Slashdot Mirror
A Sucker Is Optimized Every Minute
theodp writes Now that we have hard data on everything, observes the NY Times' Virginia Heffernan in A Sucker Is Optimized Every Minute, we no longer make decisions from our hearts, guts or principles. "The gut is dead," writes Heffernan. "Long live the data, turned out day and night by our myriad computers and smart devices. Not that we trust the data, as we once trusted our guts. Instead, we 'optimize' it. We optimize for it. We optimize with it." To win Presidential elections. To turn web pages into Googlebait. To sucker people into registering for websites. Of the soon-to-arrive Apple Watch, Heffernan notes: "After time keeping, the watch's chief feature is 'fitness tracking': It clocks and stores physiological data with the aim of getting you to observe and change your habits of sloth and gluttony. Evidently I wasn't the only one whose thoughts turned to 20th-century despotism: The entrepreneur Anil Dash quipped on Twitter, albeit stretching the truth, 'Not since I.B.M. sold mainframes to the Nazis has a high-tech company embraced medical data at this scale.'"
Suckering people into registering by calling them cowards if they don't. That's news?
I think this sort of thing is ironic. For one thing, it clearly illustrates that the human mind IS an optimizer, capable of making inferences on data that even the most cutting-edge AI is only able to roughly simulate. Computers can certainly be granted superior perception to a human but the optimization algorithms may not always win in a 1-on-1. Humans have the potential to be just as good at signal processing if the context is something we have already evolved or been conditioned to handle.
Future historians will look back on the Inhuman Age with bemusement and hopefully disgust as they recite the resources and technologies we had and let people starve while we calculated to unlimited accuracy how many iPhones transexual dwarves buy during a full moon.
The only place where sloth and gluttony are seen as a preferred way of life.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
The article assumes all humans are stupid.
This is not the case.
Fuck Heffernan and her bullshit article.
I have better things to do than waste more of time time on this clickbait trash.
By the way, fuck Dice too, because Slashdot is a steaming pile of mediocre crap these days.
Well, at least the discussion can only go up from here.
Mainframes didn't exist in WW2. IBM sold Germany tabulator machines like they sold to many other countries around the world. What the Germans did with them aren't IBM's responsibility.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
That summary reads like the deranged, disjointed ramblings of a psychotic person.
#DeleteChrome
Hmm, Godwin in the summary: 'Not since I.B.M. sold mainframes to the Nazis has a high-tech company embraced medical data at this scale.'
Well, comments on this have nowhere to go but up.
Is it just that these Phds working on machine learning algorithms are actually dense fucking morons?
Seriously.. I'm yet to see any real "machine learning" demomstration that was anything more than a clever bar trick.
a sucker is born every minute.
Like any new tech, data mining and psychological optimizations can be used for positive or negative purposes and will drive its own bevy of bullshit management fads. The author, like most progressives and conservatives, would throw the newly born baby out with the bathwater to go back to a easier, simpler day where they understood everything and before these young whippersnappers with their "computers" and "smartwatches" started making things move too fast for the old people to keep up with. I'm at the point in my life where I've seen almost two generations of essayists crank out screeds like this and while I have that nagging fear that one day I will be the old fuddy-duddy... it hasn't happened yet. Still wish those damned kids would get off my lawn, though...
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
Apple Watch's "chief feature" is neither time-keeping nor fitness-tracking.
It's chief feature is a connected touchscreen on your wrist. Period.
Those so-called "chief features" are just necessary features because we only have enough room for one device on each wrist, only have two wrists, and people would feel silly wearing a device on each wrist.
A watch functionality and a fitness-tracker functionality are just needed because otherwise many people would have an excuse to wear something else on their wrist instead of an Apple connected touchscreen.
Is there a place where that is not the preferred (albeit unattainable) way of life?
As someone who works with decision theory I can hereby attest that this article is totally stupid. If at all, the opposite conclusion can be drawn. Since the 70s plenty of evidence has been found that people make irrational decisions "out of the gut". Unfortunately it has also been shown quite conclusively that these decisions are bad or neutral most of the time. People systematically overrate their own abilities, commit all kinds of fallacies like the base rate fallacy and there is often almost no correlation between the perceived quality of a decision maker (e.g. their management 'credentials') and successful outcomes (e.g. measurable success of a company).
In a nutshell, if you want to make good decisions, better trust the numbers and not your gut.
Hearts and guts have always been optimized by data. So now we have more data. Great.
Whenever an article delves into the origins of words, I take it as a sign that the piece is literature, not news. In this case it turns out to be an ad for a watch... smh.
Just wait until all those fitness trackers find out that keeping fit involves more than walking from the sofa to the refrigerator and back every hour or so. I wonder how "sticky" those fitness apps will be? After a year, what percentage will be still using them?
Somebody seems to have his history badly messed up. The first Mainframes where sold in the last 1950s. Nazi Germany surrendered in 1945. Hence IBM never sold any Mainframes to the Nazis. The other stuff this person says is probably of similar accuracy and quality.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Who's the real coward (and sucker) here?? Is that your fantasy name for your failed life??? Yes.
is a Slashdot contributor now?
My curiosity got the better of me, and I wanted to see if the article actually sounded as much like an insane manifesto as the summary indicated. Damn, it's actually worse! This is a childish, incoherent, first-world-problem rant of epic proportions. She doesn't just Godwin her own article. She pulls off a double Godwin. She not only brings up the Nazis, but Stalin and the Soviet gulag are thrown there in a few times for good measure. Also, I couldn't help but notice the word "optimize" and its variations appears 40 times in this article, if you include the title. Quite the subtle theme, huh?
If you must read this tripe, please only do so for sheer entertainment value. Any attempt to actually extract a coherent point from this blathering is in for a stress-induced headache. Fortunately, this is Slashdot, so it's likely I'm the only one who will bother actually reading TFA.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
...there should be some way to erase all big data of a personal nature nationwide. Its much harder with data held abroad.
A kill switch for personally identifiable information would be useful, I'm sure no one wants to be the idiot that repeated the mistake of Dutch in WWII...
"Factors that influenced the great number of people who perished were the fact that the Netherlands was not under a military regime, because the queen and the government had fled to England, leaving the whole governmental apparatus intact. An important factor is also that the Netherlands at that time was already the most densely inhabited country of Western Europe, making it difficult for the relatively large number of Jews to go into hiding, if they would have chosen to. Most Jews in Amsterdam were poor, which limited their options for flight or hiding. Another factor is that the country did not have much open space or woods to flee to. Also, the civil administration was advanced and offered the Nazi-German a full insight in not only the numbers of Jews, but also where they exactly lived. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_the_Netherlands#The_Holocaust
It's been years since I've thought about it. When I was young and first got exposed to the whole concept of "making big decisions" I realized something. The process was like this: 1. Gather data. 2. Make chart of pros-and cons. 3. Come up with some kind of way to weight the data, ultimately arriving at some numbers that suggested the best course of action. 4. Screw it all and go with your gut.
It's obvious to think that you could cut out the first 3 steps. The big revelation for me was to realize that while steps 1-3 were important, the disappointment I felt over the numerical outcome was important too. It was like there was symbiosis between data and emotion.
An extreme example of "only looking at numbers" came to me in my late 30s. It was suggested that I should remain on the East Coast because "taxes are high in California".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
To the contrary, the vast majority of people pay very little attention to actual data. Think about it: anecdotal evidence is well known by science to be the least reliable form of data, but nearly all of us will take the recommendation of a friend over a statistic.
need I say more?
You lost me at Nazis.
- Holy crap, I've got MOD points! Who thought that was a good idea.