>[irreparably damaging] children's minds
I’d love for someone to get me into Mark Zuckerberg’s head on why he should keep doing what he’s doing.
I’d love for someone to get me into Mark Zuckerberg’s head on why he should keep doing what he’s doing.
Decent portion of juries.
Just a case of Affluenza, right?!
If I were to guess, he's thinking he can get the good (if there is any good to be found) without the bad still using more controls/technology.
The Insta Ads: Teens can set daily watch time limits.
The reality: When the teen exceeds their set daily watch time limit, the notification includes option to skip and continue watching !!!
Even without the government telling them, they shouldn't be damaging children.
Once all the growth and new ideas were consumed, the only ways to make number go up, is to extract more profits.
This means doing everything within the law, and as safely as they can within the grey area, to ensure they hit those numbers.
They had an existential risk when TikTok showed up, and the design idea behind TikTok was even more addictive and less community oriented than Meta.
Do note: I am not giving Meta a pass. Just ensuring the system of incentives that got us here is interrogated and a better way forward is thought of.
That being said, the timescale of change in that proposed mechanism seems too slow to me given the extreme urgency I see in the climate crisis. Do you see a way out of it without systemic change? Do you not share the same assessment of urgency?
The zeroth law of economics is that wants are infinite and resources limited. Economics is the study of how subjective wants can be best fulfilled given the constraints of reality.
Meaning that markets are always designed to achieve certain outcomes, and the idea of unregulated markets that work magically is fiction.
This is why you have (had) people like Lina Khan who identified how Amazon could be anticompetitive, even if kept prices low for customers. All markets have to be tuned, policed, kept clean and rules refreshed to achieve the outcomes we want as a society.
We design markets, and have the knowledge to do it well.
* The whole Atlas Shrugged self-deification bit
* Relatedly, the "Effective" "Altruism" bit, where you first have to gain power at all costs to then properly wield it for good. But even by that standard, you'd think he'd have enough power by now.
Lastly, not really his own mental steelman, but more of an external diagnosis:
* Increased wealth has been shown repeatedly [0] to be correlated with narcissistic symptoms. Maybe it's simply pathology.
For most of these ultrawealthy execs, I don't think it's even that moderately complex, and I don't think they really try to rationalize it to themselves. All they know in life is "number must go up" so that's all they really care about. In their positions, they don't have to listen to anyone but shareholders, and all shareholders care about is "number must go up." Some of them have PR people who sit there writing speeches that rationalize what they do in terms of some kind of nebulous good, but when they're done mouthing the words, they go back to their dashboards and all they are really working on is the numbers and making them go up.
The impression I came away with is that their rationalizations for continuing to accumulate/keep wealth were created perfunctorily, downstream of being wealthy. Some of their rationalizations were defensible ("I'll start a charitable foundation" or "I'm economically transforming the communities where my businesses operate"), some not. But I got the strong feeling that the rationalizations (even the ones that these people used on themselves, not for others) were developed in response to the baseline prior that they needed to keep/increase their wealth. The rationalizations weren't reflective of values that were present before the wealth, they were just a necessary buffer against cognitive dissonance given that the real core value in play was that they needed to keep their wealth. If they hadn't rationalized it with "I'm a job creator", it would have been something else, and it wouldn't have mattered. The narrative wasn't the point, they just needed something serving that purpose.
I was also surprised at how little deservedness came up. Very few of their rationalizations had to do with pride/entitlement a la "I am smarter/better than others therefore this wealth should go to me". They were more ... utilitarian reasons that they shouldn't stop accumulating money.
Overall, I didn't find either of these people unusually good or bad--they were ordinary for white-collar educated knowledge workers, with ordinary amounts of grit, greed, values, hypocrisy, and adaptive/maladaptive behaviors, to my eyes. They rationalized their having wealth with the same combination of true/false/self-serving/values-based logic that other people use to rationalize ... I dunno, not voting, or not giving money to beggars: the reasons presented are usually foils for the underlying reasons, you know?
They had to make positive results.
They had to bow down to the culture wars and the people in government.
They had to X, or the concequences to them would be bad.
I know that many people in trust and safety, civil society, etc. cut their teeth doing safety at Meta. They had many genuinely upstanding people who tried to do the right things for their users. People who pushed the issues to their leadership.
However, you do not get paid by reducing time on site. You are not valuable, when you are from a cost center that is reducing revenue.
I know that T&S conferences have to discuss how to describe the work as revenue accretive, just so that leadership listens before doing something horrifically bad.
Within firms, the incentives mean engineers grow by figuring out how to remove /automate T&S, rather than fulfil requests from T&S teams.
You get what you build incentives for. Even on HN you see this. There are more converastions on the threat of censorship than on actual research or papers and safety.
It makes the most sense. Especially given the “dumb fucks” quote.
Isn't that what most people in democracies think though? When you cast your democratic vote on a candidatr, aren't you hoping to dictate how the whole country should be run?
The only difference between someone like Zuckerberg and your average citizen is that the latter is powerless as an individual.
They do think that, yes. But they're not shaping anything as they see fit, at best they're shaping as millions of other together see fit. They're giving someone a millionth of a mandate to do something, and then hope that happens.
> The only difference between someone like Zuckerberg and your average citizen is that the latter is powerless as an individual
That's quite the difference. It's exactly the only one that matters from what we can see around us every day.
It's the entropy of power. Spread that power over too many people and it becomes noise.
The guy just bought a castle in Ireland.
He's doing it so he can buy another castle, then continue to tell everyone how in-touch he is with the regular person.
Also, I’m sure Peter Thiel being one of his first major investors has something to do with it.
It's one reason I'm happy to see social media disappear and, if not that, then at least age restricted. My kids will say stupid things in those years - we all do. And I don't want that to follow them as they look back on their earlier selves and invariably cringe.
Besides, this message came out in a lawsuit Mark lost and was not a public message. He was in a lawsuit because he stole people's ideas.
The guy still has the same heart and mind he did when he wrote this. He proves it every day.
In any case though I'm not here to argue that Zuckerberg is some amazing person. But the GP up in this thread wanted to know what was going on Zuckerberg's head, and most people are seemingly incapable of understanding how other's perceive the world without resorting to cartoonish child-like caricatures of villainy. I blame a failing education system that demonizes the past rather than teaching to understand how easy it is to find yourself in the shoes of the villain.
And on that note I think most people would probably end up acting similar to Zuckerberg in his shoes right now. By now he probably loathes social media and its users. But he's also probably unable to give it up simply because it makes billions of dollars, and his other ventures are mostly failures. So he's having kids, playing with politics, and generally living life, while milking his golden goose for all its worth.
>Dumb fucks.
Is an attitude he never grew out of.
Why would he do that? Billions of users prove him right. I wouldn't change my views either if I'm right. It's society's fault for being dumb fucks. This creep it's just exploiting that.
I think the word you're looking for is "sociopath."
It’s that simple.