That conclusion presupposes that rationality and empiricism are at odds or mutually incompatible somehow. Any rational position worth listening to, about any testable hypothesis, is hand in hand with empirical thinking.
391 karma · joined October 28, 2016
There's an illogical extension of conflict that's sometimes applied in this context, with heavily implicative language that's often misleading. No Google isn't interested in reading your personal email (as if Google as an entity could have any interest in the first place), they will definitely serve you targeted ads and sell product integrations based on it though.
And a lot more interest in figuring out "Who does this benefit in The Class War in the short term?", and changing their opinion of legislation so they're on the same side of that.
It's socially consistent, logically questionable.
In a world where cellphones have all sorts of radio antennas on at all times, there are more ways than you'd think.
> A publicly traded company that generates revenue from targeted ads can never be fully trusted to behave. A social network that optimizes for time spent looking at ads will never really care about its users well-being. Algorithmic feeds are responsible for a widening social divide and loneliness.
I'm really not interested in debating dogmatic philosophy about how cynical one should be in the world. The entire point of my comment was that cynicism induces FUD that's not necessarily backed by direct evidence. One can come up with all sorts of different theories to explain what's happening in the world. Just because they sound somewhat consistent on the surface, doesn't mean they're true. That's just inverted inference.
I do agree with you that there are bad incentives in play here, but if we don't want them to be exploited and actually care about privacy, we should convince our effing legislators to plug the loopholes and enshrine online privacy in actual law. Instead of companies being able to write whatever they want in their Terms of Service. And then create mechanisms to enforce said legislation. Instead of moralizing actions of a company as some sort of monolithic (un)-ethical entity.
I think humanizing and moralizing the actions of large companies is a gigantic waste of time. Not only it accomplishes nothing, it gives us (the affected party) a distraction from focusing our efforts on the representatives that we elected who aren't doing their job. Maybe it's representative of where we feel we can make change
The point I was making wasn't that De-id is a solved problem, or that your data is "safe" with FAANG companies. The point was more about the malice that's attributed to them as a blanket measure, in comments such as these:
> (especially all the FAANG people that curiously always stay silent in threads like this one), has worked very hard to make everyone believe that online privacy is a thing, while working even harder to undermine that at every possible step.
There are many people and execs at these companies who are unscrupulous. But there are also many parts of them that are trying to work on doing things the "somewhat right" way when handling user data.
De-id and anonymization is a hard problem. But there's a lot of concrete evidence for me that many people in the FAANG world are at least trying to make progress on it (sinking billions of dollars of eng and research resources on them), instead of blatantly making bag, which they totally could.
Having worked at one of those companies (and having quit that job being disillusioned by a lot of things), there is still so much mainstream misinformation about this. Yes data is often used for tracking and training. In aggregate form. Sensitive data is anonymized/de-id-ed. The leading research on these techniques are also coming out from these companies btw.
There are layers and layers of policy and permission safeguards before you're allowed to access user data directly as an engineer. And if/when someone tries to exploit the legitimate pathways to touch user data (say customer support), they get promptly fired.
But it's much easier to believe that FAANG is some great monolithic evil, out to surveil you personally for some vague benefit that never gets specified. All the legitimate concrete monetary benefits (e.g. tracking for ad targeting work and training ML models) can be had just as well with aggregate data, but privacy FUD doesn't want to listen to that.
Meanwhile stupid legislation and the ability of courts and law-enforcement to subpoena any data they want whenever they want keeps data on their servers longer than they'd want to. Yet people will prefer to blame the "Evil Tech Cartel" instead of multiple branches of their government wanting to read their texts and GPS logs.
There was so so so much trial and error in games in the 90s, with some you basically had to press different inputs to even figure out what does what. No QoL features, really poor save systems that forced you to play the same section over and over, terrible voice acting, crappy B-movie plotlines (this hasn't changed that much tbf but there are some amazingly written games too at least to somewhat counterbalance that) etc.
> more and more people will realize games are a waste of time for them and go on to find other hobbies
This is what I'm arguing against, more and more people will realize exactly what sort of games they like and home in on that is a much more likely scenario.
And just in case your point is that games used to be more engaging and fresh, well, Indie games exist. So many games are doing many new things, or fusing existing genres into something fresh. There's a lot more variety to be had in games than most other media.
I don't think people will suddenly accept worse standards for art, and anyone producing high quality work will have a significant advantage.
And now if your argument is that the average consumer can't tell the difference, then well for mass production does the difference actually matter?
And then there's the age group younger than me, for whom games are not only a hobby but also a "social place to be", I doubt they'll be dropping gaming entirely easily.
They're both arguably unreasonable standards but one is for the end-product (i.e. a novel/album/software project) as opposed to reaching some apparent level of general skill at your hobby. The latter is full of traps because for subjective hobbies like arts, how does one even evaluate that?
But how does it reward anything if you're not engaging with anything outside of direct article links or newsletters you subscribe to?
IMO your comment is not constructive unless you think the linked article is "viral vague behavior that only draws clicks"
For the general populace including many tech people who are not ML researchers, understanding how convolutional neural nets work is already tricky enough. For non tech people, I'd hazard a guess that LLM/ generative AI is complexity-indistinguishable from "The YouTube/Tiktok Algorithm".
And this lack of understanding, and in many cases lack of conscious acknowledgement of the lack of understanding has made many "debates" sound almost like theocratic arguments. Very little interest in grounding positions against facts, yet strongly held opinions.
Some are convinced we're going to get AGI in a couple years, others think it's just a glorified text generator that cannot produce new content. And worse there's seemingly little that changes their mind on it.
And there are self contradictory positions held too. Just as an example: I've heard people express AI produced stuff to not qualify as art (philosophically and in terms of output quality) but at the same express deep concern how tech companies will replace artists...
My current strategy is to fully block the domain if that's the sort of tactic they're willing to use.
The friendships I was alluding to were basically in-person in-office sort of friendships that demanded a larger upkeep once the pandemic hit and later when I left my job. So like you I needed some online platform to coordinate in person meetups. It worked for the most part fortunately, but there were definitely some friendships that got lost along the way.
The absolute I'm talking about in the GP comment, is in reference to the clarity you are referring to in the GGP. You don't actually provide any example of said clarity. And I didn't refer to anything you said directly as cynicism past the point in the chain where you state your preference towards analogizing a museum exhibit to an over-arching pattern about the Fed's handling of money. That to me is indeed casual cynicism, and it provides no clarity, only hand-wavy oversimplification with a defeatist sort of appeal.
Since you don't provide any other example of a statement that I would consider cynical, which in your view actually provides clarity, I'm having to use my own imagination as to what kind of "clarity confused for cynicism" you could possibly be referring to. Those are the statements I'm talking about in the GP comment. And I completely stand by what I said there.
The opposite of clarity is not self-doubt but curiosity. And unlike cynicism it's constructive because it's not afraid of being challenged.
For my case I was able to convince many friends to connect on various chat platforms of their choice. Some friendships fizzled out, others are still going. And then there are some anew.
Unfortunately a lot of our friendships are essentially default proximity relationships. These tend to not survive as soon as the first obstacle to proximity shows up if not enough people are willing to put in the effort to make it something more.
I didn't think of it before but you're right building feels like implying more weight than it feels right. But also I concede this is quite subjective.
There's definitely something borked with our brains though. I have had multiple people express surprise when I tell them that I will not check any notifications when I'm driving even if I'm stopped at a traffic light for a minute or more. I just don't want to be distracted, and yeah it takes conscious effort sometimes, but it does get easier once you learn from experience that the world will not fall apart if you check your messages later.
I even internally reframe it as future candy, which makes me engage more positively with async interactions. But practicing delayed gratification is hard.