which allows messenger use without an app.

Good to know! I had just trusted them to redirect me to a non-gimped mobile site.

My happy medium was disabling notifications and putting the icon in a subfolder (iOS) so its not apparently visible.

The lack of visibility prevents me from opening the app out of habit, but its still there if I need to check a certain group or event.

I removed it from my phone, blocked it in my browser my only way to check it now is with my phone browser ... I still have the heinous facebook messenger app installed.

but much like you the FOMO is gone, but so is a lot of anxiety. I can focus on things that are more important ( reading is my new hobby) and spent more focused time with my family.

Lately, I am more and more going to free events in the "nearby events happening now" space. Somehow it's the ad-hoc nature of it that really fun.

Possibly tangential, but that's yet another reason we need to fight for control of our computers, instead of outsourcing everything to commercial vendors in the cloud, and making everything so dumb that everyone can "master" it within 5 seconds of seeing it. Things don't have to be this way, computers can be used to augment human thinking.

vendros - mind blown

A typo. Fixed. Thanks!

I don't think people outsource their thinking to machines.

I think the algorithms just work well at finding similar things to what people choose to consume or like. They aren't perfect, but there's this need to explain things by this great conspiracy of fake news and invisible influencers in a paranoid style.

I think this has gained traction due to a crisis of the knowledge class that happened due to the rise of populism via trump and brexit. They can't understand that those sentiments were chosen because people agreed with them; they had to have been influenced and their free will taken by "algorithms." This to me is like saying my free will is taken by the suggestions Amazon shows me on their site, or that my taste in movies is shaped by Netflix recommendations.

This gets annoying because it's so obviously a reaction in that particular style of contradicted elites. We see it in many forms, like the handwaving over internet comments and "civility." The knowledge elite hates to have its power or dominion challenged, and will try to explain the doing so via these systemic solutions.

it confuses what i liked in the past with what i might enjoy in the future. or what might feel familiar or what someone like me liked.

how am i ever supposed to have new foreign experiences if recommendations are based on past experiences or grouping me into demographics to make me more like others?

sure everyones a mimicry or pastiche of others, but its losing its randomness and becoming more uniform and standardized.

A perfect recommendation algorithm would be optimal in the exploration/exploitation tradeoff. Suggesting new things with some probability to see if you might like them or not. Most recommendation algorithms today are way too far on the exploitation side of the tradeoff, but it's not a requirement.

"The Verge: There are people who love the idea of our humanity being augmented. They think it's a good thing. More intelligent, stronger, and so on.

Author: They're living in a science fiction fantasy world. The problem is that we're not just merging with machines, we're merging with the companies that make these machines.

It might be one thing if we were gaining intellectual powers that we had full control over, but we don't. Right now, four or five big companies control the machines we're using. "

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/10/16263366/franklin-foer-bo...

Perhaps he might say there's nothing wrong with man letting himself be augmented by a machine, e.g., a "smartphone". But when the user does not have full control over the machine and she lets some third party control the machine for her then that's not really the same thing as simply "man augmented by machine".

In the model promoted by SV man grants some control over himself to some third party, a corporation.

Apparently the author was working at New Republic when one of the Facebook founders took it over, said he hated having to sell ads and then proceeded to institute a system of generating mindless clickbait headlines.

Perhaps he believed such headlines are so effective they rob a person of "free will", such as the decision not to click.

It is certainly possible to use machines we control to access information and otherwise supplement our intellect. But I guess SV still believes one needs to be a computer nerd to do it. And everyone else still needs SV's help.

http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/09/11/550...

This concept of human augmentation controlled by several large corporations was very well explored in the Deus Ex series. Consider watching the DE:HR cutscene compilation [1] to get a sense of the atmosphere.

In all of the games, the medication for preventing implant rejection is extremely expensive and strictly controlled by the manufacturer. Those who can no longer acquire it suffer a painful death brought on by the implant rejection.

While high class society members can pick and choose what augmentations they desire, low class workers are pressed into getting enhancements to improve work efficiency. Construction tools are melded to arms, and military personnel are subjected to experimental tech. One ex-mil NPC was forced to get an implant to wipe memories, so that their team could be used for inhumane purposes and have no recollection.

The protagonist in Human Revolution is head of security for a biotech giant who becomes augmented after a corporate espionage attack. The attack is part of a larger attempt by a Chinese company to monopolize the market, under the direction of external forces. To avoid ruining the ending I will just say, you really don't want a tech company pushing bad updates to hardware your life depends on.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPuNh2stwvw&list=PL1030EE10C...

" I'm really getting the feeling that my friendships have been hacked (and tainted) for someone else's profit."

Your comment makes me remember the concept of commodification.

I didn't think before about this in this way, but it seems that Facebook (and relates services) could be though as the commodification of our friendships.

Have you seen Adam Curtis's documentary, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace? A lot of it is about that

Previously we had outsourced thinking to:

- village elders and tribal leaders

- educators at all levels with various agendas

- workplace superiors with party lines and biases

- etc etc

People were never individual free-thinking agents like they think they were. Ever. In fact, I'd much rather have machines recommending me what to read next, even as a side effect of a company making money by showing me ads in the process.

This is probably the main reasoning behind the "crazy" valuation of some companies that have seemingly simple business model of selling ad views.

People who talk about some kind of tech bubble often dismiss the indirect value, the value beyond the basic economics of their business models.

It's not $10B worth of tech or business model. It's $10M worth of tech, and $9.99B worth of minds with your foot in the door already.

Google?

Moreover, the machines in question becomes more and more capex intensive, therefore they are less and less reachable for organizations which don't have the financial resources. The winners-takes-it-all means that the winner gets a lot of control...

Like everyone using Amazon AWS just makes them (Amazon) bigger.

Of course, in the pre-internet age we were forced to outsource our thinking to the press instead, it's just that you're less likely to see them running articles about how they themselves are waging a war on our free will.

I didn't really entrust my personal information, my friendships, my CV or anything else to the press. In fact, there was no institution comparable to social media that so intimately, on a personal and individual level interfered with my life.

Sure, reading certain newspapers or others was and is a way for people to shape their views of the world, but it is very much a one way relationship. I can read what I want or I don't, but there is no intimate connection.

Also the press at least is in part a civic institution, it's held responsible to at least some common standard. Social media, which is entirely private and corporate operates in opaque fashion bound to basically nothing but their own interest.

> Social media, which is entirely private and corporate operates in opaque fashion bound to basically nothing but their own interest.

There is a small glimmer of pressure on Twitter and Facebook from the public since last year. Things are changing. Glacially slowly, as always, but they are changing. I suppose that's the same development that happened with newspapers a few centuries ago. (I would be very surprised to hear that newspapers were held responsible to some sort of common standard from the very beginning.)

But Facebook is more internationally widespread and free of charge. And in the pre-internet age I assume that attention span was at least a bit longer than today.

Also then it was the authority of press that supposed to do the thinking, but now I feel it's echo chamber and social pressure.

And before the press it was the church, the community and the family.

Back then it was the passed down wisdom and morals of the elders that guided society. Now it's a bunch of 20- and 30-somethings who haven't experienced enough to develop morals, let alone wisdom. But that's OK, because they've farmed it out to an algorithm. And when that fails, they shrug their shoulders and declare themselves blameless for the damage they've done.

The public cries out because of the way its treated by Facebook. There's a simple solution: stop hiring children. Or at least stop putting them in positions of power.

It's a mistake for FB users to consider themselves employers who have any effect on hiring. That's like a pig with an opinion about work habits at the slaughterhouse.

> > The problem is that when we outsource thinking to machines, we are really outsourcing thinking to the organisations that run the machines.

Ah, there we go. The writer was taking me around the real garden path, and I bounced. It's a stupendously important point, and really doesn't require most of the build up to get there.

>when we outsource thinking to machines, we are really outsourcing thinking to the organisations that run the machines.

And the people who run the organisations.

Likewise, when we outsource our reality to machines:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/kFrnMacxz5E/maxresdefault.jpg

every person should read this Adam Curtis article.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7-...

Facebook is very useful to me - as an address book. There has never been a better tool to get in touch with folks not talked to in years.

As for the 99% of the profit-making garbage on that site, I haven't bothered since the Snowden disclosures.

I'll just leave this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVGINIsLnqU

Honestly, I think the right company with the right marketing could make Facebook completely irrelevant. All you'd need is a basic address book/profile functionality + basic messaging + event planning. Perhaps a use as a universal login, as many do like that.

They would lose a ton of users if the network effect would catch on, which is obviously the big hurdle.

It would also be a curious case of brands being left with few Facebook users, and likely no way into the disrupting service if it was funded by basic ads. That requires the disrupting company to not be greedy, but I think they could make a viable business out of it.

Please, someone make this for the greater good.

FB's tentacles are so deeply embedded in everything that I'm not sure a classic tech death from a disruptor is possible. Only a long and slow decline over a period of 5, maybe even 10 years.

If Zuck does end up making a Presidential run, I think that'd have a very good chance of triggering a sizeable decline in its US userbase.

I'd be stunned if he did. The man has the personality of a lizard. No way is he an appealing candidate for the general public.

> “I’m visiting small towns in Iowa” is a normal sentence, said by many a billionaire who wants nothing.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2017/08/03/i...

Many said the same about Trump.

Take a closer look the next time a State of the Union speech is broadcast. They're all reptiles.

Honest question: Would Zuck be running for the GOP or the Dems?

Well, I suppose that, in 2020, only the Dem ticket is up for grabs since Trump will be running for a second term, but if Zuck got to choose, would he go with the Republicans instead?

> I'm not sure a classic tech death from a disruptor is possible

Well, FB's brand itself is super toxic these days, so you could probably build something on the whole "we're not FB" premise

(disclosure: I worked at FB for 3 years)

I don't agree that it's "super toxic." Any company that gets this big and is also a utility will get its fair share of complaints, and this fair share will seem huge because the base is huge. Think about Comcast, for example. For the most part, people will still use it b/c it's embedded in so many parts of our lives. It has a monopoly on the social graph. Heck, growth has been exceedingly strong even though its been around for over a decade.

Just building another company and saying "we're not FB" is not enough. For most people, FB is good enough, just like a utility. It will be exceedingly difficult for a company to just come in this one angle and win. In order to win, they need to play to a strength that isn't dependent on the existing social graph, because you are not going to win taking FB head on. It has to be guerilla warfare.

diaspora tried that.... it has next to 0 adoption

The investment to get going with Diaspora is too high.

Facebook is simple. You sign up, your friends sign up, and then you connect (possibly automatically since Facebook can often determine you know each other).

My (possibly incorrect) recollection is that Diaspora requires figuring it out for yourself (I recall them spending too much time on selling how great it is up front when they should just shut up and get you settled first). Then you have to sell it to your friends.

Start with the name. It sounds like an intestinal disease.

I remember when they said the same thing about Microsoft.

So, contacts + email + calendar? I mean, the only difference here is how contacts are handled -- remotely-managed profiles in a singular remote registry instead of locally-managed profiles in plural local registries.

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