Show HN: Race to the Bottom
race-to-the-bottom.onrender.com
race-to-the-bottom.onrender.com
So have an alternate card titled "Promoting your country" rather than "Propaganda" or "Personal Safety" rather than "Firearms".
Some of these cards definitely present biases that could prime someone to vote a certain way such as "Exploitative Gig Economy" is clearly biased. I would strongly guess if certain cards were worded more positively, they wouldn't be ranked as poorly.
"Advertising" -> "Promoting your product"
Or some of them are so broad it's difficult to disambiguate the good from the bad like "Telemarketing", "Advertising", or "Pharmaceuticals". Some of it is awful while other parts are between great and ok.
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Another interesting dynamic I was thinking of as I was answering was the axis of "Personal Responsibility" to "Social Responsibility".
It gauges how the crowd thinks of harm. For instance, Environmental Pollution is bad because it harms everyone and no one _chooses_ to be polluted on necessarily while something like Sugary Drinks is largely a personal choice that affects no one else.
Maybe another axis of "Protection" to "Liberty" where something is a personal choice but could be seen as bad because it is addictive or otherwise tries to trap the person.
So Adult Platform would be fairly squarely in Liberty/Personal while something like Online Gambling would be Protection/Social.
I'm actually a little amazed that marketers have branded their job so poorly.
"Oh god, I hate it when I get a new browser and all the ads are terrible! So much better seeing ads for stuff I want, instead of a screenful of stuff I have no interest in!"
They do not perceive any outcomes from the profiling other than less annoying ads. It arguably justifies the truthy wording "Do you want to keep more relevant ads?" on Opt In pop-ups... as long as the sentence continued, "at the cost of anyone being able to buy a profile of all your most personal details that knows you better than your mother, enabling them to more easily manipulate you, discriminate against you, blackmail you, or defraud you?"
I think many trigger a visceral negative reaction, like animal testing, but most of these can be broken up into sub-parts that are both obviously good and obviously bad at the same time. Animal testing of cosmetics: bad, animal testing of the safety of a new drug that millions of humans will take: probably good. Chemical manufacturing that produces plastic packaging for things that could use paper packaging: not great, chemical manufacturing for chemicals used in healthcare, probably good. To be clear, these are nuanced topics and I'm not interested in debating them here, just providing illustrative examples.
I realise this isn't really the point of this experiment, but it does go to show how much the framing matters. This is part of why surveys can produce radically different results depending on how you write the questions.
Similarly, "Wind farms" (negative connotations) vs "Wind power" (positive connotations).
Another example is military and defense, or pharmaceuticals. Some rather beneficial and even necessary aspects to both, yet some disagreeable things to either as well.
I really thought the author did something here.
And don't even get me started on water pollution, the sometimes-lethal green algae, the dead bees, and agriculture workers exposed to cancer-inducing products.
For example, Cannabis is "Cannabis cultivation, dispensaries, and marijuana-related businesses", while Sugary Food & Beverage are "Products associated with obesity, diabetes, and health concerns". So if you think there is also a positive side to sugar, the context makes it clear you are voting for the negative side. But the negative sides of Cannabis are left out of the context, so you're more likely to be neutral or positive about it.
Another example is Environmental Polluters, which are "Industries with major pollution, emissions, or environmental damage". And you also have Chemical Manufacturing, which is "Industrial chemical production and hazardous material processing". But there is no such thing as a "pollution and hazards" industry. So what are we voting for as "worst" here? Nitrogen and Cement? Industry in general?
And the rankings are just an ordered list, completely opaque. With all the overlap between the options, there has to be something actually interesting to do with the data.
Perhaps adding a text input after the selection to ask a user to describe their position on the topic and having that broadly shared would help towards that goal?
The rankings page doesn't give me any sense either of how my opinion broadly tracks against the "public opinion". This would fundamentally change the flow you have going but presenting the options and then asking the user to manually tier list them would allow for that side by side comparison.
I thought the point was to show how ranking industries based on "evil vibes" is subjective.
This is so funny because simply by including an industry there is an attempt to sort it into signs of a failing of society. It's borderline performance art when you are asked to choose if "dating apps" are worse than the industry that makes bombs and chemical weapons which kill thousands of people daily
Also curious to see diff per region/state and maybe as some further vision connection of it to a specific regional stats regarding the topic.
Also, some of these things are definitely not like the others.
This also highlights a major flaw with voting and political campaigning in democracies:
Undifferentiated blanket judgements based on biased framing, polarizing society artificially into totally unnecessary camps of opposition.
Many of the options here are also confusing. "Pharmaceuticals" as one of the options among other generally-considered bad things? Pharmaceuticals have saved millions of lives. Am I supposed to assume we're talking about the opiate crisis specifically or something?
Oil & Gas are necessary for a country's survival. Good!
The Oil & Gas Industry operate political lobbying and climate change disinformation campaigns. Bad :(
So, which of the two should I consider in my rankings? Both? Neither?
You just have context-free character strings to work with here.
And then I peeked at the leader board and *really* didn't care for the things ranked best at all.
- private military 6 but defense 39;
- surveillance tech 7, data brokers 9, but facial recognition 14, social media 17, advertising 34;
- polluters 3 but coal 26, oil 30, mining 37;
- scam 5 but clickbait 15, MLMs 18;
- influencers 22 but ads 34 (influencers *are* ads);
- lobbying / disinformation are close (1,2);
- escorts, adult platforms, dating, adult content all 47-50 (nice!)- private military is different from (and not necessary for) defence. A country having an army for defence is bad but kinda necessary. A country hiring mercenaries is not necessary.
- you can have e.g. social media without surveillance tech, and the harm comes mostly from the surveillance tech. Likewise for the others. Facial recognition opens my phone, I'm fine with that. Surveillance tech is always bad.
- same for the resources industry; they could create a mine that doesn't pollute and cleans up after itself when done. Mining itself isn't necessarily harmful (and we need the resources). It's the pollution that does the harm.
- kinda same for scams - the thing we hate is the scam. The others could do this without the scam, but they choose not to which is why we hate them.
- influencers are a particularly annoying form of advertising, so I get why they're ranked differently. It would be interesting if all forms of advertising were ranked so we could really see what annoys people.
totally agree that the sex industry at the bottom is good :)
Could we save ourselves the cost of a military, and put that money to better use, without actually endangering the lives of our citizens?
I would suggest, certainly in the case of the USA, that the answer is "yes". The USA's military budget is larger than most of the rest of world's combined. Yet the USA is not in any danger of being invaded. This massive, massive, military force is entirely about projecting force elsewhere, diplomacy by other means. It's not "defence".
The USA has huge social welfare problems. Hundreds of thousands of homeless people, for example. If the USA chose to, it could redirect even a small part of the military budget to building social housing, and (imho) the world would be a better place.
So while I agree that having a military for defence (and purely for defence) is probably not a bad thing, that's not the purpose that most countries have a military for. Hegseth aside, most anglosphere countries have a Department of Defence that has never had to defend anything [0], but has been at war for most of the last 50 years. I think this is bad.
[0] Falklands war is a little bit dubious; technically a defence of a UK protectorate. But colonialism, etc.