b1daly

There is (or was) a “bug” in the business logic, as is now apparent. Assuming it is the case that CA gained access to this information by lying, it means there were inadequate safeguards in who could access. The data. The only reason you could say this wasn’t a “breach” is because FB had engineered virtually no safeguards against this type of deceptive use of user data.

When you have a Facebook account, you are explicitly granting permission to FB to use your personal information and social graph to sell ads. There is nothing deceptive about this.

How would you know this?

Given that Trump won on the slimmest of margins, if CA’s work resulted in a net increase in Trump’s margin, the “ROI” is huge.

You’ve thumbnailed elements of the problem, and left out the heart of the matter: The cabalistic forces of uber-rich conservatives (reactionaries) marshaled these propaganda tools to convince justifiably agreived voters to vote for a candidate who is letting them “run wild in the candy store.”

The interests and ideology of the Mercers and the Koch are diametrically opposed to any practical solution to the problem of growing inequality in the US.

They, most of the Republicans, practice a “take no prisoners” form of politics, in which they care little how either the ends or the means of their campaign affect lower class people.

The deceptive elements, and the use of sleazy propaganda, by these neo-reactionary King makers, is of a piece, whether they use modern data mining techniques or not.

If it wasn’t so sad, it would be hilarious. The joke is on all of us.

Given the problems with replication, and the selection biases, I’ve decided it’s a safe bet to ignore the implications of articles about health studies!

It’s shocking how many dietary and medical practices have been championed, and then later repudiated.

One challenging example: fish oil.

Article saying it’s good...

http://time.com/4619488/omega-3-fats-heart-health/

Article questioning the overall research:

https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/30/fish-oil-claims-no...

What and how will they lose? What kind of potential harms do you foresee happening to the users of social media, as a consequence of that use?

There has been some discussion here about China’s plan to increase use of social media as a means of societal control.

Is the problem that people are sharing to much information, or is the problem that China has an authoritarian government with little respect for the rights of its citizens?

Commenters on Internet forums don’t see them as surveillance platforms, from which they must hide their views.

These are platforms for speech. People crave and seek such platforms, and frankly I think they provide a valuable service in disseminating ideas that corporate entities have no incentives to.

It verges on absurd to criticize platforms designed to transmit public speech on the grounds that they might leak that information.

There seems to be a quaint archetype floating in the collective consciousness with an image of privacy that has never existed, outside of recluses living in exile from their community.

Historically, anyone living in a small community had such a lack of privacy, that it would be intolerable to many modern city dwellers.

There needs to be a more nuanced and realistic concept of how personal information is managed, by all entities who touch it.

I’m just replying to your comment as it jogged lose an example of what I see as a missing piece of the issue.

Namely, a course of conduct in self protection needs to have an understanding of what the potential harm is from a given threat.

As I see it, the big danger is not from these corporate data vacuums like Facebook, directly.

The biggest threat is the use of this aggregated data by bad actors.

I have yet to hear of a major tech company undertaking actions to directly harm the users of their products. In fact, they are highly incentivized to minimize harms to users.

I don’t see targeted advertising as a bad thing. If I’m going to see adds, I prefer they reflect my interests. I actually find out interesting things from such adds.

Because the overall system has become so complex and monolithic, I think taking steps to thoughtfully minimize personal information leakage is prudent.

But inconveniencing oneself to no discernible benefit is counter productive, and can easily backfire.

For example, if you move your email service to one provided by your shared website host, you open yourself to many potential woes.

Emails from private domains are more likely to get lost in spam filters. I’ve had unfortunately breakdowns in relationships because people who needed to reach me thought I was blowing them off.

Last time I had an email address a private domain, the spam filtering was so bad, it rendered it almost useless.

You’re also hosting your mail on god knows what server, controlled by a company with a lot less security resources than Google.

So there is a substantial cost in avoiding the free email services like Gmail, for nebulous benefit.

I am very concerned about the issue of personal information security. But everything comes at a cost.

The question of whether allowing law enforcement back door access to private communications is worth it is not so straightforward as many commenters seem to imply.

For those advocating for more awareness of the loss of privacy, some more precision would be helpful.

What Facebook does is not the same as a “surveillance company”.

To throw out the term, with the obvious negative connotations, might attract attention, but muddies clear understanding of the dynamic flows of networked information that we are part of, and the incentive structures of the entities involved.

I’m saying, just getting a clear understanding of what is happening is hard enough, never mind determining the possible consequences of various paths of action.

There are a lot of unexpected, emergent properties of such a complicated system as the global internet, which has billions of autonomous agents as fundamental components.

A prime example is the current examination of the influence of the “Russian Trolls” in the 2016 election. I doubt many people foresaw the current controversy around this subject. I cant think of any parallels to the phenomenon.

Knee jerk reactions about such complicated systems, which from people influenced by the “hacker” ethos tend to the anti-corporate, anti-government point of view, severely misrepresent the threat environment that a common citizen confronts.

From my point of view, the biggest threat to an individual is from criminal activity. People like to rag on Equifax for the security breach, but I don’t come across similar screeds against the actual perpetrators of the breach.

The phenomenon of these large scale hacks of personal information is an unintended property of the current business, consumer, and governmental conduct.

A “surveillance company” is a whole different category of threat.

Stone cold killers is not the right description here. These soldiers, conscripts, were put into the most bizarre, dangerous, depraved situation you could imagine. The stress must have been unreal, in the jungles. They suffered a situational insanity.

I think we do want to go that route. As opposed to supporting and arming dictatorships that suite our supposed interests at a given time. Then turning against them, or arming their enemies when they don’t.

If the US consistently practiced being a good global citizen, maybe one could make a case for “humanitarianism military intervention” in limited cases.

What we have now is apparently open ended military activity, around the globe, for an indefinite timeframe.

Most of the conflicts we are party to are civil wars, and by definition these are not “winnable.”

As far as I can see, the US continues to wreak havoc on innocent civilians around the world to this day, with total impunity. This serves only the interests of the corporate military political complex. The fiasco of the US response to 9/11 beggars disbelief.

It’s sickening how the propaganda apartatus in the US has shutdown virtually all reporting on what our armed forces are actually doing.

Perhaps the worst of the US conduct is the continual supply of arms to States and factions in conflicts around the world, thereby radically increasing the lethality of the conflict.

Of course, the US is not alone in this arms dealing, but this is something where we could unilaterally make a dramatic action towards world peace. Withdraw from current wars, end arms dealing, and work towards negotiated outcomes, where possible.

Jeez, I’m making a rhetorical point that the US army, which is not technically a mercenary army, as it is the official army of a sovereign state, has turned into an organization whose operations are driven by business interests.

The Spotify interface relies heavily on the “...” option. This menu always provides the option to go to album, artist, like the track, and share.

This suboptimal in one major way, which is that this three dot link is hard to target!

All things equal, I (US Citizen) prefer that our military be effective and efficient. It troubles me though that there is virtually no public discussion on the unprecedented geographic scope , and time length, of today’s employments. This whole thread is interesting, and I think it is worth considering: to what end is all this innovation being applied?

I have come to the conclusion that the professionalization of the services, coupled with the parasitic business model of the “defense industry,” has turned the US armed forces into a standing mercenary force.

Ultimately, the blame for this lies with the corrupt electoral system in the US, and the unwillingness of our political leadership to exert a modicum of common sense, and reduce the scale of US military involvements.

We can’t rely on institutions that many entities rely on for their livelihood/existence to put themselves out of business.

It would be nice to see the military engage in disruptive innovation that would discourage open ended military conflict. (And the endless meddling in other countries ghastly civil wars.)

Yeah, those are bad things, but Pinker’s thesis is that things are improving. All the historical societies I’ve read about had astounding levels of savagery and brutality. Along with disease and no real medicine.

Why is it so hard for people to grasp this idea of “progress.” It implies improvement, not perfection.

The general thrust of “mainstream” thinking on “enlightened” thinkers of the past is that they offer a framework for freedom and justice, however I’m perfectly framed, and in spite of them falling short of living up to the ideals they espoused.

To deny the concept of human rights, and the validity of science because some foundational thinkers fell short is ridiculous.

I agree with your point that we should consider the evidence, and conclusions, presented to us as the work product of scientists. Especially as much of the information is shaped by innumerable cognitive biases.

However, I’m fascinated that someone could realistically doubt the “theory of evolution.” For one thing, it is very much an active area of research, with new discoveries all the time. (Reading about the epigenetic aspects of hereditary traits kind of blew my mind. It turns out that animals adaptions to specific environments can influence later generations.)

So how do consign a relatively young area of research, that is making concrete contributions to science as being akin to religious belief?

The specifics, and controversies, of evolutionary theory, and it’s scientific cousins, are quite complex, and it seems rather capricious to wave it all away as if it was some cartoon theory of reality.

My own, very limited, view of the weakness of evolution as a theory, is that it can seem like a “just so theory,” almost true by tautology.

But the mechanisms of natural selection, and hereditary transfer of traits are so well established that to dismiss the lot of it strikes me as irrational.

A not unreasonable hypothesis. Yet the bulk of the destruction is the result of ghastly military actions, aimed at direct destruction of the society. To worry about the contribution of climate change is not pointless. Close to it though.

Uh, all of these things are happening already, and will continue to happen. The biggest causes of unnecessary misery in this world are political (which of course encompasses the physical environment.)

The questions are what the best course of action would be: for individuals, neighborhoods, states, continents.

We cannot escape the physical environment we live in, and to fantasize that somehow compiling a list of risks could lead to some dramatic action is not illuminating. Taking such talking points out of context is confusing.

Define screwed.

I’m not sure what I think about the “climate change” issue, but I maintain a reserve of skepticism towards proclamations of apocalyptic doom.

A) Humans, and all living things, are screwed from the get go. A guaranteed calamity awaits us all.

I think contributes to a lack of perspective that is not helpful, and possibley harmful. On a number of levels, personal and political.

B) The fact that climate change gets far more discussion and attention than the ongoing calamity of US military conduct is telling. It tells me that climate change, which is complex, and only ameliorated by levels of global cooperation never seen before, serves as a “boogie man” for the “politically aware.”

Organizing against the conduct of corporate war, as it operates globally, presents far more “low hanging fruit” for positive outcomes, at doable price levels.

Yet, there are no serious (meaning electable) politicians in the US who have an opposition to the crazy influence of corporate money. The military spending (and its corruption) is protected from scrutiny by seemingly insurmountable social structures.

Yet, achieving meaningful reductions in military activities, if not spending, is within the realm of imaginable. It is far more doable than the level of global cooperation that is required to reduce carbon emissions. But people who might be inclined to support collective efforts to clean up the corporate-military-political complex are demoralized.

The Republicans apparently pride themselves on taken the worst possible courses of action on challenging problems. They are working to undercut the science of climate change!

Frankly, I see global action on significant greenhouse gas reductions as impossible.

So, somehow, liberal minded folks have found a perfect subject to project their sense of hopeless futility in “global warming”, an almost intractable problem.

In the meantime, there are unexplored opportunities to improve our communities, and world, all around us.

If we, the US, could somehow turn the corner on the lunatic resistance to gun control, and then make some active progress on military misadventures, maybe Americans might think about giving up on meat.

I think the problem with how these new concepts are presented, is that they are taking these ad hoc methods of doing arithmetic and trying to turn them into algorithms. My guess is that this is driven by the need children have to know how to get the “the right answer.”

The traditional algorithms aren’t very intuitive, but they work. Trying to make an algorithm out of the various ways you can break up a problem, ad hoc, seems bananas.

This is one of those truisms about life. That it is well understood is expressed in the cliche about “having to play the hand you were dealt.”

Lewis is making an observation here about the bias of the lucky, which blinds them to the objective reality of their situation.

I like the point.

I’ve assumed the trend away from high content websites was driven by the need for responsive, phone friendly sites. There is so little screen real estate available, that design considerations lead to these websites that are a big pretty picture, with a little bit of marketing fluff text.

In such a purchase flow model, where are customers placing their orders? Meaning, are they driving traffic to a general ecommerce site like Amazon?

It’s interesting to me that the most successful general ecommerce sites have a visually utilitarian appearance, with emphasis on function over form (so to speak).

Brand websites have the extra burden of trying infuse their sites with a unique brand identity. Companies that sell directly on the internet, and have enough products that they have need for a “catalog” to present products, have an extra challenge.

Such brand websites carry a heavy load, as they serve marketing/brand identity, suppport, contact, communication, and ecommerce functions. Throw in the mind-f*ck of “responsive design” and it’s not surprising some websites fall short.

The OPs thesis seems dubious, as he proposes no alternative for anything that could possibly fulfill all these functions.

I think it’s pretty clear that “depression” is a normal psychological state, and that it is functional. It would be surprising to find such a common, and profound, behavior in a long running, successful species if it wasn’t.

As the example of learned helplessness illustrates, depression can be induced in a predictable way. Even on an intuitive level, a stance of submissive apathy could increase chances of survival, if one is a captive.

My (lay person’s) view is that what we see as clinical depression is a symptom of a “bias” or miscalibration issue, where the feedback circuits in the brain responsible for maintaining homeostasis have been forced to work outside of their functional ranges. The brain has a lot of redundancy and compensating routines, but they have their limits.

One of the most obvious causes would be having a weakened part of the brain, whether through injury, genetic, or environmental causes. The brain becomes miscalibrated, and can’t maintain equilibrium because some essential component is operating “out of spec.”

If you look at other human attributes and biological systems, they are all prone to disorder. Or perhaps, to having characteristics that fall on the outer edges of the distribution of the characteristic. As a simple example, when an individual is under a certain height, we call that a “disorder” or “syndrome.”

So there is an element of arbitrariness and imprecision as to where these definitional borders are drawn. They are fuzzy. But, looking at a larger population, you can start to see patterns where you can definitely place an individual into a sub population of people who have a disorder.

Mania, for example, has enough common symptoms, that I am confident it is an actual, physiologically based, “disorder. Even though the symptoms of mania are all behaviors and states experienced by “healthy” people, all the time.

I also have a theory that by the time a mental health problem starts to become perceptible by others, it is actually a pretty severe condition. The individual’s internal state is probably far more disordered than it appears to be. Because our brain is so flexible, and powerful, it can compensate even extremely disorder functioning, for the purpose of hiding the illness from others.

My ideas are largely consonant with yours. You’ve outlined a “model”of depression, which uses the concept of depression being a response to having ones mental construct of reality broken. That would be the functional aspect of depression.

My view is that “depression” the disease occurs when the brain can no longer maintain homeostasis. So if someone is being tortured, for example, depression would be a an expected response. If the torture is severe enough to push past the ability of the brain to maintain order, which is the point of torture, that’s a situation where calling the state a “disease” or an “expected response” is simply a matter of semantics.

Because depression is a normal state, part of a stress response, it’s symptoms can look, and be, very similar, even though the causes can be myriad. I think this is why the blunt instruments of psych drugs are used to treat these symptoms across so many different scenarios. They don’t work great, but they do work.

S&P 500 is primarily a ranking by market cap. It’s a measure of how much the market values a stock. I can see it being a component of size (how “big”). There’s no doubt that the big tech companies are colossal entities.

The market cap of a company is largely based on a bet of the “size” of a company in the future.

Tesla is the most “valuable” US auto maker, by market capitalization. This illustrates that market cap is inherently related to predictions which have a large speculative component, which can be influenced by pure market phenomena.

If someone is lacking marketable skills, and is forced to take a “make work” job, I would hardly call that a “vanity” project.

This was done in the Great Depression, to try and keep the economy going.

There are ways to create work that is valuable, but the market value is below what anyone can afford to live on. So the government could subsidize salaries, in addition to hiring people.

Getting back to my comment about military spending: I see it as a destructive waste. How does that get decided? It’s decided by people operating in a complex political-financial-industrial-military complex.

If we, as a society, can decide to waste lives and wealth on idiotic military action, we can decide to spend wealth on helping our own citizens.

That’s all government spending.

Your contention implies that there are no differences of import to how a company is managed, if business failure is inevitable. Sadly, I think this is not that rare of an opinion amongst a certain class of managers who disproportionately consider their own welfare, above all.

You don’t have to think that hard to realize the callous absurdity of this viewpoint.

What is it wasteful of? What if someone working such a job feels better about being alive, because they have a role to fill in a community? Why is having people doing forms of “make work” worse than letting people waste away into despair? Would you feel good about having your aunt thrown to the curb, because she has no marketable skills?

The ideas of “efficiency” as they are used in economic theory are very narrow, and reflect a technical understanding of a vastly over simplified model of reality. Such models do provide insight into real life, but they are analytical tools, nothing more.

Economics, as field of study, has a big problem with the concept of “value.” The price of things tends to stand in for the value of things, as it is easily measured.

You don’t have to look hard to see the absurdity of taking this compromise too far. Look at military spending. Since dollars are spent buying a weapon, and workers get paid, profits are made, the “value” of the sale gets added into GDP. Then we take that missile, and blow it up. If we kill our enemies, then maybe one could say we got our money’s worth. If we kill only innocents, then I see it as more of an “anti-value.” What if it just blows up in the desert, and makes a multi-million dollar hole in the sand? Sort of a modern, high tech version of paying one group of workers to dig holes, and another to fill them in, is it not?