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Comment by jimmytucson | Hacker News Reader

> 3 or 4 rounds of A/B testing and you get the most efficient (read: manipulative) method of getting users "engaged"

Now replace “engaged” with “to buy stuff” and that’s essentially online advertising. You’re being tricked by gurus of the mind to send your money to someone else. How this is legal represents a gap between traditional laws and modern times.

The sad truth for us software engineers is, a lot of the most exciting work is at least tangentially related to refining this trickery: big data, machine learning, etc. For example, implementing GDPR where I work has been a bizarre experience from a human standpoint. On the one hand, we all surely feel privately it’s a good thing for people, but we talk about it to each other as if it’s a burden and a setback for our business (which it is).

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> You’re being tricked by gurus of the mind to send your money to someone else. How this is legal represents a gap between traditional laws and modern times.

Eh, this has existed for decades at a macro level in over-the-air television and radio. 'If you're not paying for the product, you are the product' is a quote that has been floating around since at least the 1970s. Methods and techniques now have the ability to target you individually but the overall premise is nothing new.

> The sad truth for us software engineers is, a lot of the most exciting work is at least tangentially related to refining this trickery: big data, machine learning, etc.

Well, I'm in Aerospace and there are plenty of interesting problems to solve here that have nothing to do with "trickery"; it's just that 100 year old companies aren't "sexy" to young kids, often don't "move fast and break stuff" and frankly don't throw obscene amounts of money to bait them.

I'm a relatively fresh grad working in development for a university. It's slow. It's stable. It's not very sexy. I could probably double my salary elsewhere. But, my conscience is pretty clean for this very reason. I build tools to make university operations more efficient, not to squeeze every last drop of data from our users or manipulate them into buying a product.

There are definitely problems to be addressed in higher ed and how universities are run, but it's nowhere near Silicon Valley's lack of ethics.

In NZ I find universities are an awful mixture of academic uselessness, and corporate greed (their incentives are mostly according to number of students moving through, not benefit to the students or society).

I have seen they can be fun places to work though, depending on the politics of the department.

> Eh, this has existed for decades at a macro level in over-the-air television and radio.

Advertising predates the internet, of course. What does not is the ability to personalize advertising to the individual using computer intelligence trained on volumes of data about people’s lives, recorded in microscopic detail. I don’t think the level of manipulation and personalization pre-internet is comparable to what advertising firms such as Google and Facebook are capable of now.

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