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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

The solution, clearly, is a world where those who actually learned the math can use it to cheat the people who didn't.

...which is what we have today, where the most lucrative industries for people with good math skills are finance (= cheating dumb people out of their retirement), advertising (= cheating dumb people out of their consumer dollars), and data-driven propaganda (= cheating dumb people out of their votes).

/dystopia

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Math has little to nothing to do with how people are cheated in those fields.

Math lets you do it reliably at scale. The basic principles of how to cheat people have way more to do with psychology and information asymmetry than math. But math lets you process orders of magnitude more data so that you have more information and better models of peoples' psychology than they do themselves.

> advertising (= cheating dumb people out of their consumer dollars)

Advertising absolutely works on you regardless of how smart or educated you are.

How it has to work to do that can change, but the idea that advertising only impacts dumb people is pernicious as shit.

I don't disagree, but was more referring to the swindler side than the rube, and compared to a good ML model we are all dumb.

The people who actually learned the math work in STEM careers, not fancied up sales careers.

Yes and if STEM industry is Silicon Valley then that is just advertising ultimately or if not ads, something much more immoral, data collection for social control. Which is advertising's intention as well so I guess all the same work

Not really, that's computer engineering and programming to support the advertising businesses.

….and data-driven propaganda (= cheating dumb people out of their votes).

I like the phrasing you used.

sociopathy isn't intelligence. Power is what enables these abuses.

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