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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.'"
Suckering people into registering by calling them cowards if they don't. That's news?
The only place where sloth and gluttony are seen as a preferred way of life.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
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
Your "gut feeling" is also often wrong, but you don't notice because of your confirmation bias.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
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...
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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.
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?
I am just surprise that they were already 213 night hawks on the Internet
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."
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.
Scarcity is so ingrained in our flawed brain, we create it in the midst of abundance.
I'm not actually sure I'd give us that much credit: when consumption is conspicuous and competitive, the existence of filthy poor people is an important part of feeling well off. Sure, having a big flatscreen TV is nice and all; but can it compete with the satisfaction of knowing that an army of disposable service-class peons have no choice but to choke back whatever irrelevant little feelings they have and pretend that doing your bidding is job satisfaction?
Mainframe computers (colloquially referred to as "big iron") are computers used primarily by corporate and governmental organizations for critical applications, bulk data processing such as census, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning and transaction processing.
A computer is a general-purpose device that can be programmed to carry out a set of arithmetic or logical operations automatically
By those definition I think the stuff they had by WWII would of qualified. " used primarily by corporate and governmental organizations for critical applications, bulk data processing such as census, industry and consumer statistics" is the perfect way to describe the products IBM put out well before and well after WWII. The only thing we are missing is where they computerized mainframes? And I think they were pretty close. They definitely carried out arithmetical operations. And they definitively would of been customizable/programmable to a large extent; I am sure the same machine could be programmed to track a bunch of different data types and perform different arithmetic operations.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
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.
There is not proof of that because every time we've had someone ty one they wither corrupted it and the US (along with others) stepped in to shut them down, ir we feared they would corrupt it and did the same. Doesn't it make sense, though, that we'd have more people doing the shit jobs nobody wants to do if those jobs were attached to larger paychecks? Instead, we have people seeking higher paying jobs while the service industry generally gets shit pay. Go into a store and look for an employee that has half a clue about what they're selling you; it is very rare that you'll find one, because anyone with a clue has moved on to positions in which they can, at a minimum, survive off their paycheck, or refused to work there in the first place.
If you think that's a good thing, you need to ask yourself how you learned everything you know today. If you literally never learned anything from anyone else, or from work done by someone else, the good on you, a system that doesn't provide subsistence-level income for everyone (who contributes in some way) is ideal for you and you should be happy to live in one. However, if you've ever learned anything from anyone else, you should realize that the best teachers are the ones who aren't worrying about their next meal; you could actually probably learn something from the guy behind the counter at McDonald's if they paid a subsistence wage; he may well to be an astrophysicist who failed to plan properly for retirement (because simply giving people money, as we all know, does not fix those issues). Or, at least, the guy at Best Buy might know the difference between a DVD player and a Blu-Ray player; that'd be a start.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
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.
The benefit of an AI is generally its superior memory and consistency when compared to a human. Those are things humans cannot be evolved or conditioned to match. We could possibly be improved to match the memory through the use of bionics, but the consistency may never be matched.
The good thing about the memory and consistency is they can both be utilized by humans in hybrid decision systems. That is why the best chess players are humans using computers, and why business intelligence tools are almost always better when they merge computer generated data with human intuition.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
and all of them are also registered on slashdot!
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
A company without customers isn't going to keep producing anything for long. And once it goes belly-up, any employees it had will become unemployed, ceasing their consumption due to lack of income and thus causing the circle to repeat with another company.
Capitalistic economy has a boom-bust cycle precisely because supply is a time-lapse function of demand, and demand is a function of supply (since you can only generate demand if you have income, which is typically earned through working). The problem is, as technology advances supply requires less and less people, so the booms become smaller and the busts deeper. Simply giving people money in the form of credit has kept the whole house of cards standing this far, but the problem with credit is that it can't grow forever - or could, but at that point it's just a less honest name for citizen pay.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I don't feel good that there are poor people. If anything, I engage in doublethink to avoid reaching Singer's conclusions, as that would make me poor as well!
What's so good about knowing others have it worse than you?
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.