Comment by hooande | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hooande | Hacker News Reader

Mechanical Turk and its ilk are very important. One of the biggest barriers to achievements in machine learning and optimization is a lack of processed and labelled data. A lot of statistical inference is about algorithms and formulae, but in most cases the key issue is having enough data. It doesn't matter how fancy your technology is if you don't have lots and lots of clearly labelled samples.

Mechanical Turk (and crowdflower and a few other services) are important bridges for this. People can do important labeling and cleaning work for a cost that's affordable enough to be practical. Right now most of the work is translation, address finding or quasi spammy tasks. But the service itself has a lot of potential to do things that impact our lives in the future. Mechanical Turk workers can improve startups by helping with personalization and automation tasks, help with science and defense by labeling images and aid in all kinds of language processing and computer vision tasks that could make things cheaper and better for all of us.

It's good to see human capital being utilized, even if it is ont he cheap. For what it's worth, amazon does recommend that people set the pricing on their mturk tasks so that they come out to something close to minimum wage. Though I'm not sure that things like this are what the minimum wage was designed for. Completing online labeling tasks is a far cry from working in an actual sweat shop. It would be nice if there was some sort of exception for technical piece work. Mechanical Turk isn't nearly popular enough right now, but in the future as machine learning becomes more common there will be a serious demand for these tasks. I hope we can find a way to let people do data preparation work while avoiding virtual dickensian conditions of a kind of data processing industrial revolution.

If this type of work is important, then why does it not provide minimum wage? For what reason should Mechanical Turk be an exception?

Legally speaking, the workers are paid as contractors rather than employees. They set their own hours and are not under any obligation to accept work they don't want to do. As such, they don't have to pay payroll taxes and are not subject to laws such as minimum wage.

I am pretty sure contractors have to pay payroll taxes. It is one of the reasons that companies are increasingly classifying employees as contractors, the burden of the payroll tax falls on the contractor entirely (normally it is split 50/50 between employee/employer).

That doesn't make much sense--payroll tax is roughly 15% either way, so with employees you just pay them 7.5% less than a contractor for the same benefit.

The real reason for contracting is that the paperwork is much simpler. You don't need an HR department. And the guy gets automatically laid off after a few months without the incident reflecting on either you or him, so there's less risk.

There's another side to it where you can hire a "contractor" on an n-month term, but instead of paying the contractor directly you go through a middleman who hires the contractor as an employee and provides (shitty) benefits and takes care of taxes.

Or you pay them the same, and skip out on benefits as well as payroll taxes and your ROI is much higher.

you can not "split" taxes between employer and employee. The employer cares only about how much the total cost of employing someone is. The makeup of the cost is irrelevant.

The point is that employers are classifying employees as contractors because they can get away with offering the same 'salary', but avoid paying payroll taxes and benefits. We can get pedantic about 'who is really paying what', but in the end, companies are using this tactic to screw over their employees. There are many cases where taking work as a contractor makes sense (mainly, short-term/part-time work), but people need to be aware of the costs, and take them into consideration when comparing job offers.

> not under any obligation to accept work they don't want to do

The fact they are choosing to do it shows they have no viable alternative, which means things must be pretty bad where they are living

Only a small percentage of workers are using MTurk as a primary source of income, so I wouldn't agree with the assertion that "things must be pretty bad".

You think that people working for less than minimum wage is not a problem?

Yes.

Once again, I'm very happy I don't live in your country.

The bigger point you need to understand is that if minimum wage was enforced at MTurk, it would significantly raise the prices, and many requesters would simply stop using the service. This would result in less work for everyone.

By that logic, no jobs should have a minimum wage, lest it drive up the price of having employees and then there would be less work for everyone.

That's right. It's the common argument against minimum wage, which a lot of people argue.

Given a choice between fewer jobs in which employees are actually able to support themselves and more where they can't, the former seems the more humane option...

How do you plan to enforce a global minimum wage where employers cannot simply shift labor?

I don't have a good answer for that, except to expect that wages wherever the jobs are outsourced to are at a livable standard for that area. Competition and outsourcing are probably inevitable in a global marketplace, but everyone should at least have access to food, clean water, education and decent healthcare.

Of course i'm coming entirely from a labor point of view, and i'll grant my grasp of economics is probably naive to say the least.

If the end goal was not profit, this would not be a problem.

If the end goal was to produce some goods or services that are of benefit to people, while looking after employees, the environment and the local community, the world would be a much better place.

Of course, the stock market might not grow so fast, but that's just made up anyway. People struggling to buy food on paltry wages is not made up.

>If the end goal was not profit, this would not be a problem.

I suggest you try your experiment on sentient creatures that are not motivated by utility. I am unaware of any at this point, however.

Humans managed about 200,000 years of doing exactly that.

I find the past 200,000 years of "management" unacceptable and largely void of progress. Only once sufficient incentive was established in what we now know as a capitalistic global market did we see humans as a species begin to solve existential problems at a race previously reserved for science fiction and fantasy.

Did you even read the article?

> The rest make under $20 a week by working an hour or two per day. The most commonly cited reasons for using Mechanical Turk are to earn some extra spending money and productively use time that would otherwise be wasted watching television. One academic study that relied on Mechanical Turk workers filling out questionnaires noted that its American participants were “normally distributed in terms of socioeconomic status, with the average participant having completed some college and receiving a financial income between $37,500–49,999 per year.” This does not match up with the perception of exploited sweatshop labor - the poor who must accept low wages due to a lack of alternatives.

I guess it ought to be illegal for people to choose to make productive use of their time.

Next time, please read the article before parroting your ideological commitments.

Whose minimum wage?

From the article:

> A survey of workers on Mechanical Turk done by Panos Ipeirotis, an Associate Professor at the Stern School of Business at NYU, found that the majority of American workers are young, have at least some college experience, and have household incomes between $25,000 and $60,000.

It sounds like the majority of workers are supplementing their incomes, not relying on it.

>The fact they are choosing to do it shows they have no viable alternative

Assertion based on facts not found in evidence. Just because they take remote jobs that can be done at their whim whenever they want doesn't mean they can't find a viable alternative. In fact, there aren't many jobs where those qualifications are met.

I think this misses the point of minimum wage. The whole point of minimum wage is that the work is not very important and very commodity-like. Minimum wage protects the importance of people, not any particular type of work.

Minimum wage is a distortion of pricing for human work - somewhat analogous to rent price control. Although you could argue it helps some people, it hurts others such as people who aren't currently working. They may be prepared to work for $6/hr but are prevented from doing so. Similarly an employer may have work that brings in value of $6/hr but are prevented from hiring people to do so. Or maybe they have work that brings in $10/hr and can't hire two people for it.

This is a completely separate discussion than what people need to get by, or what they should be provided. It is far more straightforward to just provide/pay them directly from the government, than pretend that isn't happening and there is no cost by distorting markets and making customers pay anyway, as well as reducing competition.

It is quite hard to think of any jobs in western economies that are only intended to bring in $6/hr revenue. Automation increasingly means that people are used as quality checkers primarily who also do some kind of manual work. You could use a robot but you would still need a pair of eyes to check things. Certain tasks can't be automated but that tends to be in higher value products. You could argue that minimum wage forces companies to be more efficient and focus on high profit activities.

There is an employment market - we don't need to think of the jobs. There will be good old fashioned supply and demand as people and companies find what meets their needs.

Seeing exactly what companies do in reaction to not being able to hire based on supply and demand is quite difficult to measure. For example it can hit the poorer people because companies can't economically provide products for them, hence causing the poorer people to have to spend more on alternatives. Sometimes surveys find that minimum wage increases made no difference, but that then turns out to be survivorship bias - you can't survey companies that went out of business or left to go elsewhere.

The real problem is that market distortions are used to sweep under the rug a social policy, and to pretend that it doesn't cost people anything when it certainly does, and the poor/unemployed the most. If in favour of the social policy then just do it directly.

While I have not used it, I have thought about using it for things that require speed in mass. That is tasks that can be broken into small little chunks. Which if done by a few would take days/weeks/months. But having a virtual workforce of thousands it can get done in minutes/hours/days.

That is why this is slightly different. It is the micro payment for micro work.

Minimum wage where? Don't assume that minimum wage in San Jose has anything to do with a living wage in Bangladesh. That's the whole point of this labor arbitrage.

How would you regulate it? The jobs aren't specified by the time it takes to do them, they're specified by the task that needs to be accomplished. This is unlike a typical minimum wage job, like in retail, where a cashier just needs to be present.

It's good to see human capital being utilized, even if it is ont he cheap.

Chillingly spoken like a true, cold-blooded functionary. Are humans mere "capital"? Is their worth decided by being "utilized"? Is that what the meaning of our existence is reduced to? Perhaps our robotic overlords will agree that such a determination fits each and all of us. Tarpaper shacks, dirty water, food scraps and, every now and then, a glance at the Sun when the heat and clouds of pollution part for a short moment.

Either that or our future could be much less deterministic and free-form through the elimination of such de-liberate prognoses. One way or another that viewpoint of humanity is doomed to extinction. I'll keep my fork packed, friend.

> For what it's worth, amazon does recommend that people set the pricing on their mturk tasks so that they come out to something close to minimum wage

What is the incentive to do an online job and set your prices at the lowest possible legal limit? Surely nearly anything else you could do with a computer would be more valuable? I mean, if you get good enough playing computer games you can make more than minimum wage.

It's the difference between a guaranteed payout right now vs a possible payout down the road. In order to get paid for online games you probably have to practice for quite a few hours for free before you might get good enough to be compensated.

True, but at least you might enjoy it.

Not much...

I am a avid gamer, but I gave up forever in going pro, because practice to reach pro level is tiring, VERY tiring...

One pro player lived unoficially with me (actually, he lived somewhere else but hated his roomates, so he hanged around my house instead), he would arrive from university, sit on the computer, and play until 4 in the morning, eat delivery McDonald every day, drop on the floor (yes, the floor, not a bed, or a cushion, or anything like this), sleep, wake up at 7 and go to university (without taking a bath...)

Sometimes he would get too smelly or clearly lacked decent food, then I and other roomates would kick him out back to his house, and let him return about 3 days later.

He is a player I still don't enjoy playing against (Because he wipe the floor with me), but even with all that amount of ridiculous practice, and winning championships, he still do not got sponsors... Now he went to do something else, and play for fun only (and his performance decreased accordingly actually... during his pro years, I would lose 100% of the matches against him, now I only lose about 70% of them, and I am sure I don't improved, since I did not play for 2 years in a row and since my return I had in total about 30 matches, while a pro player could pull 20 practice matches in a day)

How many hours do you have to practice a day to be a pro?

Very few gamers get sponsorships. It is not an easy way to make a living. Your argument is equivalent to telling everyone to forget about minimum wage jobs and practice throwing curveballs, on the off chance that they can score a position as a pitcher in the major leagues.

I think he was referring to the farming and selling of virtual goods.

Farming digital goods can be done by anybody , so you will have to compete with chinese farming groups who are happy with a return that's about break even with what the electricity and broadband would cost in the west.

At least with transcribing english text you have some advantage by being a native english speaker.

No, I'm saying before you waste hours and hours doing tedious tasks on Turks, just get a job at McDonald's. It will pay more and probably be less tedious.

The barrier to entry for being a worker in Mechanical Turk is extremely low, and the system is very flexible. I could see it being very attractive as "side job" type work to monetize spare hours, rather than as ones' long term primary form of employment.

It's good to see human capital being utilized, even if it is ont he cheap.

It is, in fact, especially convenient for those who buy this human capital to get it on the cheap.

I notice also that you're arguing that this project will allow machine learning to essentially capture this capital and get even more value out of it. Obviously those now selling their skill and knowledge for cheap will not get a cut of that result.

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