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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.'"
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.
The ugly trick (unfortunately one that used to be a corner case; but is now an alarming percentage of your average day in modernity) is that if the context is not something we have already evolved or been conditioned to handle, we frequently fail dramatically and repeatedly; even against the better judgement of our general-purpose-but-not-always-persuasive conscious cogitation: we are, alas, not nearly as good if the challenge is "Your odds of violent death are the lowest in human history; but you've never had greater awareness of potential danger you can neither fight nor flee" or "If you obtain food and other survival requirements by sitting in a chair and moving your fingers, you now require less energy, and can afford more, than your metabolism can possibly imagine."
It's irrational and ineffective. Starving people contribute neither production nor consumption. They merely create a revolt risk. A system that provides at least subsistence-level income for all its members will outcompete a system that doesn't through sheer endurance.
Put another way, at some point the only way for a corporate entity - a nation, a company, whatever - to expand is to make the world effectively bigger by lifting people out of poverty so they have time and energy for nationalism, trade, posting on Slashdot, etc.
Also, with the ever-deadlier weapons even Joe Terrorist can afford, at some point the future historians either ensure no one's desperate or future history will end.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.