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Comment by ashton314 | Hacker News Reader

The tone is perhaps a tad melodramatic, but that keeps it fun to read!

I think there’s a question worth asking here that I don’t thing gets asked enough: what are the decisions we want to leave to humans? What decisions do we want to leave to individual humans?

This article reminded me of Neil Postman’s Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. I’ve written my thoughts on it here.[^1] His primary thesis is that all technology has a trade-off and an agenda of how it wants to be used, and more importantly, we are often blind to that trade-off and agenda.

For simple technologies, like hammers and spoons, the danger is negligible. For more powerful technologies like writing, telegraphy, and statistics, the dangers are much harder to see.

I highly recommend Technopoly if this article struck a cord with you.

[^1]: https://lambdaland.org/posts/2020-08-16-book-review-technopo...

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For me it comes across as typically nihlistic, which is all too common these days, where by it's making statements that we're nothing more than survival of the fitest.

For me this is just patently false, humanity has tackled with existentialism, art, science and much more. Many of which is to better understand our position in the universe and not just to survive.

But there is a crux to it; not everyone cares. Which again can also be seen through the generations many people are just interested in surviving and have no more desire than to get to the nearest McDonalds or Starbucks, and that's fine.

I feel this is the majority of people and it's only a few exceptional individuals that have the drive and ability to push beyond; some of them are actually often quite troubled and maybe it's their very lack of contentment and happiness that drives them on.

I feel the nihlistic point of view has the greatest of troubles with this state of affairs because if the vast majority are just content to sit back and go to the nearest Yelp recommendation, and there's no real higher purpose, then it's all just rather depressing.

"... if the vast majority are just content to sit back and go to the nearest Yelp recommendation, and there's no real higher purpose, then it's all just rather depressing."

I think we're there. Many I people I know, or know of, don't care about higher purpose and don't care to understand the concepts or mechanisms underlying the technology that does stuff for them. They just want life to be easy and fun (as we all do), but they don't care about exploring meaning in life or even going in-depth into their own beliefs

Technopoly was floating around my fraternity's library. I picked it up randomly, and loved it. Postman didn't write the ancient Egyptian myth told in the beginning of the book, but Pharaoh being cognizant of the downside to Thoth's gift of writing to mankind was eye-opening. The rest of the book was also good. It really changed my prospective on technology, to always be on a lookout for hidden downsides to seemingly universally beneficial technologies like writing.

(MIT fraternities may be a bit different from what you'd expect. About half of MIT undergraduate men are members of fraternities.)

Does it mention the rise of Protestantism and the 100 years war as a consequence of the printing press ?

> what are the decisions we want to leave to humans? What decisions do we want to leave to individual humans?

The problem is that to even ask these questions, you must already have an answer to them: you have to know who "we" is.

Well maybe not an answer, but there is definitely the assumption of consensus around who "we" is.

Everything is relative. A couple of millenia ago, powerful technologies meant plumbing, sewage, currency, postal mail. Do you want to think about any of these things? No, you just assume they work so you can move your thinking up the stack. But you absolutely want them regulated and managed by a democratic authority too... Why is Twitter different?

> you absolutely want them regulated and managed by a democratic authority too... Why is Twitter different?

If my sewage or plumbing stop working, I get sick and die. If my Twitter stops working, nothing...I am not on Twitter. Lots of countries (e.g. Japan) do fine with a private postal service. And plenty (e.g. Panama or America in the era of free banking) do fine outsourcing their currency.

I am not saying Twitter shouldn’t be regulated. Just that this isn’t the argument for it.

It depends on what you mean by “stops working”.

When social media becomes the primary driver of misinformation and anti-democratic sentiment, then it has arguably “stopped working”. While users might not be sick in the flesh, their minds will surely start to rot.

And solving it by blocking Twitter is just so... human.

The platforms aren't the problem, people are the problem. Education is piss poor, if that's not fixed/improved, we can go back to pre-industrial times and people would still vote for a moron who promises big things, never delivers and just grabs power for themselves.

Financial/civic/political education in schools? Public-sponsored articles and videos debunking conspiracies? Nah, just ban Twitter, that'll solve it.

People on either side of the fence believe they're right. Keep ignoring and belittling each other and it will lead to an even worse situation down the road.

In the end, unless we are talking about natural calamities, everything is a people problem.

Are blocked sewer is a people problem; it’s either poorly designed, poorly constructed, poorly maintained or a combination of causes. But in the end, the problem is caused by people.

Put more succinctly then: when a platform/technology becomes so successful that's used by a lot of people and/or other businesses built and depend on it, it (eventually) has to be regulated. If the prize of success is monopoly (as per Thiel), the price of success must be regulation.

Indeed. But with platforms being privately owned and centralized, the scale at which they start being problematic is fairly small.

The likes of Facebook/Twitter/YouTube have blown past this limit a long time ago.

At this point it's too late for regulation. You can't effectively break them down. Nationalizing them is pretty much unfeasible since they have so many international users. So the only solution left seems to be to shut them down completely, and let the competition do their job (it won't take long, considering Internet timescales). But maybe before consider what kind of regulations these competitors will have to live under. (Maybe a built-in time limit before they are shut down in turn, and the cycle starts all over again ?)

If it's a monopoly, it should be broken apart. This could reduce or remove the need for regulation. Although maybe not in cases like this - protecting ignorant people from themselves because they can't think for themselves or fact check social media information. I'm not sure these problems can be regulated away either.

Social media has fueled quite a few murders. If social media is not working right, YOU might not die. Someone else might, though.

I do think about plumbing, sewer, ect. It's good to know how it works so that you can fix it.

While moving thinking up the stack may be an option, I don't think that's really what's happening. People would rather use that time for leisure (look at digital consumption). Not to mention, knowing the basics of these services is very elementary. The people capable of thinking further up the stack would not be significantly impacted by possessing a basic understanding of simple services.

Well as I home owner I absolutely think about most of those things, and I want to understand how they work if for no other reason so I am not ripped off by a contractor should I need these systems repaired.

On a macro scale I also want to understand them so I know how badly my utility is screwing me when they propose rate hikes and other things to justify their poor management covering that poor stewardship with need for "improvements" or other explinations that will be ignorated by the masses of people that "do not want to think about any of this things"

This is known as Outsourcing your thinking, one should never do that

I also do not at all want them "regulated and managed by a democratic authority". I neither want centrally planned systems nor do I want them to be managed "democratically" which is at the end of the say 2 wolves and lamb voting on what is for dinner.

Twitter is different than plumbing, sewage, currency, etc. because it was not created in response to an urgent need of sustaining life. While it might not have been clear at its inception, Twitter has changed how we thing about public discourse and politics. In the case of simple technologies, the needs of society drove the creation, implementation, and use of such things. Now, we have Twitter, the existence of which has changed our society in ways that Jack Dorsey & al. probably didn't intend.

The big idea from Postman on this is that with simple technologies, the culture and the society drive their development and use. Whereas with bigger technologies (Internet, statistics, Twitter, etc.) start to shape society around them.

I'm doing a poor job of explaining myself; Postman has more to say on page 23 onward of Technopoly if you're curious for a better explaination.

People also need to think for themselves and take responsibility for their actions. Remember the case where someone got millions for spilling hot coffee on himself? Hot coffee is hot and it's the drinkers responsibility to not spill it. We can't blindly follow what we read or see. If we do that, there won't be any issue.

The other problem is that platforms try to be the arbiters of truth. That can't work because most things are in shades of gray. When platforms take sides, the other side feels slighted.

> "Remember the case where someone got millions for spilling hot coffee on himself?"

Often trotted out as an example of frivolous litigation, you're likely referring to

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...

> "Stella Liebeck, a 79-year-old woman who suffered third-degree burns in her pelvic region"

> "Liebeck sought to settle with McDonald's for $20,000 to cover her actual and anticipated expenses. Her past medical expenses were $10,500; her anticipated future medical expenses were approximately $2,500; and her daughter's loss of income was approximately $5,000 for a total of approximately $18,000"

McDonald's offered $800. Liebeck retained an attorney. After continuing to refuse to settle, the jury ultimately awarded $160,000 to cover expenses, and $2.7M in punitive damages.

If you want to argue the personal responsibility angle for the $20,000, you're entitled to your opinion. The millions were not what she personally was asking for.

Yes, the common perception of this lawsuit is a prime example of an excellent PR spin. Almost everyone seems to know of this lawsuit, but almost all of them seem to have very important details wrong. There are good reasons McDonald's lost this lawsuit.

Skin grafts on your genitals are not just hot coffee. They were serving coffee 40 deg F (22 deg C) hotter than the temperature needed to fry an egg, and at least 20 deg F (11 deg C) hotter than any other tested vendor. Also, at the time, McDonald's had reports of over 700 people who had been injured to various degrees by their coffee.

thanks for posting this. this story keeps popping up, always with this kind of details either omitted or completely wrong.

it's important to keep reminding people of those important details.

thank you!

>>They were serving coffee 40 deg F (22 deg C) hotter than the temperature needed to fry an egg

That right there is also PR spin, because it does not actually take that high of heat to "fry an egg", infact to cook eggs properly you often want lower heat or they become rubbery... Thus it is PR spin to phrase it in that manner because people associate "frying" with extreme high temps well over boiling point (212 degrees F / 100 deg C)

The coffee at McD's at the time was around 180 degrees F (82 deg C), their justification for that (right or wrong) was customers wanted to hotter coffee so it would still be hot when they arrived at the homes or offices after visiting the drive through.

Anecdotally, I know many people today that complaining about drinks from Drive through not being HOT enough, or cooling down too quickly

>>Also, at the time, McDonald's had reports of over 700 people who had been injured to various degrees by their coffee.

Over a 10 year span, over thousands of locations, and probably millions of cups of coffee sold, from a statistical standpoint that is very small rate

And the punitive damages were awarded because there were documents that McDonalds was aware of the danger (there were other similar cases), but did nothing.

I've also heard they deliberately kept the coffee very hot because they were promoting free refills, but wanted to discourage them to actually happen, but I don't know if it's true.

It is,

I thought that the line of thinking was that it was that hot because they didn't expect people to drink it immediately. No one is getting free refills from a drive through.

"Remember the case where someone got millions for spilling hot coffee on himself? Hot coffee is hot and it's the drinkers responsibility to not spill it. We can't blindly follow what we read or see. If we do that, there won't be any issue."

I think you pwned yourself here, repeating blindly a very distorted presentation of the actual incident. Go read up more on it, you might change your mind. There is a good reason why McD lost the case despite lawyering up.

Oh, you used the R word. That's a big no no. Nobody likes Responsibility, and you're to blame heh.

I don't mind taking personal responsibility and (anyone) getting handouts, things are a bit incorrectly tuned as far as laws go though.

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