Hacker News Reader

Comment by greenavocado | Hacker News Reader

People want the cookie, but they also want to be healthy. They want to never be bored, but they also want to have developed deep focus. They want instant answers, but they also want to feel competent and capable. Tech optimizes for revealed preference in the moment. Click-through rates, engagement metrics, conversion funnels: these measure immediate choices. But they don't measure regret, or what people wish they had become, or whether they feel their life is meaningful.

Nobody woke up in 2005 thinking "I wish I could outsource my spatial navigation to a device." They just wanted to not be lost. But now a generation has grown up without developing spatial awareness.

View on HN

> Tech optimizes for revealed preference in the moment.

I appreciate the way you distinguish this from actual revealed preference, which I think is key to understanding why what tech is doing is so wrong (and, bluntly, evil) despite it being what "people want". I like the term "revealed impulse" for this distinction.

It's the difference between choosing not to buy a bag of chips at the store or a box of cookies, because you know it'll be a problem and your actual preference is not to eat those things, and having someone leave chips and cookies at your house without your asking, and giving in to the impulse to eat too many of them when you did not want them in the first place.

Example from social media: My "revealed preference" is that I sometimes look at and read comments from shit on my Instagram algo feed. My actual preference is that I have no algo feed, just posts on my "following" tab, or at least that I could default my view to that. But IG's gone out of their way (going so far as disabling deep link shortcuts to the following tab, which used to work) to make sure I don't get any version of my preference.

So I "revealed" that my preference is to look at those algo posts sometimes, but if you gave me the option to use the app to follow the few accounts I care about (local businesses, largely) but never see algo posts at all, ever, I'd hit that toggle and never turn it off. That's my actual preference, despite whatever was "revealed". That other preference isn't "revealed" because it's not even an option.

Just like the chips and cookies the costs of social meida are delayed and diffuse. Eating/scrolling feels good now. The cost (diminished attention span, shallow relationships, health problems) shows up gradually over years.

> I like the term "revealed impulse" for this distinction.

I like it too! I might re-use it.

> They want to never be bored

This is the problem. Learning to embrace boredom is best thing I have ever done.

Yes i agree with this. I think more people, than not, would benefit from actively cultivating space in their lives to be bored. Even something as basic as putting your phone in the internal zip part of your bag, so when you're standing in line at the store/post office/whatever you can't be arsed to just reach for your phone and instead be in your head or aware of your surroundings. Both can be such wonderful and interesting places but we seem to forget that now

Plants "want" nitrogen, but dump fertilizer onto soil and you get algal blooms, dead zones, plants growing leggy and weak.

A responsible farmer is a steward of the local ecology, and there's an "ecology of friction" here. The fertilizer company doesn't say "well, the plants absorbed it." But tech companies do.

There's something puritanical about pointing to "revealed preference" as absolution, I think. When clicking is consent then any downstream damage is a failure of self-control on the user's part. The ecological cost/responsibility is externalized to the organisms being disrupted.

Like Schopenhauer said: "Man kann tun, was er will, aber er kann nicht wollen, was er will." One can do what one wants, but one cannot will what one wants.

I wouldn't go as far as old Arthur, but I do think we should demand a level of "ecological stewardship". Our will is conditioned by our environment and tech companies overtly try to shape that environment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com