Former Google and Facebook execs are sounding alarms about the power of tech
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
This is very much a matter of perspective. Prior to Apple launching the app store as a walled garden for ios and then launching it on macos proper, it was generally an untested assumption that users would not be willing to accept such a software delivery model.
Prior to Google, it was assumed that it would be unacceptable to require people sign up to and give personal details for access to software. Most software licences were distributed by emailing codes to the user. The web app with mandatory registration was usually only seen in enterprise grade portal-based software.
Today, the standard software experience requires so many accounts that /average users/ are turning in desperation to password managers to corral the hundreds of accounts they need for their month-to-month computing, and Microsoft has moved from "next-next-done" installers to actively pushing a walled garden on the population. Despite Android having full support for distributing packages as .apk files that can be installed without the app store in the exact way you would use an msi or a deb, I would anecdotally say less than 5% of apps are offered for download from their creators websites in this traditional fashion.
Sure seems like the tumors are metastasizing to me.
Many people value Facebook for the experiences it gives.
You sound like one of those people that 'doesn't watch TV' in the 90s. To many TV doesn't give any value at all -- it is mindless drivel. However, many others like TV. So it goes with Video Games as well. The product of an entertainment company is entertainment. If you don't find entertainment in the product then don't consume it, but don't act like a spoil sport when others like it. Stop purporting your own opinion as fact.
The shadow profiles maintained by Facebook is the equivalent of watching your TV by stealing the non-watcher's electricity.
Triangulation of other people's profiles based on your phone book is the equivalent of handing over your non-watching neighbor's address to the (physical mail) spammers and then going and collecting only the interesting stuff from their house by using their key without their knowledge or permission.
Calling someone a spoil sport for pointing out the problems that FB causes to non-users is the equivalent of turning up the volume on your TV to a 1000 and telling your non-watching neighbor that all they need to do to drown out the noise is to go get a TV and then do the same.
The question is, is it true?
HN does offer higher-than-usual quality of discussion, but its ability to discuss is still palpably limited. In this light, waiting for the right starting point of discussion can be productive. A lot of debates are tiresome because they seem to start back from ground 0, and it can wear down community enthusiasm for the subject.
You'll find it difficult (but not impossible) to figure out who I am. And I like it that way. Not because I'm particularly scared of anything, but because merit alone should be our filter.
This is further exemplified by the classism present in the current society. If you haven't gone through the right funnel, if you haven't been born to the right parents, if you merely got unlucky and your family's fortune was stolen or squandered, then suddenly you are unworthy of being listened to.
Right? That's what you're saying by "Words ought not be judged solely on their truthiness independent of their person." Either you're somebody, or you're nobody. And if you're nobody then you may as well go die.
That is quite dramatic, but not quite overly so. It's how companies feel about their employees when they fire them, for example.
In fact, follow this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15792258 Just start at the top and keep reading. It's an absolutely fascinating debate, and one of the sides is completely anonymous. I still don't know how to feel about the situation. Both sides bring up good points.
But such quality came out of letting merit alone be the judge. And people will disagree whether it's quality, but it certainly made me think.
Is that your interpretation?
No, if words aren't judged solely, that implies at least, I don't know, one, or can I get two extra factors? What's wrong with multi-factor judgment?
For example, when I listen to my doctor, do you think I'm only evaluating the merit of the medical reasoning? Are doctors in the habit or routine of providing their medical reasoning? And surely, while not all doctors are from good financial backgrounds, just by being so prejudiced in favor of your doctor, you are judging the final accumulated product of an unfair system, and you are probably enjoying its fruits. The reality is you probably also evaluate multiple signals, every day, even if one of those signals is correlated with a class division you despise.
You certainly have a point. And I would agree that in medical matters, or in other situations where an expert opinion is warranted, it's worth taking credentialism into account.
But there are a few people on HN without credentials who are excellent programmers. What makes them excellent? If you had to figure out a hard design, or build something quickly (as opposed to rock-solid reliably), are you sure the first person you'd go to is a Harvard grad? Even if you had the money. I've met enough to know that they're smart, but you can get within a stone's throw of their skill on your own.
Let's start with a story. My tooth hurt, for days. Terrible shooting pain. I remember waking up and jumping up and down crying due to how absolutely excruciating it was. This isn't artistic exaggeration.
I go to the dentist. Tooth's godda come out. But what made me hesitate was how quickly this determination was made. She took one glance at the xray and said "This tooth needs to be extracted." Instantly.
I go home and wait, and bear the pain a bit. The pain goes away, and I forget about it for awhile.
A few months later, it comes back. I go to a different dentist. Same exact situation.
For lucky reasons, I could not arrange the operation. I say "lucky" because I still have that tooth, and that was four years ago. If I had listened to credentials, I would be one less tooth and none the wiser.
This was quite striking, and it has always made me wonder why we have this absolute faith in the systems we participate in. It works most of the time. It's a pretty good rule of thumb. But the special cases are what makes life interesting, and most systems are remarkably bad at evaluating those.
What does all of this have to do with whether some rando should have an opinion about Google? Well, that rando might be right. And the only way to figure that out is to think about it and decide for yourself.
This is not unusual. Experts know how to recognize patterns quickly because they have lots of training and experience to do it. If a dentist looks at an x-ray and sees what looks like rotting tooth root, he or she will recommend taking out that tooth, and the chances are very, very good that he or she is right.
>>For lucky reasons, I could not arrange the operation. I say "lucky" because I still have that tooth, and that was four years ago. If I had listened to credentials, I would be one less tooth and none the wiser.
What happened is that your dentist informed you that leaving the tooth in would be very risky because it could lead to a much more serious condition and require major surgery such as a root canal. You decided to take that risk (or circumstances forced you to) and got lucky and nothing bad happened.
This doesn't mean that the dentist was wrong.
That might not be the best example given the number of medical mistakes made, and the general success rate of an initial diagnosis. If anything the ability of patients to question the medical reasoning of their doctor has been shown to actually improve outcomes. On a personal level I question my doctor like I’m interrogating him, and I’ve rarely found that to be anything but useful. Are used to have on deficiency anemi that might not be the best example given the number of medical mistakes made, and the general success rate of initial diagnosis. If anything the ability of patients to question the medical reason of their doctor has been shown to actually improve outcomes. On a personal level I question my doctor like I’m interrogating him, and I’ve rarely found that to be anything but useful.
In this way, it's similar to how many disparate problems are reducible to the Travelling Salesman Problem. Once that reduction is discovered, the line of inquiry rapidly converges with those of other TSP investigations.
It's valuable to do so to bring others up to speed cheaply, and to avoid getting stuck on credentialism's local maximum.
Irrelevent. If you accept a statement without proof, you become vulnerable to manipulation.
This is also why topic-specific forums exist, so that short proof suffices. Though I dont know an appropriate forum for this article.
Hopefully you picked your doctor due to his past performence. Money and review should serve as a good incentive.
Ok... so who are you? Since I don't know you, I can't judge your statement with any respect to you, so your statement cannot be considered true, so why say it? Truth is quite obviously the sole standard a statement should be judged by. If you give up on the analysis and are looking for a shortcut, then that is something else entirely. Our "ability to discuss" is hampered when your opening statement is self-evidently false circular reasoning.
So Reputation does not imply a statement. Reputation is only used to reduce ddos on my brain.
Ironically Headline/Article basically suggest to accept it as truth because reputation.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/11/google-ap...
I'll quote #peoplewindow's reply, broadly agreeing with my comment:
>The Guardian has been pushing the line that non-Guardian news sources are 'dangerous for democracy' for a long time now. Other similar publications like the NYT have the same viewpoint.
Check out the Guardian’s history and structure:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian
The Guardian is about as good as you’re going to get in terms of a mainstream outlet being able to take an objective view here. Pretty much the opposite of Facebook.
Technically, no. Though the Guardian is good and thorough at what it does, it is explicitly established to advance a liberal viewpoint, rather than be purely "objective". See their own about page for the Scott Trust, which is the non-profit that is responsible for publishing and governing The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/the-scott-trust/2015/jul/26/the-...
The current editor, Katharine Viner, has also been fairly explicit about this in the past (notably in live chats when in charge of the then-new Australian edition).
Most UK news outlets wear their political stance on their sleeve. One of the common ways to get an objective view is to read both The Guardian (left) and The Telegraph (right), and from that triangulate what in the story is a matter of political perspective.
In terms of this topic, the power of tech, Katharine Viner posted a "long read" in 2016 that it's unlikely they'll deviate from in terms of "The Guardian view on..." https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jul/12/how-technology...
From an organisational perspective, you can also read a bit "between the lines" from their financial situation -- growing readership but losing money. Which puts them at an awkward cross-roads where their mission to promote liberal values is best served by remaining free, but it that places their future in jeopardy.
TL;DR: though The Guardian is good, don't mistake "independent" for "neutral"; it has a well-established political view.
That statement is nonsense.
Of course The Guardian can't possible be objective w.r.t. Facebook.
Facebook and The Guardian are competitors in the market for online advertising.
edit: double-down
+1
That's (part of) what I'm trying to say.
The other part is that, though I'm not all a fan of Facebook, The Guardian (as a competitor) clearly has a self-interested agenda with these anti-Facebook articles.
A few years ago, they used to run a lot of snide, sneering articles about "bloggers".
Now that it turns out that blogs have modulo-zero impact on their bottom line, their focus has turned to Facebook et al.
The only people who thought the "arab spring" was a burgeoning utopia are western military, intelligence, and political elites.
Now those same people see these platforms as a threat and so the "respectable" media is full of anti-SV stories.
> it’s all automated; the owners of the system can’t possibly monitor everything that’s going on, and they can’t control it
Yes, that is the real problem: communications that can't be censored and controlled.
It's part of a persistent strain of technoutopianism. You might read Tom Standage's excellent 1998 book "The Victorian Internet", which talks about the adoption of the telegraph during the Victorian era. Many of the same things people said about the Internet's power to change society were said about the telegraph: https://www.amazon.com/Victorian-Internet-Remarkable-Ninetee...
It was not as immediate and exciting as modern technology, but it was way more exciting than what previously existed. People even fell in love by telegraph. See, for example, the 1880 novel "Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes": https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/26/wired-love-romance...
Furthermore, dopamine isn’t addictive and “In studies with rats, where dopamine was suppressed, rats showed “normal hedonic reaction patterns,” and still showed normal pleasure responses even though dopamine was suppressed.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/women-who-stray/201701/n...
But hilariously, America seems dead-set on using the same weapon on itself...
It is hard to say how much the social media (twitter especially) were really playing a role on the ground and how much they were being used for propaganda to shape opinion in the west.
The arab spring was when CNN and others started reporting on tweets like they were legitimate news, which obviously has to be a discriminatory process, because someone is deciding which tweets are news out of the millions that are not.
Someone decides that the tweets of atrocities on one side are news, while atrocities on the other side are not, and that the tweets "proving" that the first tweets were staged fakes are not news either.
Considering how much support I saw from outside the US, I'm finding this hard to believe.
Twitter is an American corporation, the users are its product. They did exactly what the platform incentivised them to do.
Users aren't the product, they're the revenue stream. The product is an easy to use communication tool.
It’s a weapon that can totally disrupt a society to the point at which it cannot function. What else would you call what happened in Libya?
In history we mostly learn about the successful revolution, and rarely hear about the failed ones. In the recent past the Middle-East has a litany of failed revolutions.
Maybe visiting might change my view, but the realizations in the article seem obvious and late enough that I think I understand the appeal but don't share the values.
The poster, a European, said that one of the things they liked about HN was that when the discussion drifted too deep into an SV-centric view, people from other parts of the world would often provide a useful corrective that would then be upvoted.
I appreciate that too, although as the treatment of the poster's comment demonstrated, it's not perfect. I think too many SV orthodoxies are vigorously defended here. The poster gave a footnote with a short list of what they called "Silicon Valley mindcuffs", and I suspect that's what got the instant downvotes.
It's actually fascinating to observe how the "tone" of HN varies through the day. My impression (I haven't carefully analyzed) is that during the morning in Europe you tend to have more left leaning points of view politically and more advocacy of Stallman-esque Open Source.
Once the US gets online though the political spectrum of opinions shifts right and towards Libiterianism. You also have people working at places like Google and Facebook adding their 2 cents, which tends to lead to "moral outrage" (European) vs "here's the reality" (US).
Less common are understanding of legal issues, typically common law needs at least one case to clarify an issue as opposed to positive law countries; the right to bear arms is a big one, so is American-style freedom-of-speech.
More specific are things like: non-American universities provide a good education, non-American companies can innovate meaningfully, tipping is omnipresent in services, keyboard layouts, American references in literature, sport, movies, etc.
One of the latest obvious examples of such mindcuffs outside of HN is Apple’s announcement around battery replacement: it’s impossible to find conditions that are not meant for the US market. You can redirect the offer to local stores or find it there. That is actually quite typical of Apple, in spite of 60% of their sales being outside of the US.
I have made the mistake to point at similar mindcuffs on HN and I will not do it again.
Also aren't political views geographicaly tied?
The SV way of thinking is present to some extent in most urban people of similiar socioeconomic class. A plumber from SF will not necessarily take the same things for granted that a programmer from SF will.
It is not really the power of tech that we should be worried about, but instead the power of investment without regard for anything other than shareholder returns. Google and Facebook could be better companies if they didn't have to sell their users to their real customers.
Business models shape the space of architectures that companies are incentivized and disincentivized to make. For people that don't like the current landscape of addictive free technologies, I'd say Silicon Valley has a business model problem, not a technology problem.
I venture that the technology is usually already there, but the business exploitation is what's different in the dominant companies.
I'm rather skeptical of Facebook though. I think there are major issues with its current incarnation.
Sure, but GP was talking about technological disruption.
Do you think it's worth it to make a location-based social activity layer for existing social forums like HN? So people could meet up, date, hire for jobs etc.
No one's actual location would be revealed. But when people post something, others would know they are probably nearby.
There actually was a startup in DC that was doing something like this, called SocialRadar. They had a lot of funding but failed due to lack of adoption. They had a real name policy and didn't have any of the same problems that Yik Yak did.
P.S. I didn't downvote vote
The extremely complex nature of modern software and its ability to offer unparalled distribution advantage is nothing like the world has ever seen. The ability of Google to push something like a chrome browser comes not only from its galleons of highly paid engineers, but also its ability to advertise/support it for free for decades to come. There simply does not exist another sustainable model to finance a complex product like an internet browser and provide it for free to consumers for decades.
The bigger problem is what is the form of regulation that could be applied to such behemoths. Its extremely hard to regulate it by a case-to-case basis, similar to what happenned in telecom, simply because the business models are too complex and different products monetize differently.
I think a line of thought which might yield some regulatory possibilities is to limit these companies manpower. No single company should be allowed to employ more than X number of engineers. If they go above, they should be required to spin of into multiple entities, each of which do no more than X number of engineers. I dont know what X is - but that is open for deliberation.
The impact that something like this could have on say Google is that Google is forced to split apart its search business with the ads business. This further allows the search business to collaborate with more ad providers to find the best fit. And on the other side, it allows its ads business to experiment with more search providers and open up a market for profitable search engines.
This is not something I have completely thought through, but whatever little I have, this seems to be the cleanest approach to fix tech.
It shouldn't be hard to regulate this. Just split them up.
More and more hackers and programmers from outside SV/startup culture started showing up. Outside of that bubble, hacker culture leans far more anarchist, and fundamentally mistrusts large scale power structures and centralized authority. And then Snowden and Aaron Swartz happened.
So in a way, HN isn't becoming radicalized, it's becoming normalized.
I've noticed a shift away from that in the past couple years. The grandparent post doesn't seem to be left-anarchist though; more like state-socialist. It proposes that some central authority, presumably the US government dissolve or split up large tech companies. The problem I have with that is I fundamentally mistrust large scale power structures and centralized authority. The US government is one of the most extreme manifestations of those things.
Recall every Tesla thread.
Actually this is exactly what I suggested. The bigger question is 'how' to split them up - and to be able to do it consistently across ever shifting market dynamics.
The telecom case is easy to define and split cleanly. The ads/search/browser and the like marketplaces will take the entire US government to make sense of.
And then there is stuff like Bitcoin and AI.
The cynic in me wonders if it's simply "old conservative money holders" being upset about the "new liberal rich." Ever since Trump took power, the media has been beating the "evil tech company" drums loudly and clearly.
The thing which makes tech companies different from every other is the 'infrastructure' effect of software and the absence of 'geographical' limits on monopolies.
Banks, law firms, audit firms are fundamentally limited by geography. A law firm in New York will find it very hard to service clients in San Francisco without having employees there. Tech firms arent 'boxed' in by these limits, which are preset for most traditional businesses, thereby greatly expands their ability to become monopolies and strangle competition.
The other advantage that tech companies have is the fundamentally additive nature of software. Microsoft made a very good OS few decades back, but its ability to keep releasing a competitive OS builds on the work piled on by decades of engineering. It is simply impossible for a startup to release another version of an OS which can compete with Microsoft Windows.
However, if we were to break up Windows into pieces, it opens up the possiblity for a new startup to innovate on a part of the OS and buy existing pieces from the vendors of each part to ship a new offering.
For perspective, PWC is the result of a merger between two large audit firms founded in 1949 and 1954 respectively. Microsoft was founded in 1975. PWC is a worldwide company employing 236k employees. Microsoft only employs 124k. Admittedly Microsoft has a revenue of ~90 billion vs PWCs mere 37.7 billion. But I'm not seeing why one is fundamentally different than the other.
And your solution is effectively to make Microsoft's products worse, so that a different, lower quality product is able to compete.
What about instead of that, we do the thing that helps consumers, instead of hurting them?
What they understand is that these companies only care about money. When Democrats were in power they were happy to help the Democrats in exchange for favors. Now the Republican are in power they will be happy to help the Republicans in exchange for favors.
Alphabet is even willing to make someone else CEO because Eric Schmidt was too closely tied to the other side. That shows everyone how friendly they are willing to be.
It's not OK for for telecom, oil and banks. I don't hear anybody saying that nor do I believe it is a popular opinion.
>"Ever since Trump took power, the media has been beating the "evil tech company" drums loudly and clearly."
You realize there's a tangent between the Trump election and how social media was used during the election right?
Tech companies are worse because they control the tools we use to communicate and think: this unchecked power can exert massive influence over our minds and thoughts.
Indeed. "Thar oughtta be a law!" is always the least interesting response to a problem. Essentially your solution to a problem is to outlaw the problem.
Then the fun part is always left to committee. "How do we split it up?" "How do we define the thing we are trying to outlaw...?"
You could brand it the "War on Problems". The president could appoint a Problems Czar. I'm sure we'll need a Anti-Problems Department, too.
These days, large corporations and industries are more powerful than government entities- just look at how they avoid paying taxes. Until we figure out how to get money out of politics, mega-corps will continue to get their way.
That being said, I think with the rise of AI, smaller tech companies are the future. A tech ecosystem comprised of smaller companies will be forced to take a standards based approach to each industry and also aim to maximize efficiency because of constrains on head count.
This requirement to maximize efficiency will further result in a boost to SAAS and in the longer term create the springboard for the next big jump in tech.
There may be some new big tech companies as AI lets software push into niches that haven't been computerized yet, but the same market dynamics will likely play out there, leading to one big winner per corpus. It's not economical to collect the same corpus more than once, and right now the first player to collect it has no incentive to share it.
The only thing I can think of that would reverse this would be legal regulations that either make all data public (unlikely), or that grant ownership of them to the person they're about rather than the corporate entity that collects them, or a technological solution that can enforce the latter while still allowing large-scale aggregation and machine-learning over multiple people.
This is simply not true, since only goverment will be able to force compliance with its requests by sending armed people to your door.
At least it also funds Chromium and WebKit...
1. Even Google itself is too big. It needs to be broken up further.
2. Management control needs to reside in separate individuals. You cant have two different companies having the same/common management control.
I can appreciate the sentiment, but then Baidu, WeChat, Alibaba, and Xiaomi win.
I don't really care what China does. If those companies have a better product, then it is awesome that they are able to compete in the US.
Why? Because it means better and cheaper products for us consumers.
If the only hope you have is that China and its firms have been weak before, and therefore China will be weak in the future, then this smells like motivated reasoning.
As governments start to realize how powerful these international corporations are, and start laying down more regulations, it will be less and less practical for a company to operate globally anyways.
Merely because other people aren't able to themselves?
All I see is consumers winning as they get free products.
It would be nice to hack those loops in a meaningful way. Make creation a drip fed, nicely chunked, and skinner box filled experience.
There are some methods like pomodoro but something software based to use these novel approaches could do a lot of good for the world.
My mother of blessed memory, daughter of two professors of psychology, in her childhood lived next door to Dr. Skinner on St. Ronan Street in New Haven, CT, USA. Myth in my family says my grandparents had the good sense to refuse a request to make Mom a subject in that box.
In the 21st century West no academic psychologist would even propose using a Skinner box on human subjects. Their institutional review boards (IRBs: scientific ethics watchdogs) would just laugh.
It might be interesting, as an experiment in ethics, to propose some aspect of Facebook's attention hacking as if it were an experiment, and see what IRBs make of it.
In the meantime: human complexity good, Skinner boxes bad. Please be careful.
Examples of skinner boxes are everywhere in society today. They've been around longer than they were identified by Dr. Skinner. Anything that gives a variable reward for pressing the same button is participating in a sort of skinner box.
Mobile games use them, slot machines use them, and you can even think of facebook/instagram likes as such variable rewards you get for the same action over and over.
They are pervasive in society already.
leaked emails (by help of the russians) surely helped trump, but even democrats concede that information was TRUE. this has nothing to do with social media, but training in the DNC about phishing scams might help.
but honestly, there were so many huge flaws in the hillary campaign (relying 100% on data that was already proven in the primaries to be next to useless, disgust over the shadyness in how the clintons took over the dnc and stacked the deck against sanders, etc).
and lets face it, they didnt have a problem with the internet when obama was using it to win, such as 'obama universities' training people to use a pyramid network on social media to basically create broadcast storms to get the algorithms to push their content to the top and shout out dissenting opinions.
I wonder of DNC will stick hard to this and nominate Clinton in next election as well.
Usually loosing political parties change their stance a wee bit to pander to wider demographics next time. Because politicians are, well, representatives. So far it looks like DNC thinks they're correct and people are wrong.
While hardcore members of the progressive faction (myself included) don't think it's as much as they should have, the DNC has made major moves to accommodate that faction, in the areas of policy stances, DNC personnel, and internal DNC administration and nomination process. It's been the single most significant change in a major party after an election defeat since, probably, the 1970s.
I hope continuing pursuit of "email hacking" and other election-time stories is more of a media thing than DNC itself. And that DNC will manage to change media coverage from that to their next offering to the nation.
Hillary represented the establishment. The last two presidents were a huge and dramatic shift away from status quo.
I think people are voting for the least likely to be a part of the machine. I wonder what happens when the people realize any candidate who gets into the primary is part of the machine ?
There were samples released on the internet. There were both liberal and conservative ads taken out too, so it wasn't just pro-Trump like most people believe. It seems as if the campaign was more to divide the country than pick any particular candidate.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/business/russia...
They stop voting like half the country already has.
Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government http://a.co/3Z1dt6b
TL;DR: People vote based on identity and morph their views to match their chosen candidate.
Struggling to accept this, I've now more or less given up on persuasion, messaging, framing, platforms, etc.
What effect do you think it had? Do you think Hillary with $1.5B budget lost the election because of $100k Facebook ads?
Amusing ourselves to death.
More troubling are the rubes who fell for the protests / counterprotests organized by agitators.
Yeah I remember the media silence. Also, I think the remarkable thing was not that Hillary won in the primaries but how many votes Sanders got despite the silence. Here was an unnamed old white man that few have heard of before elections gathering so many enthusiastic young followers. The DNC and Clinton could have done more to bring back or incorporate some of Sanders' policies into Clinton's campaign or in general to be more welcoming towards Sanders' voters.
After the election was lost, the traditional media which Clinton relied on so much was deemed to have failed. Chomsky would say the Manufacturing Consent machine had broken down somewhere. Almost immediately Facebook and Google started talking about "Fake News" and how they'll work twice as hard to combat it.
On the surface it was nice to see these companies saving us from lizard people spam, on another level it was a message to the future presidential or other marketing campaigns saying effectively "Don't spend you billions on MSNBC, spend them on us, we'll be far more effective".
Now the old and crusty media is punching back and writing articles about how tech companies are eating our souls.
I agree in principle with article and never even signed up for Facebook to begin with but like you identified so it has merit, but I think there is also a battle on another level here as well.
Hard to take this kind of attitude seriously. Things seemed fine enough when they were working there, so what has changed?
Thats a very charitable reading of what he did.
That's quite a big if. If it were true then hospitals should drop the use of opioids for any type of pain management to zero. Even with the opioid epidemic in the U.S. I've never heard anyone advocate such a radical position.
> perhaps consider not doing heroin?
In a lot of cases in the U.S. opioids were pushed to treat types of pain for which they have been shown to be ineffective. So the patient needed to take more than the proscribed amount of a drug that was more addictive than a pricier alternative therapy or treatment. I can't find the source for that atm, but it appears that prescription rates are significantly higher in the U.S. than in other developed countries[1].
So to answer your question-- no. Turning down a painkiller for a pricier alternative treatment requires both a) having disposable income and b) having sufficient time and expertise to do a research project on both the effectiveness of the suggested opioid painkiller and effectiveness of alternatives. And that is assuming one would somehow know a priori to disregard entirely the advice of their own medical doctor. It's simply not serious public policy to suggest that everybody just take on burdensome, life-altering levels of pain to avoid the vaguely-worded danger that an addiction robs one of their soul.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/12/28...
It works for nonhumans, too: https://imgur.com/gallery/PR9DJ
Good grief. How out of touch does a person have to be to think that's a reasonable suggestion to make? The ability to control one's circumstances is quite limited for large segments of the population and, even for those more fortunate, no one can predict when one of life's unexpected calamities will bring them down.
Genius. I wonder why nobody's thought of that until now.
/sarcasm