obelix_

My feeling is the kind of pandering a leader used to do to get into a seat of power has changed thanks to the internet and the state of info overload we live in. They are much more aware of who to target and what that group wants to hear. And since every targeted group is overloaded with info, getting/keeping their attention creates this arms race of who can be the most touching, entertaining or outrageous circus clown. Not just in politics but in every sphere I see more and more absurd attention craving characters being propped up. And I am finding it hard to see how democracy benefits.

Idk I think US has bigger problems than whether it's semiconductor tech gets stolen. Social media and the news media have created such a dysfunctional environment that I am finding it increasingly hard to believe constructive debate/solutions on anything are possible until the underlying environment producing the dysfunction is cleaned up. If not we are just going to get more and more leaders from both sides propped up purely for skills to pander.

Do you think that's working?

Once you take this position, and from the outcomes we see all around us, its very easy to reach a conclusion that the edu system is failing as a large part of the population can't parse what they are being fed. And that includes highly educated people btw. Cause they land up on either side on any issue you pick.

But that's just wrong.

People constantly expect the education system to solve the problem (of info overload - so many facts that not all facts are equal as the article does a good job explaining). The education system was never designed to solve info overload.

And social media/news media/Google are designed to overload everyone.

We need a bridging of the two systems.

Google/social media/news media has to understand they are constantly serving second graders tenth grade problems. And pretending there won't be any consewuences.

The education system is atlest able to signal to a second grader he is in second grade and here is a path to tenth grade with feedback constantly being provided to ensure he stays on track if he wants to get to tenth grade.

These signals don't exist on the internet of 2018 or are drowned out by 2000 other signals.

Most people are busy, distracted, coping with their own life problems and with the minimum attention they have to spare are told to pick facts from a large buffet table. The tech world has reinvent what signals it's providing alongside those facts.

Cause the highly simplistic current signals of upvotes/view counts/likes/retweets etc are not enough.

All you have to do is ask Google - did inequality increase under 8 years of Obama?

Look at the results that pop up. You will see articles filled with charts and data that tell two totally different stories. Every other link will dutifully fall on one side or the other.

How is the average American going to figure out what the truth is?

I'll qualify that with - only if you know what you are doing.

If someone is struggling in the deep sea, dive in to help only if you have experience swimming in the deep sea. This stuff is not simple and can have lifelong negative effects on both parties if done wrong.

The programmers who implement these systems don't even know that their upvotes mechanisms can have a down side. Only after they acknowledge it as an incomplete and incorrect social signal and that they are out of their depth in controlling the unintended effects can the debate begin.

Most definitely it does effect the HN users. Every site that uses the upvotes mechanism as a signal to the group about what they should think or focus on is producing both positive and negative consequences. It's used not because the good outweighs the bad but because it's implemented by programmers who find it easy to implement. If you asked a social psycologist/socialogist/ecologist or an educator with experience in building learning environments a very different system would be in place. We need these kind of people influencing these feedback loop not just the well intentioned but misguided programmer.

I have bought this up multiple times before. There are a lot of impressionable minds around here being exposed to lot of half baked/frustrated/misguided thoughts. Many times the upvotes mechanism just amplifies and reinforces these thoughts.

It can.

The root cause of a lot of problems Facebook creates is the like count next to every utterances, article or behaviour on the net. This has to be regulated much more than private data/friend graphs/location data/what you view/search for etc etc.

Psychologists will tell you the most effective way to influence behaviour of an individual is to show people what the herd around them is thinking, saying or doing. This is how society has always created "social norms".

If people around you don't smoke, you are less likely to be a smoker. Teen girls who see other girls get pregnant are more likely to get pregnant. There are literally thousands of examples that can be cited about how seriously we take this signal.

In a world with too much info that no one is trained to handle or are too busy or distracted to handle, we look at what what the majority of people around us are doing and do that blindly. This is signal influences behaviour. Both good and bad.

Facebook has fucked that signal up for society. In every sphere of life. And we are currently dealing with the fallout. The signal is being delievered too fast and too much imho. And this speed is highly overrated in its value to society.

Whether these counts should be displayed, to who, how quickly, next to what type of content, for different communities, education levels etc needs to be debated and regulated.

I meant they make a difference in comparison to non-targeted ads. It's easy to measure. Both have low conversion rates but the difference is not negligible or ignorable depending on what you sell.

That's the customer point of view. Spend sometime with a sales or marketing team esp when they are rolling out a new campaign or product. Targeting makes a big difference even though the conversion rates maybe low.

I think personal info, what you view, search for etc can be useful to both sides when both sides are seeking each other out.

But when it's one-sided is where things get ugly. When Alex Jones is trying to build a captive herd, the kind of data being misused is not so much your personal info/things you have searched for or viewed, but what I call "counter" type data surrounding the content you produce i.e. likes, retweets, views, upvotes etc.

This type of data is what drives the creation of an Alex Jones or a Kim Kardashian. Cause no sane person is out there searching for these clowns. The clowns come into existence only because these count numbers have an influence on people. 14 year old girls from Ecuador to New Zealand look at these counts for guidance on what is hip and that produces a Kim Kardashian with 110 million followers on Instagram.

These counter numbers need to be removed/hidden/shown less frequently or with delay and automatically the world will be a diff place.

When attacking FB and Google(YouTube), Twitter etc these numbers and their visibility to the uninformed and vulnerable of society is what needs to be attacked.

But what happens is people attack the personal info, search and view histories data collection which is actually useful. And that causes unneeded confusion and defensiveness.

"It's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission" is a very popular mantra among the boy wonders of Silicon Valley.

That is pretty good :) I can't find it right now, but some very similar phrase was used after the Deep Water Horizon explosion and oil spill, which caused the BP CEO to get fired, to describe the role of the leader in such situations.

It probably is, given the type of characters proped up by the attention economy.

China hasn't produced a Trump yet. Meanwhile the US has laid the foundation with the attention economy (that props up people with the largest view/retweet/like count) to produce an entire crop of Trump type "leaders" in every sphere of life from the corporate world, to the army, to academia, to the media etc etc. The ground has been prepared and the seeds have been planted.

Look around. What is going to prevent their rise? Regulators? Zuckerberg?

China just executes the CEO. Mindless ambition. Mindless consequences.

Yup Trump, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, the 2008 meltdown, Zuckerberg turning the internet into his private sewage factory etc etc are all shining achievements of western wisdom and deep thought. The poor unimaginative illiterates of the Orient just don't get it. If only they understood what magic freedom can produce.

Btw I suggest you reread your French Revolution history. The aristocracy was very much back in power within a year of the king getting his head chopped off. And then they propped up Napoloen who decided he needed to conquer the world. The next 100 years were spent with the elites of one European country or another colonising and pilaging most of South America, Africa and Asia. So much for freedom and equality and the aristocracy learning any lesson. They are still more of less in power with the same mindless global ambitions unless you haven't seen the inequality numbers and have your head buried deep in the sand.

Yup pretty sure instagram will produce the next president. FB produced Obama (thanks to Obama every politician on the planet got onto social media). Twitter produced Trump. And since attention spans to read text have gone down the tube, the Russians will have to start honing their fake image skills. At the end of the day, all I want to see after Kim K gets elected, is Zuck back at a hearing explaining how fake images on Instagram are a thing nobody paid attention too cause why would we when it's doing so many positive things and keeping the company afloat.

Well done. Great logic. The majority can also prop up a Kim Kardashian and Trump who met in the Whitehouse today and took a nice selfie. Those two idealists are taking your majority for great ride pal.

On the internet of 2018 sites like Reddit/FB/YouTube/Twitter are perceived to have VALUE to users for just one simple reason - instant validation of whatever bull is flitting thro their minds.

The like/upvote/view/retweet counts never existed next to every thoughtful or thoughtless utterances prior to these sites. Just as in the real world. And just as it should have been. Everything your mom says doesn't need a popularity score next it.

The ppl who defend these sites have blindly accepted that popularity scores next to every thought/speech/action have no downside.

These days I don't even expect them to overcome that blindness which is why comments like yours will always get down voted despite the common sense in them.

No difference. Just that mindless consumption culture turns people with brains into ants running an ant hill. So there will always be opposition.

Interesting. I'd like to hear more about this "entrainment" concept mentioned. How does the brain know what the "envelope" is? Sounds like magic.

Social network scaling is not a technology problem.

Technology has imposed scaling on societies and patted it self on the head for the unintended benefits derived, while burying its head in the sand on the unintended consequences.

The roman empire, Genghis Khan, the East India Company, Napoleon, Hitler etc etc etc achieved scale and then what happened?

Democracies once upon a time, in theory atleast, were for the people, by the people, off the people.

Post advertising funded internet/24*7 news we just have a system for propping up attention cravers, by the attention merchenants, off everyone elses attention and resources.

After creating such an environment do you really believe any of the issues you point out become easier to solve?

Fuckerberg is going to go down as the guy who turned the info age into the age of reactions and noise. Nothing else.

No balls involved here. They know the number of users that will blindly click accept to whatever policy change popup appears.

So it's standard mo to show users shit, get the clicks, then use the numbers to justify how much people love the platform. The rest of the herd then stands back and says hmmm maybe this is what people "really" want.

Bad example. Einstein wasn't exactly a 'life is worth living' advertisement by the time he reached old age. I doubt he would have taken the offer. Source - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zpTUjb-iKf4

If think the point being made is Amazon didn't suffer the same fate as Yelp wrt to book reviews because Amazon had a better product than whatever Google produced.

Thanks! Looks pretty useful. Will be checking it out soon.

I see something about uploading the CSV file. Not clear where the sqlite dB is being created. Is it local? Does the browser create it? Ideally I would like to run this locally when I am playing with data.

What's been the largest file tested? Basically what's the max rows/cols it can handle fast?

Plus this particular boy wonder very confidently stood up in front of everyone and said fake news is BS right after the elections.

My 2 reasons -

Libraries are designed specifically to be distraction free environments where one can focus. The internet might have all the info ever produced, but it is also the most distracting place ever created. And as more and more people get overloaded with info they aren't trained to deal with the craving for more focus and less distracting spaces is going to increase.

On the internet any half baked article passes for information. In the library the neuroscience floor doesn't have shelves and shelves of books written by kooks, that you have to wade through and filter out to find quality. This is huge advantage if you are doing any sort of serious work.

Well Intel has faced Nokia and Kodak moments literally 6-7 times in the past and survived. Granted not always because their tech was better. But survival has nothing to do with just cheaper prices and better tech. Evidence of that is all over the place.