Comment by dlkf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dlkf | Hacker News Reader

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I never cease to be impressed by how effortlessly humanities academics are able to write hundreds of words while saying literally nothing at all. The entire essay could be replaced with "Google wants to measure things in Toronto." Would this be a bad thing? Quite possibly! But there needs to be an argument as to why, and Zuboff doesn't have one.

Broadly speaking, measuring things is good. The previous Canadian government tried to kill our long form census, and this was met with widespread public disapproval. How is the government supposed to draft evidence-based policy if they don't have any evidence? The current government brought it back, and we all spent an afternoon filling it out.

Obviously it's different when the body doing the measuring and optimizing is a private entity, and there are legitimate concerns about a misalignment of incentives. But instead of offering a single concrete example, the author leans on the tired CAPITALISM == BAD trope, content in the knowledge that there's enough unnuanced leftists out there that she can hit solid sales numbers without even trying.

I'm grateful for the article, because I was on the fence about reading her book. Toronto Life just saved me $35.

Everyone acts as if "evidence-based policy" is a good way to govern, but I actually don't think it is.

Laws should be decided based on principles, not evidence. There's a great Mitchell and Webb sketch to this effect: Kill the Poor - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owI7DOeO_yg

I mean, the evidence is meant to be used to back some principles. For example, I am proponent of evidence based policy and I am also an advocate of mental health help. There is a lot of pseudo science and easy feel good stuff but there is also a lot of really good behaviour therapy out there. One works, one is muck, and I think tax dollars should be used to fund the one that works because people deserve to not be depressed

I agree laws should be based on principles, but I do wonder where to draw the line. I've noticed that any system that is built up from axiomatic principles and reasoning usually ends up out of touch with reality as well. It's likely we need to have evidence feeding back into a principled-based system.

I think principles decide what you do about the evidence (and even what evidence needs to be collected) to accomplish your goals. The goals themselves derive from principles.

Evidence-based governance can give you gas chambers or head-start pre-K programs depending on what you're trying to accomplish.

> Laws should be decided based on principles, not evidence.

Agree 100%. It has become my recent understanding that "evidence-based policy" is a more sanitised, technocratic way of carrying out good old-fashioned eugenics policies.

The problem with principles is they don’t tell you much about consequences. We might all agree that we should help very poor people in region X, but what will actually help most? Micro loans, micro loans with coaching, unconditional lump sum cash at random, unconditional lump sum cash to targeted promising candidates, free schools, schools with small fees?

We can’t know how the different effects of these things compare from a principled argument. That’s where evidence is useful.

Broadly speaking, measuring things good, measuring people sometimes good, sometimes very bad.

There are two things I would very much like to avoid. One, weaponized behavioral models that allow bad actors to cheaply, anonymously and pervasively manipulate people, groups and societies.

Two, having my life, or my children's life, become an exhausting and soulless rat race of conformance to the behavioral models deployed by various gatekeepers in society.

seems like someone is on a booktour

What are you doing on HN don't you have a pointless feature to deliver that'll die in MR

Google are hoarding data in a way which is totally unacceptable and probably illegal, at least in Europe.

And why? In order to fool companies to buy the worst and most useless advertising format ever, the banner ad.

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