Personalisation Is Asymmetric Psychological Warfare
shkspr.mobi
shkspr.mobi
I regularly go to the same cafe for lunch. So some of the staff know me by name, but others who've just started working there don't. And I know their faces and one or two names. This is how it works on a normal human scale.
The corporate version of this delivers, as they say, asymmetrical friendliness. You see someone you've never met before and they know your name, birthday, etc. while you know nothing about them.
And especially in the airline context, all this is devoted to more perfect price discrimination. They know your favourite drinks order so they can sell you more drinks.
You can see this in very high class concierge services, where they have deep dossiers on their clients, but a rotating staff of concierge's. Often there is a primary point of contact concierge that relay's the client's preferences to the others.
Taking that same approach, especially when it comes to measurable behaviors (types of foods/drinks, media consumption etc...), why would it be any different mechanically other than the fact that you prefer familiarity with the person you are talking with?
A co-worker went to try a new restaurant, and ordered his drink. The bar tender made his drink as ordered, and then realized that there was only one person in town who ordered that drink and what he wanted was slightly different from what was ordered. Because she knew what he wanted she remade the drink to be exactly what the customer wanted not what the waitress wrote down. (she delivered the drink personally just to verify that it really was the customer she thought it was and not a new guy who might have wanted it as ordered, which is how I heard the story)
The fact that craftsmanship in this role can be rewarded is a fantastic thing. The people who can do things well can meet the people who want those things done well.
Don't do that.
The comment would be just fine with just the second paragraph.
Personalization != probabilistic statistical match.
I'm arguing that lamenting "mechanization" of social interaction - whether between corporate employee and client as in this example, or even between individuals - is akin to appealing to ether as a virtue of the universe.
If interactions between actors can be measured (which they can to some level of specificity in certain contexts), and the desires of the actors can be understood to such a degree (which we're starting to be able to do), then we can model actions which increase or reduce the likelihood of desired outcome, and following from that can produce and optimize decision support systems that nudge users toward some mutually beneficial state that may have otherwise been opaque to both actors.
People seem to hate this idea because it basically puts hard determinism right in their face - in that your past behaviors if known well enough should be predictive of future actions ceterus paribus.
It's often argued that, such a granularity of measurement in social dimensions is impossible technically, or the fact of being measured changes their behavior. I wouldn't argue either of those to be untrue, only that it need not be perfect to increase the overall optimization of the system.
So instead of saying, yes lets use measurement to optimize our system of interactions across commerce and relations, people bristle at the mere concept of social engineering in the Popperian sense of the term because it feels restrictive to our sense of "free will." I argue the opposite, that doing such would simply make us more aware of our predilections and much more likely to be able to align them across groups.
How do you agree on that ? Because that's currently missing in most selling processes that use manipulation - that's exactly why manipulation is used in the first place.
I tell the concierge service what type of table I like at a restaurant, to put into their file on me, so I expect anyone there to know that.
I do not tell a Bumble date where I work, so I do not expect them to know that (even though they could Linkedin stalk me).
A lowball offer on a house I am selling could be viewed as insulting. But, if before the offer I let it slip that an ugly gas station was about to go up next door, then all of a sudden the lowball offer is not insulting anymore.
Not at all.
> Did you willingly provide it AND REMEMBER?
People have inherent expectations and soft historical memories. The idea that consent is some boundary line is a dystopian legal mechanic, which is specifically at odds with the psychology of humans. Agreeing to something doesn't affect if it's "creepy" (a psychological defense mechanism).
The idea that "you consented to me having this info, so anything I can come up with to do with this info is fair game" is obviously bullshit. But that's just because it's quite obviously not really consent, but rather a case of someone trying to justify doing something that is obviously lacking consent. People generally consent to specific uses of information, so if someone is ignoring the explicit or implied purpose of collecting some information, they are really just pretending there is consent.
Which is, BTW, why the GDPR limits use of collected information to specific purposes (which have to be either inherently required for fulfilling some obligation, or there needs to be consent for that specific purpose).
Is there some large body of measurements you are referring to?
This made me think of what it must be like to be a celebrity. To have people fawn over you, whilst you can barely recall a fan's face for having seen so many.
That doesn't strike me as so odd. There's lots of stuff I might read or watch in the comfort of my home that I might be embarrassed to read or watch on a plane where people will use their own preconceptions to judge me, accurately or not. For example, some Anime (and nothing all that weird, it's just the preconception that cartoons are for kids). I can't even get my wife not to judge me for that, so I might forego watching it on a plane just so I don't feel self conscious. I'm projecting an image of a responsible adult, Kim Kardashian is projecting and image of someone who likes X, Y or Z.
At this point it's not the age issue. I think most people get that there are animated shows for every demo at this point.
It's the fact that you had to preface with "nothing all that weird".
And the fact that I've heard that so often on the internet only to find out that "well, except for that, but she's not as young as she looks, she's actually a 5000 year old dragon. But they're all flirting with her because of her magic powers, not because she looks 8." Oookay...
Yeah, but given the market it comes from and how prevalent it is there, that qualifier is really only used because some people don't realize saying "I watch anime" is sort of like saying "I watch a category that's a significant subset of Japanese mainstream television" when all people know is that the Japanese have some eclectic television by U.S. standards.
> And the fact that I've heard that so often on the internet only to find out that "well, except for that, but she's not as young as she looks, she's actually a 5000 year old dragon. But they're all flirting with her because of her magic powers, not because she looks 8." Oookay...
I hear you, and agree. That said, it's sort of like 5 years ago mentioning you use Reddit. Some subset of the public might only have heard about it through news reports/articles about some of the more problematic subreddits.
For what it's worth, my own tastes go more for the stylish and interesting stories that are harder to do when using live acting. There's some excellent (in style, story, or both) Science Fiction and fantasy that comes out as Anime (Steins;Gate, some of the Netflix series that have come out). Also, there's some really accessible ones I can watch with my son, such as Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood (which we just finished watching together, and is excellent).
Such as mainstream Studio Ghibli anime "Pom Poko" which includes many songs and sight gags about testicles.[0] Or the Penis Festival.[1]
So when I did run into him in the local community space, I had a thought: I could be another fawning fanboy, interrupting his shopping and day in general, or I could just think to myself "Hey, that's Satch!" and not bother him at all.
So I didn't bother him. I've long wondered if I made a good choice or not, now I think I made the right one.
My theory is, why bother people just because they're famous? Unless they're looking for it, which is why I had a nice conversation with Moon Unit Zappa on Broadway in Seattle at the 76 station, where she was camped out promoting her movie The Spirit of '76.
Except this once.
Meg Ryan was throwing a birthday party for her then-boyfriend, Dennis Quaid, and actors, musicians, and celebrities came to have their cars parked. Most of the valets were gushing and wowing over this or that celebrity or actor, but I tend not to care too much about star sightings and don't really go for celebrity worship.
A gray, older Citroen rolls up and it's my turn to park. Citroen are pretty low to the ground, only a little bit taller than Porsche roadsters, so even though I'm medium height I stood high above the car's roof with a good view into the driver's side.
The window rolled down and there he is, David Bryne, looking up at me and handing me his keys. His eyes seemed really big from that angle and I don't even remember him getting out of the car. I do remember that I had a feeling of awe and admiration (The Talking Heads had broken out on the Stop Making Sense tour and Byrne was known to be an engaged and consummate artist.)
Though our interaction was brief, Byrne's look suggested he understood I'd recognize him (I did!) and he looked at me directly and treated me as a fellow human providing him a service. No haste, no self-absorption, just a courteous exchange of pleasantries for service.
Or maybe I'm simply susceptible to being star struck by artists whose work I admire.
It's not the person in front of you who knows you, it's the corporation, and you are just speaking to an agent of a multi-embodied hydra.
Your primary goal should not be to know the agent, but to know the corporation you are dealing with, what its needs and wants are, how you personally fit into that picture, and whether the goals of the corporation and you are compatible.
However, sometimes knowing the agents of a corp well on a personal level can help in that process.
Exactly right. For example, there have been many stories here of people who are able to get a form of customer service from Google because they know someone who works there.
IIRC there was a lawsuit where some retail employees were required to wink at customers as they came into other store. Someone at corporate decided this was a good idea. Something only folks disconnected from the actual store would come up with sitting in a conference room and certain that they would never have to wink at strangers all day long... or be winked at unexpectedly.
I beg to differ with analogy (though not the rest of your post). The "uncanny valley" is a hypothetical situation where a construct is unpleasant because it seems human but not human enough [1]. The (supposed) solution to the uncanny valley effect is for a thing to seem more human.
But that's not the problem here. The problem is a corporation here really isn't your friend. The corporation aims to sell as much to you as possible at the highest mark-up possible. No amount of them improving the experience is going to change that.
The nice things about a local cafe have to incidentally nice. The cafe isn't a better designed experience some better designer has created to make more money, since then you'd be paying for every personalism of this service.
https://youtu.be/lmWFrMq3qNY?t=19m53s
Read me Doctor Memory?
https://youtu.be/lmWFrMq3qNY?t=23m09s
Hey paro, he broke the President!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Think_We%27re_All_Bozos_on_T...
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
> Hey Dan, was just tailing the access logs and happened to see you register. ;) Let me know personally if you have any questions! – Chuck, CEO
It's even sadder when the templating system is broken and you see "Hey {{firstName}}".
Please, spare us the bullshit.
Dear Madam/Sir
Congratulations for becoming record #b6aeca9c-b249-4238-87ab-54c8adbf9762 in our customer database.
Please be advised that becoming a customer does not make you profitable for us. To earn your place on our hard disk you have to spend at least £23.84 more with us this year or get at least three of your friends to sign up as well.
Do not reply to this automated message as this email address is permanently unattended. We are a strictly no-support, no-human-touch enterprise as this is the only way to make this service sustainable. You don't want to ruin it for everyone else, do you?!?
You have subscribed to our Unlimited Forever Plan. However, please be warned that we have a secret fair use policy in place to deter any free riders taking advantage of our generosity. Penalties and account closures may or may not apply according to our terms of use.
Greetings
Automated Customer Onboarding System
Link to email settings management page.
Bullet lists instead of long form content.
You probably don't have "Hello, visitor..." on your web, so you can just as well drop it from your e-mail.
> We have registered an account called "Tetha" for "tetha@coyote.acme.org" on amazingservice.acme.org.
> If this wasn't you, click <this link> to delete the account.
> If you're interested in the services you can receive on a free account, click <this link>, and for further service options click <that link>.
That's short and to the point.
Now I feel misunderstood. I thought it was a perfectly good straw man argument, not just a measly false dichotomy.
always_good's complaint was about an embarrassingly fake personal tone coming from a complete stranger representing a corporation. S/he didn't complain about a lack of brutal honesty regarding an obviously deceptive business model.
In any event, it's a joke. I agree with both of you. You don't have to be glaringly dishonest either in tone or in the way in which you structure your business model.
That comment just triggered work mode too hard, and at the moment, any point but a hard, way too specific, and nasty to refute point is void at work. It's been a rough week.
I remember getting emails like this from automated web-mailer services in the late 90s/early 00s. If in those days you would have made your server sent out personalised messages masquerading as an actual live human being, people would be quite upset and felt betrayed. That was not done. In fact, people mistook now-obviously form-generated letters for being human-written a lot more often (because the tech was new). Adding onto that confusion by being deliberately surreptitious was something done only by spammers and other vermin, maybe the occasional pranking of friends, but that was it.
In my eyes it never quite became globally acceptable, either. Some consumer cultures are more okay with it than others. I just learned what other features I need to check to suspect a computer instead of a human. If they turn out to have been trying to mislead me, I'll adjust my opinion of them accordingly.
It's perfectly possible to have an automated message not be all stiff and robotic, even putting a smile on the recipients' face, without actively trying to impersonate a human.
[0] with the assumption these notifications are sent to a tech audience that understands what a server is, adapt as needed
Occasionally you run into a genuinely nice staff member at the supermarket who immediately learns your name, asks about your kids, etc. Companies notice how everyone is pleased with that, and then get the idea that they'll somehow force the behavior onto the rest of the staff.
Everyone is forced to greet you, thank you by (poorly pronounced) name off credit card, and they send secret shoppers to penalize them if they fail to do these things. The end result of which ends up being negative, because no one particularly likes hearing friendly words that clearly aren't genuine.
If you want to know something about me, just ask. I might refuse to answer, or ask why you want to know, but at least you haven't started off by disrespecting me. I'm not sure how so many businesses have become confused about this. Maybe they've calculated that pissing off a substantial number of their customers is a worthwhile trade-off, but it seems like a bad direction to go in even if the short-term numbers look positive. </rambly paranoia>
I imagine soon many will start cataloging how many times a customer causes damage or makes a scene or is rude to staff, and if it gets logged with enough frequency, they get banned system wide. It'll be interesting to see how long "the customer is always right" stays in place once we have no choice but to deal with home Depot or Lowe's, or Walmart vs target vs Amazon, or one of the 4 or 5 airlines and hotel companies.
Lenders and landlords have been doing it since forever, no reason for the other businesses to not get on board. All the troublemakers will be sifted through and left to deal with organizations outside of the mainstream.
E.g. Oh a new crisis "just came up". I need you to complete this big menial data entry task that I forgot about for a week right now (drop whatever you were working on before). Don't you want to make it to your daughter's concert tonight? Best get it done by EOD so you can be there for her. Next day: how's progress on that thing you were working on before?
To me, for airline and other staff to address me by my first name is like being addressed as "Comrade," where only a counter-revolutionary could object to being addressed as a comrade, and would clearly require that I be marked as what I can only assume to be a problematic opportunity, and scheduled for enhanced scrutiny.
The horses of dystopia have already left the barn, it's just a matter of how you choose to live out your remainder of it.
"Ok?"
For one, searching for content on NY Times site sucks. I just want a better search engine without personalization. Just better categories, tags, search by relevance to a named entity or narrowed in a time frame, which just works. Currently it’s an awful way to look for things. Couldn’t they spend engineering budget better on just search engine problems, rather than some sexy, over-hyped customer embedding model with all kinds of gadgets to solve cold start, etc., but which doesn’t seem to actually add value?
The other thing is that you _know_ the whole purpose is to optimize some notion of engagement that is not actually a healthy measure of the user getting value out of the product.
I think there could be some minimal benefit to stylizing or customizing results based on highly aggregated characteristics, like country or a super broad age group.
But beyond ensuring the user is routed into a very high-level bucket of characteristics that can broadly determine relevance, anything more specific to individuals or anything relying on nearest neighbor or collaborative filtering based on a highly individualized representation, is just flat out unhealthy, by design.
Information retrieval without personalization is like the new version of “I just want my phone to actually function as a phone.”
Thought it was an interesting read.
The average consumer has very poor access to proper ETL.
You can have all this data on the outside, and it still speaks nothing of the person on the inside.
Companies can have every detail of your life parameterized and quantified, but people can always choose (i.e. get woke) to intentionally conform or to defy norms. Intentionally feed data that looks patterned, and then switch it up in a way that makes people scratch their heads and go 'huh'.
You can walk around with your phone in your pocket and have that awareness, e.g. "I am purposefully taking this route on my walk to work while listening to this music on repeat for 30 days" because you know people are going to draw some correlation.
You do 'know' things about those entities, namely, their brains are hooked on a drug called machine learning. That doesn't void you of your privacy.
And future algorithms will detect it. Not enough of the population will do it. At best you'll be classified as a deviant and you might have difficulty getting apartments or loans. At worst, well, maybe the first with their back against the wall when the corporate takeover comes.
Future algorithms won't detect it. The future population will do it without realizing that's what they are doing. That's what generational rebellion is all about.
P.S. I'm already a deviant, and I'm fairly well accepted in my community that values diversity over discrimination, offers me everything I need to sustain myself independently, plan for retirement, etc. I managed to get all that, while being a deviant.
It's counterproductive to worry about. I do my work, get the job done, I do a good job, end of story. Why overload the brain with fears when I have to use so much of it to reason correctly and create good code? Does that make me more predictable, more easily controllable, more financially viable, or less? Those are questions people who want to control other people can ask themselves.
What are you talking about?
This is something that is actually occurring, there really is a psychological war going between how much information black box entities have about entities they provide a 'service' for, in how it impacts the experience of living life, the fact that most people have no choice but be connected to the internet (the subject of the linked article).
It's a psychological war in that it's an inverted microcosm of the history of discrimination. Instead of just judging people based on some generalized set of superficial details like appearance or a quantitative metric of intelligence, a GPA, resume, etc - a lot of organizations are refining it down to the most seemingly insignificant and 'supposed' trivial details.
Which is missing the forest for the trees, even though it may be profitable in the short term. The US has a president that fancies himself a dictator and looks up to / highly respects people like Kim Jong-un and Uncle Xi. It's the cultural and political climate so it's clear there are real reality reasons to show cause for concern. All this stuff influences what people think is acceptable and where to draw the line. It's all background noise information that propagates into models of interpersonal boundaries - what people are willing to tolerate and what they will cry out against. Learned social behavior, etc.
It supports fear culture and that is another tool people can use to manipulate and control others. Regardless of whether it actually works, this stuff is the mentality of some people in power. So when I read comments like the parent that replied to my original comment (I'm OP), the point is - guide them out of the conspiracy but understand where it's coming from by describing why it is true while not necessarily being true.
Fear culture controls. People who want to control others for any purpose aside from improving the well-being and respecting the autonomy of others are aware of this. There are plenty of existing technologies (look back to the development of advertisements) that exist purely to manipulate emotional state in order to direct behavior, and I have no doubt there are some folks out there looking to refine it down to a precision science.
The real front lines come down to, how far will they push it before people 'snap' (and you can see that happening with the US president, because honestly, every intent a 'self' attempts to have on others comes back to affect the individual 'self'). I think that explains his ludicrous behavior in a way that has empathy, because you can tell, all that garbage he has done to others continuously affects his perception on how he sees those around him. The man can't trust anyone except for dictators lately.
I don't think there's going to be any kind of corporate takeover aside from corporate rebellion, possibly. Creating a tight association between the government, the media, and corporate interests is too last century. There are some interests that seem to be going in that direction, but it's clearly not all of them.
This is how it has been throughout history. Why do you think this is different now?
But this is precisely the most nefarious type of control. Nothing is more insidious than the conviction that you are controlling others for their own benefit.
It doesn't have to be seen as nefarious if it isn't.
You can play some little games but you won't be able to choose to not get rejected by different services based on that data. Just look at what happens to people on no-fly lists or who deal with identity theft. Easy to get onto and hard to get off. The more data these entities have and the more they can hide behind algorithms the more they can make your life miserable and you will have no idea where your problems are coming from.
I'm sure I sound overconfident but honestly, been there, done that. Having been suicidal for approximately half my life has transitioned into meaning, have no attachment to anything. Appreciate what exists while it's there, but don't be attached to it, don't depend on it for survival. Goods, services, liberties, freedom of expression, places, people.
Life has been miserable enough for me while potentially having everything I could potentially get rejected from. If someone wants to make my life miserable, I pity them.
Edit: I would not categorize identity theft under the same label as being put on a no-fly list. Identity theft can indirectly lead to being put on a no-fly list. Being put on a no-fly list should not lead to identity theft (assuming the entities that hold this information are as secure as they present themselves to be, given their stated purpose for their existence).
From a data analysis perspective, that's a correlation to construct that could actually help people deal with the issues of too much data correlation being used to form expectations of behavior (like getting on and off lists that prevent essential liberties and rights from being exercised fairly).
I think Google is already there, at least for chrome users.
>> I think a good way would be to open up all data
Psychologically, this is a bad option. People need privacy, especially interpersonal privacy, which today, is generally, somewhat preserved.
Of course, you could come with the claim that once everything is open, people will adjust, and things will be fine. But that's a huge and very risky experiment, and relatively hard to back-off from, once the data is released.
And technically/legally it is possible to create more corporate privacy on the internet. It's just that there's no real political pressure to do so.
Oh, and you can see from their web sites where you have used your Istanbul Pass in the last few months, like "bus M42 Mecidiyeköy-Bakırköy, at 12:34 Today, -1 credit".
Little things to invite positive personal interactions between strangers can be a good thing. That is, perhaps, not the intended purpose, but it at least seems like a welcome side effect.
This is precisely backwards of a free society.
The Snowden episode both comically and tragically exemplifies this: He is an outlaw for giving the citizens visibility into the government's surveillance of those citizens.
National security justifies government secrecy? I believe the opposite. Government secrecy jeopardizes the security of a free nation, turning it into an unfree one. It protects and enables corruption and hypocrisy. And it is used FAR more often in government acts the violate the principles of freedom, fairness and justice.
The government should have nearly nothing to hide if it is doing nothing wrong. Most of the justified cases are far outweighed by the dangers of the unjustified ones. It's not worth the trade. The only secrets that should be allowed are those that protect regular citizens, not the government or any of its agents.
I am used to just seeing articles like this: https://mashable.com/2014/06/05/edward-snowden-revelations/#... None of that directly reveals military logistics.
Don't fully recall consequences to the joker, but they weren't good, starting with being identified by seat number to fellow passengers.
But given the capability to know such information, you'd also know the names and email addresses of all passengers. So just send a report on the pilot to them all. From a thoroughly anonymized and proxied account. Including yourself as a recipient.
Don’t joke around about things in the airport or on an airplane. Safety and security are generally number one in the minds of the front line employees. Turns out we like going home alive too.
I wasn't being entirely careful about locking things down. And now I get some extremely specific ads, relating to a 30 day rolling window of recent purchases.
I'm trying to think of the best ways to poison and destroy this linkage, that was established some time after September. It may indeed be true that I just have to totally disconnect.
On some level, this is regrettable, only because Facebook absolutely monopolizes access to the updates some people choose to publicize for themselves, since those people know no other way to broadcast important information.
Mostly, these people are not geeks with technical fetishes. They don't have the slightest inkling about packets, ports, sockets, protocols. They don't understand that an iPhone does have a root file system. So facebook is it, and no distributed immitation cheese or diet margarine will replace their coca-cola brand social media.
What to do?
Point is, the "flight crew"s and even the "pilots" are not the corporation. The corporation may easily sacrifice their privacy if its believed to contribute the bottom line. Even the CEO might be sacrificed. The really private things about a corporation are its finances, its tradeoffs of customer benefit vs "efficiency", its market segmentation policies, etc.
Is this situation more or less dystopian?
Having your emotions manipulated such that you feel closer to your flight attendant means you may spend money on their airline like you're friends. But the truth will come out when the plane lands and you say "Hey, wanna go see a movie?" and they're horrified. The problem is that it's pretend w/ a cause. If it was just pretend and both were on board, it would be like children. If it was genuine, then all the better-- few things are better than genuine friendship.
The key is that forgiveness is primarily about (and, arguably, for the benefit of) the emotional state of the one granting the forgiveness.
It can be granted independent of any feelings of guilt (which are impossible to know for sure) on the part of the recipient.
Similarly, someone else's happiness about my birthday is irrelevant to me if I don't care about that someone, no matter how genuine that happiness is.
If you don't know me, what does it mean? Maybe I'm terminally ill and every birthday is just a reminder of time running out. Or maybe I'm terminally ill and I don't care? How could someone know this without knowing me personally.
I guess that's a german culture thing. Don't try to be a friend unless you're willing to undersetand a person and support them even through bad times.
I would much prefer working at a place where people liked me, even if they had been hired because they were more likely to like everyone. But not if they become the sin eaters of the group because they produce no useful work, or they have no autonomy in what they do to raise morale.
This is akin to amazon's main website changing "We recommend the following to you" to: "People who bought this also bought" - to induce a subtle hint of jealousy that others are getting a better deal and this is totally optional.
Any recommendation system should be a voluntary opt-in feature and should consistently do a great job at recommending.
"Total surveillance is the perfection of democracy."
> The true horror of technological omniscience is that it shall force us for once to live according to our own rules. For the first time in history we shall have to do without hypocrisy and privilege. The new equilibrium will not involve tilting at the windmills of ubiquitous sensors and processing power but rather learning what explicit rules we can actually live by, finding, in effect, the real shape of human society.
Parity of information is the difference between Star Trek and North Korea.
Sounds like North Korea to me...
Maybe you prefer "The Orville"?
Until then, it's just a harmless sham.