The worst thing I read this year, and what it taught me (2016) | Hacker News Reader

The worst thing I read this year, and what it taught me (2016)

ethanzuckerman.com

44 pointstablespoon78 comments

Honestly, as a black person I'm all too familiar with this kind of obliviousness. For me, it usually comes in the form of dumb commentary like..

"We can fix this in a way like the following; if I were a kid from the rough part of town, I would go to the library instead of joining a gang. We need to work on why this doesn't happen more."

In a way, these are even worse because they're simultaneously technically correct and royally stupid and completely unhelpful because it's very obvious the writer is absolutely ignorant and clueless about the big picture and efforts that already exist. It's like running up in a hospital and yelling at doctors to wash their hands because infections ARE STILL KILLING PEOPLE.

Archive link to the story the author is talking about

https://web.archive.org/web/20160304065420/http://maneatingr...

Thanks for the link.

After reading the article I understand the strong reaction to some of its naivete. Many elements the author recommends removing aren't replaceable with a VR system. It's a terrible article.

That said, the underlying idea of using VR/video games in prisons to supplement treatment and increase opportunity for socialization while incarcerated is valid. Plenty of ostensibly healthy, free people opt to socialize this way. I know several psychologists working on these types of systems for non-incarcerated patients (kids with autism, etc). US prisons do not rehabilitate and this might be one way to safely and cheaply provide this type of outreach.

!! A masterclass in techno-utopian quasi-messianic nonsense.

What the author of this article should realise is that Silicon Valley can go back to basics because it doesn’t matter at all when they fail.

Real life problems aren’t like that.

It's not satire? I thought the author was deliberately constructing The Matrix one element at a time.

I think the film "Cube" is superior in this context, is about exactly your point: [SPOILER ALERT]

Blind bureaucracy creating a city-cized torture device over the course of decades, everyone built a little piece of it, but no one knows what it is.

"My list of biggest fears in life goes something like this: #1: Being trapped in submarine, #2: Floating away into space, #3: Going to prison"

He then proceeds to convert #3 to #1.

I know most of you hate this word, but this is a great example of what privilege looks like: thinking you can solve a problem you have zero experience with, and not including people who do.

Another example:

I was at a hackathon and met this kid who wanted to build a wristband for domestic violence victims so they could push a button and call for help when they were being abused.

Great idea, he wants to use his tech knowledge to help abused spouses! That's fantastic! Nothing wrong with that and it should be supported. But since he has never experienced being an abuse victim, nor did he consult any, he didn't realize what a useless idea this is. (As soon as the abuser knows what the device is, you think they will allow it in the house, let alone take heavy retribution for buying it? Even if it was a subtle/hidden device, being caught with it would mean even more abuse.)

Heart is in the right place, but intellectual arrogance needs some dialing in.

I'm kind of with your point but also not. You don't have to actually be a victim of cancer or even know anyone personally who has cancer, to help cure it. To say "it's privilege" is a weird way of phrasing it. It's just a person who needs to do better user research before building a product.

We're not talking about cancer. We're talking about things that involve human psychology and behavior.

Privilege is why they didn't do "better user research": the person making the proposal doesn't even consider those they would impact.

> We're not talking about cancer. We're talking about things that involve human psychology and behavior.

Yes, it's a slightly different field. I don't see how that changes the point. The point is that plenty of people who aren't first hand victims of something still come up with solutions for it. This is just an example of someone who didn't. I don't really see how framing it about privileged vs not privileged inventors is helpful. All that matters is the technology ideas and how best to come up with them. And we all agree user research is good.

Bringing up privilege is important because someone who is aware of it can cut off this sort of mistake before they make them. We indeed agree that user research is good. So I'd imagine we agree that it's good to think "I should put the perspective and experiences of my users front and center." And that's exactly what it takes to not be privileged.

I see what you're saying, but let me try to explain what I see as the difference between the two situations.

Curing cancer is about biology, chemistry, etc. It literally does not require any experience having cancer as you stated. Just lots of research and college education.

However, if you said you were going to write an app to cure "the mental anxiety associated with having cancer," and you've never had cancer, but in your mind the cure is to strap on VR goggles, isolate yourself and play minecraft, then yes, that would be "privilege".

You're assuming you have the solution but you have zero lived experience. That's the difference as I see it.

(Obviously I don't mean "you" as in you personally.)

Psychologists help cure anxiety, depression, addiction, etc. all the time without actually suffering from it themselves. They're "privileged" not to suffer from it themselves or even necessarily have any friends or family who suffer from it. They just do good user research before creating a solution presumably. Also, conversely, plenty of people who have "lived experience" of how they cured their anxiety with a cult religion or some placebo diet or something aren't necessarily very helpful experts for other people either. So I just don't see how framing the conversation about who is or isn't privileged is really helpful?

"They just do good user research before creating a solution presumably."

That would kind of be the point, right? Rather than saying, "Just do X", they try to understand the problem first and don't just throw out ideas that solve what they a-priori think the problem is while also being what they think of as easy to implement.

Yup.

Just curious if you know any psychologists that fit into this category? I know a handful pretty well and all specialize in areas they have direct experience with. They also 'experience' their clients pain, similar to a masseuse. Perhaps it's like being a developer without hands on experience with css, networking, or virtualization etc... You can still be a really good developer, but you probably can't say you're great at it or be a worthwhile resource for teaching others.

Not personally, but I'm sure there's a mix of both types.

You are ignoring what I wrote. Please re-read my comments because I already explicitly addressed this both times: it is not "privilege" when the psychologists literally consult their patients and work together on a solution.

It is helpful to frame it this way because someone who has no first hand experience, nor have they consulted with those who have, are claiming a solution. Think of privilege as a class of arrogance that comes from ignorance.

I read what you wrote which is why I replied saying calling it “privilege” is a weird way of phrasing what is essentially “user research” or “due diligence”. How is the “privilege” and “lived experience” framing helpful? Nobody would care if the solution was good. All that matters is the solution itself, not who came up with it. But of course, one is more likely to come up with a good solution if they do good user research first. I think “laziness” is a better descriptor.

By the way, I mentioned psychologists the second time not as a repeat example to curing cancer, but as an example of something which is more about “lived experience” of people, yet is still cured by people without the “lived experience”. You literally mentioned anxiety in your example, so I brought it up that people cure it all the time without suffering from it themselves.

Psychologists attend years of school and training for the express purpose of understanding their clients' experiences.

There are multiple ways out of privileged obliviousness. One is lived experience. Another is taking the time to develop a structured and empathetic understanding.

Harsh words. If they can persuade even a single person to gather enough domain knowledge to validate their efforts, I suppose they could do some good.

That said, whenever I see someone doing the Dunning Kruger Maneuver, I try to approach with compassion and communicate the constraints they are missing without mocking them, humiliating them, and forcing them into a corner where they publicly lose face. Misplaced confidence is a universal and human problem, not limited to technologists, and it's an excellent place to apply the golden rule. Caveman Science Fiction illustrates it happening in reverse:

https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/bw3le/caveman_science...

For a real world reverse example, consider Jurassic Park. It convinced a generation of casual moviegoers that they understood the risks of genetic engineering to be severe and untamable, even though the movie was the furthest thing from a risk analysis: the dinosaurs were guaranteed to get out, otherwise nobody would pay to see the movie, including myself.

In any case, the moment anyone brings out accusations of arrogance, privilege, naiveté, etc is the moment that battle lines are drawn and all hope of civil discourse goes out the window. That's often a waste, because most of these situations can be course-corrected without verbal bloodshed.

"[Jurassic Park] convinced a generation of casual moviegoers that they understood the risks of genetic engineering to be severe and untamable...."

Well, from what I remember, it taught a generation that "those people are stupid and if they'd just done X, everything would have worked out unicorns and rainbows."

> communicate the constraints they are missing without mocking them, humiliating them, and forcing them into a corner

This. We need debate that's not about "dunking".

I mean, I'm with Snow here. I think the response is a bit poor in that "well, we don't know that this is safe, so this proposal is obviously crazy and does no one any good." Maybe we could find out if it's safe? It doesn't seem obvious to me that it's a bad idea.

What happens when a rowdy prisoner breaks the VR headset and is suddenly trapped alone in a box for 10 years.

What state do you think he’ll be in when he’s let out?

Ridiculous idea

Maybe you could give them a replacement

edit: and I mean, they could still use voicechat in the meanwhile, you can build that in the wall so it's pretty hard to break

And when they break the replacement? Or they piss off the guards so the replacement somehow takes months to get to them?

It’s cruel.

>Maybe you could give them a replacement

but isn't this supposed to be happening in America?

What happens if VR goggles turn out not to be the most wonderful thing ever?

Well, it's still cheaper and I'm sure eventually VR technology will get better...

Lobotomy was used for this purpose for many years to make unruly prisoners docile. The practice is still legal (and doesn't use an ice pick any longer), however it is rarely used today.

There are however an array of medications that could be administrated to force compliance and do not cause a permanent state like a lobotomy would.

But yes, the entire idea is dehumanizing in my opinion.

Dehumanising is the Silicon Valley status quo.

And it's spreading!

Prison is dehumanizing. Any gain in dehumanization may well be made up for by the incredibly reduction in rape.

The idea is obviously bad because it’s ostensibly designed to protect prisoners by reducing the opportunity for prisoner-on-prisoner violence. A noble goal, but what this fails to recognize is a good chunk of prison violence originates from guards, including sexual assault. I fear giving guards free reign to isolated prisoners would have the exact opposite effect of reducing violence in prison.

That sounds like a pretty easy problem to solve with auditable surveillance that is redundantly deployed and has realtime ML algorithms that "watch" it.

And this surveillance system would be controlled by…

Multiple independent auditors?

That could work but at the end of the day it’s the guards who have physical control of the surveillance system. We would have to rely on this other system (powered by ML — who designed this system? - and independent auditors) working for prisoners instead of for the guards when anything goes wrong (sorry the recording malfunctioned during the exact period you claim you were assaulted).

Unfortunately prisoners are usually on the losing end of systems designed by their jailers, as they lack strong advocacy and a role in designing the system itself.

I thought this was supposed to be cheaper?

"Here's a historically hard problem that we've had and experienced for decades if not centuries with multifaceted origins and no clear answer"

HN: "Just use ML, seems pretty easy to me".

I don't meant to disparage you, but that is how your comment came across to me.

We do it already. Within the context of this prison system (independent cubicles) I don’t think it’s very difficult.

Technically, the response is more like

"Well, we have reasons to believe that this idea is dangerous and it doesn't actually solve any problems. In fact, the only advantage it does have is to give some pseudo-intellectual who doesn't understand any of the issues the warm, fuzzy feeling that he's smarter than everyone else."

I mean really, he calculated the price of the prisoner's toilet?

Leaving aside the technical issues of "what happens when a mentally-ill prisoner breaks every new headset after 5 minutes" aside for a moment.

The pandemic has provided us with a lite version of what Snow proposed. And despite having better conditions (bigger and comfier apartments, no need to live alone, allowed to leave the place once in a while) this was enough for plenty of people to have nervous breakdowns.

I don't doubt that I would do fine in such a prison, but I also don't doubt that most people would come out completely broken. To quote the modern poet Randall Munroe [1], "I've never been that big of a hug person, but it turns out I'm not quite this small of a hug person either".

[1] https://xkcd.com/2419/

I keep thinking about Dostoevsky's account of late 19th century Russian prison in "The House of the Dead". It's in a remote town, but it's pretty open, civilians walk in and out and do business with inmates. Why are modern prisons so cut off from society in comparison?

The modern prison is not modeled after a town, school, or hospital as a place of community, growth, and rehabilitation. The modern prison is modeled after a dairy farm, where prisoners are livestock to be housed and milked for profit. I’m a big believer in the idea that economic incentives determine behavior, so until we take the profit motive out of the prison system, I believe it will continue to be a place of exploitation. I shudder to think of how much worse it could get with Facebook involved.

That can't be the answer to my question, as prisons have become more isolated also in countries where they aren't privatized.

A prison doesn't have to be private to have a profit motive. Many prisons are built to provide jobs (corrections officers, admin, services) in their localities. Many prisoners are housed far from their homes. It can't be beyond notice to elected representatives that closing the prisons would affect their constituents.

The original blog post is pretty silly for a number of reasons, but I think this reply post is also pretty bad. For instance, the author makes it sounds like cheaper and better prisons would be a bad thing:

> In other words, when Snow focuses on making prison safer and cheaper, he’s working on the wrong problem...If your solution only mitigates the symptoms of a deeper problem, you may be calcifying that problem and making it harder to change. Cheaper, safer prisons make it easier to incarcerate more Americans and avoid addressing fundamental problems of addiction, joblessness, mental illness and structural racism.

He later goes on to dismiss worries about violence in prison, and chalks up the fear to people like Shane imagining the people in prison as being "so other." Prison violence is a very real problem, and it's hard to feel like someone actually cares about the prisoners when they're casually dismissing it like this and acting as if it's misguided to try to make prisons safer. The other issues he talks about are important, but they don't negate the importance of improving prisons. It's like arguing that the worries about the Boeing 737 Max are unimportant because we should be riding high speed trains instead of flying.

Furthermore, there seems to be a severe lack of imagination. For instance, he writes:

> Furthermore, will contact with humans through virtual worlds mitigate the mental problems prisoners face in isolation or exacerbate them? How do we answer any of these questions ethically, given the restrictions we’ve put on experimenting on prisoners in the wake of Nazi abuse of concentration camp prisoners.

He's not wrong that switching prisoners who are used to human interaction into isolation with VR seems like it would end up badly. But a mere two paragraphs before this, he writes about how there are already supermax prisons (among others) where the prisoners are isolated. We wouldn't need to do Nazi-esque experiments to see if VR has potential, we could offer it to prisoners who are already isolated. I can't see how it wouldn't be an improvement for most of those who are already isolated.

Again, I don't disagree that the original article was extremely goofy. But this response doesn't seem to be much better, especially for someone who teaches courses on social change.

Once upon a time, Greg Bear wrote a novel called Strength of Stones, where the inhabitants of a planet built artificially intelligent, self-maintaining cities with the ability to exile criminals to protect the rest of the inhabitants. Then, potential criminals. Eventually everyone. I don't remember the rest of the book; it wasn't very good.)

Anyway, have you realized that cheaper prisons are a bad thing? (No one really cares about the safety of prisoners. Honestly, do you?) Cost is the primary limit on incarceration in the US; making incarceration cheaper simply means more people are kept in prisons. The US imprisons about 1% of the population (2020: 2,120,000 prisoners, 330,000,000 population); what proportion is about right, do you think? More or less?

A comment:

"Ethan, I’m glad you’ve mentioned Morozov’s writing in this post. His essay on “The Taming of Tech Criticism” http://thebaffler.com/salvos/taming-tech-criticism strikes me as examining the key issues here, particularly his line: “Disconnected from actual political struggles and social criticism, technology criticism is just an elaborate but affirmative footnote to the status quo.”"

If the linked excerpt is supposed to be the epitome of outrage, I don’t get it. The idea is a bit odd but seems worth exploring and is better than the current alternatives.

What are the current alternatives? That’s what is so irksome about this post to people in this field. It’s coming from the right place, but instead of even acknowledging the alternative solutions out there, it brushes them aside and jumps right to the most technical one imaginable - basically hook prisoners up to the Matrix. A thoughtful proposal would hold this idea up against other proposed solutions and weigh the pros and cons of each. I think even the most cursory analysis would have made the original piece much better.

So what to you would be the epitome of outrage, if solitary confinement, hypothetical technology, and optimizing for the cheapest manner of keeping a human alive is not it?

> If the linked excerpt is supposed to be the epitome of outrage, I don’t get it. The idea is a bit odd but seems worth exploring and is better than the current alternatives.

The original blog post was an unholy combination of profound ignorance, arrogance, and the belief that problems can be solved exclusively through an almost mindless application of tech fads and buzzwords.

A lot of tech people display that same unholy combination, and the Ethan Zuckerman article has a lot of good advice for overcoming it.

it would be a large improvement over what you're doing to people now

An initial thought:

Is Soylent still a thing?

It is! Wow.

Anybody here still living on it?

Speaking as an American who emigrated to a Nordic country, when I go back to visit I feel like I'm leaving a more civilized land for a less civilized land. The feeling largely comes from how harshly the US government treats its citizens, and how that harshness is an expression of public will. As but one example, in any forum discussing any infamous man on trial, and there is inevitably a significant number of people talking about how excited they are for him to be anally raped. Prison as a concept is an opportunity for average American to indulge their inner sadist.

Related, no matter how well a company is paid to deliver services to the public, those services are inevitably sub-par, and expected to be so. Whether prisons, schools, public utilities, welfare, public transportation, medical care: if it's paid for by taxes, it's gotta be shitty.

I don't like the response article, either. It's written in that grating, self-righteous tone of the smug moral scold. This is a person who is not actually helping, but helping himself build a reputation for helping, by moral screeching and bullying.

At least the original essay was honest.

I was just having a conversation elsewhere, and I complained that technocrats want to put everyone in identical boxes and mediate their entire experience of the outside world. I had no idea my figurative expression had ever been proposed seriously.

If people were actually worried about inmate mental health we would do away with incarceration. Being held against your will doesn’t exactly do wonders for you - and the consequences don’t end when you’re released.

Sure, we have to “draw the line”, but isn’t that arbitrary?

> Sure, we have to “draw the line”, but isn’t that arbitrary?

Perhaps, insofar as it's arbitrary to be more concerned about the well-being of victims than perpetrators. Personally, I have arbitrarily decided to care more about potential murder victims than convicted murderers, potential rape victims than convicted rapists, property owners than convicted thieves, and so on.

Makes sense - I’m well aware no one here cares about anyone else’s wellbeing (but some claims to the contrary sure are good for your image), and you can freely move that line around whenever you want to dunk on someone on Twitter or HN. That’s what life’s about.

Or maybe that’s just Twitter, on HN it’s about saying things everyone agrees with and never bringing up something difficult to respond to, so you won’t get downvoted.

Which of these points leads you to declare that the parent doesn't "care about anyone else's well-being?" Genuinely interested.

> Perhaps, insofar as it's arbitrary to be more concerned about the well-being of victims than perpetrators.

[1] Personally, I have arbitrarily decided to care more about potential murder victims than convicted murderers;

[2] potential rape victims than convicted rapists;

[3] property owners than convicted thieves;

[4] and so on.

> Perhaps, insofar as it's arbitrary to be more concerned about the well-being of victims than perpetrators.

I’d argue that our current system isn’t really interested in the well being of victims either. Or rather, it’s only interested with the victims when the victims express specific opinions. The actual relationship between crime, survivors, retribution, and forgiveness is an extremely complex matter.

Consider the case of Sirhan Sirhan, and how public figures treated Kennedy family members who were pro-parole vs. anti-parole. Sometimes the same people who were saying “you must listen to the family” were openly attacking other family members for wanting parole!

> Personally, I have arbitrarily decided to care more about potential murder victims than convicted murderers, potential rape victims than convicted rapists, property owners than convicted thieves, and so on.

If that’s what motivates you, you should actively hope for a more merciful and restorative criminal justice system. Our current system has very high recidivism rates, which is very bad for those potential future victims.

When you say “our current system”, which country are you referring to?

Contextually, I'm assuming the US, because they specifically mention Sirhan Sirhan, the Kennedy family, and high recidivism rates, all things applicable to the US justice system.

You are correct.

That is of course exactly as I suspected since an Americentric view of the world is depressingly common.

I think it’s not useful to form universal views of the world based on the status quo in the USA. The prison system is harsh in the USA, and recidivism is high. In some other countries however, the prisons are significantly more brutal, and yet recidivism is low. So it isn’t quite as simple as the the commenter was implying.

It's strange to put "property owners" in the same list of victims as murder victims and rape victims.

This may be one of my spicier opinions but I think we should have caning for some crimes. Fines and incarceration both have collateral damage, if the person punished is responsible for anyone. Fines are regressive. Incarceration has a host of well known problems.

But, unfortunately, a sufficiently dangerous person does need to be physically put away. Being held against your will may well do wonders for people you threaten.

Isn't the problem that carrot only works if it is bigger than their criminal carrot and the stick only works if it is bigger than their own sticks?

If you cane someone who was brought up with violence, it can reinforce the idea that only the strongest wins. On the other hand, trying to be nice to them won't work if they want the $100K they make from drug dealing.

The sad fact is that nothing works perfectly, but at least we can strive to make it consistent, which is probably the biggest problem in most penal systems.

It's not particularly spicy, but it has absolutely no evidence to support its effectiveness, either as a deterrent or as rehabiliitation.

In fact plenty of historical evidence suggests it not only doesn't work, it makes reoffending more likely.

There's no space for "Well, obviously..." in prison management. Effects are often not obvious at all.

This is fine if you really want revenge porn, but not so much if you want a saner and less criminal culture.

>It's not particularly spicy, but it has absolutely no evidence to support its effectiveness, either as a deterrent or as rehabiliitation.

A strong claim. A few minutes of searching found no strong evidence for or against its effectiveness, or that is superior or inferior to incarceration. Much more seems to have been written about the morality and public opinion of the practice (e.g. [1, 2]). It is known that corporal punishment of children causes developmental harms, but this does not extend naturally to adults.

1: https://journals.co.za/doi/abs/10.10520/EJC85246

2: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2722140

> but I think we should have caning for some crimes.

Do you think your countrymen are prepared to cane women then?

If not, you'll know why this isn't a good idea.

No, it’s not arbitrary. It’s dialectical. “The line” is drawn by laws passed by well-constituted popular government and based on long-standing precedent.

Like the laws that result in extreme racial bias in sentencing, or an outsize proportion of inmates locked away due to mandatory minimums for nonviolent drug crimes? The laws that don't take into account abuse by prison staff or other inmates, secondary effects on inmates like PTSD, or tertiary effects on society from things like grooming? The "long standing precedent" of drug criminalization that was willed into existence by public hysteria campaigns spearheaded by a highly agendaed political elite in a short span of time in the 1980s and 90s? The "well constituted popular government" whose judges and sentencing behavior vary so much between states that which side of a street you live/get arrested on can be the difference between months and life in prison? The government that turns a blind eye to prisons whose conditions are condemned by other governments (the UN) as torture?

Once you depart from the minority of incarcerations that are reasonably unquestionable (e.g. demonstrably uncorrectable violent sociopaths), you will find abundant arbitrariness at every level: in the formulation of laws, their application by courts, their enforcement by police, and the conditions of their punishments.

"Arbitrary" is the rule. "Dialectical" (which I interpret as "civically intended, publicly acknowledged proportional consequences") is the exception.

>>If people were actually worried about inmate mental health we would do away with incarceration.

No, it is simple prioritization — that sort of absolutism is a fallacy. We are worried about 'inmate mental health' AFTER we are worried about preventing said inmate from further damaging the health, wealth, or life of others. If someone is a threat to anyone in my family, friends, society, IDGAF about their mental health until that threat is neutralized.

If you have a better way to neutralize the threat from people who decide it is ok to damage, steal, harm, rape, kill, or otherwise violate other people, let us know. Otherwise, cut the fallacies.

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