I mean, if you read about how current industry-standard recommendation systems work, this is pretty bang on, I think? (I am not a data scientist/ML person, as a disclaimer.)
If e.g. retention correlates to watch time (or some other metric like "diversity of content enageged with"), then you will optimize for the short list of metrics that show high correlation. The incentive to have a top-tier experience that gets the customer what they want and then back off the platform is not aligned with the goal of maintaining subscription revenue.
You want them to watch the next thing, not the best thing.
Your sci-fi distopia flash fiction is compelling, but not actually on topic in this discussion.
"Think of the children" is weaponized for censorious purposes, but also the harms of social media are well documented (unlike many of the other moral panics fuelled by this phrase). Communication channels are becoming managed spaces, but by private companies not accountable to the electorate, not by the state.
I'm not sure a blanket under-16s ban on all social media is the right answer, but there are really good reasons why people support this that you need to engage with to have a useful discussion here.
If a thought like this has occurred to you, a dilettante, after reading a headline and/or cursorily glancing over the article, then you should assume that a study conducted by people with substantial academic training and deep expertise in the field have also had this thought and incorporated it into how they perform their analysis.
Drive-by anti-intellectualism like this is the death of interesting conversation, truly.
Since the "people with substantial academic training and deep expertise in the field" can be bad at statistics or experts at academic fraud, doubting statements with obvious political motives is a prudent policy.
Distrust is science, deferring to authority without a good reason is anti-intellectualism.
It's not that simple. It's true that a willingness to criticize and falsify established assumptions and skepticism toward arguments based on authority are part of the scientific ethos. It's also true that many scientists simply do what they've been taught to do, without questioning methods or taking an interest in the philosophy of science. But your last sentence is so sweeping that it would allow flat-earthers to be considered scientists and intellectuals.
What is being criticized here is an attitude that believes one is the only one capable of critical thinking and that everyone else is just an idiot who is already overwhelmed by the task of tying their shoelaces in the morning. This is simply arrogance and has little to do with constructiveness, let alone scientific ethos. You treat yourself to that little dopamine rush of saying “ackchyually” and then just carry on playing Bubble Shooter on your phone.
This is very common here on HN. And when this ultimately hardens into blanket skepticism toward institutions, you are closer to the flat-earthers than to the scientists.
In an ideal world, you would be right. In this world, I just read a study (that passed peer review), where they took per-capita data from a district with 100 people, data from a district with 50.000 people, averaged them without weighing by number of people, then presented the result as the per-capita average for all districts.
That is when they're not outright fabricating data, and having their colleagues cover for them (at Harvard):
In or before 2020, graduate student Zoé Ziani developed concerns about the validity of results from a highly publicized paper by Gino about personal networking. According to Ziani, she was strongly warned by her academic advisers not to criticize Gino, and two members of her dissertation committee refused to approve her thesis unless she deleted criticism of Gino's paper from it. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesca_Gino
I reviewed a paper recently that gave an incorrect definition for one of Maxwell’s equations and then proceeded to use it incorrectly. It got moved to a lower ranked journal rather than rejected outright. That wasn’t the only problem either, half the text was clearly AI generated.
Have you not observed that science is very often politicized, filled with fraud or just plain mistaken? The anti-intellectual position is anti-skepticism.
Then come with proof or some shred of evidence, rather than asking an unsubstantiated question that undermines the scientific process unnecessarily by trying to insert doubt from a place of zero expertise in the field.
I think they call this the appeal to authority fallacy, it’s the people without expertise in a field that often see the holes in something first, then the holes start glowing after they get hand waved away by smug narrow-minded experts.
> it’s the people without expertise in a field that often see the holes in something first
While it's obvious that everybody makes mistakes and has blind spots, I'd wager that, in general, being more knowledgeable gives you better tools to spot actual holes.
And sure, experts too can be narrow-minded and smug. Just like everybody else.
> And sure, experts too can be narrow-minded and smug. Just like everybody else.
Being an expert always adds a big weakness: You get paid to do this so you are biased.
So no, they are not "just like everybody else", they have spent more time on it so they know some things better, but you can't get away from biases that comes from being paid to do something and that makes experts worse at some other things.
it can even happen in software engineering but takes different forms, someone outside sees the problem first because they are looking from a different perspective or due to familiarity with some external factor or edge case of their environment
> then you should assume that a study conducted by people with substantial academic training and deep expertise in the field have also had this thought and incorporated it into how they perform their analysis.
You should sit in some academic meetings and paper drafting e-mail chains! There’s a degree of believing the best in people but in my experience that can unfortunately be misplaced in science.
On my iPhone 16 Pro + Airpods Pro, when I start the game (tapping on the screen when it says "Tap to start") I get a message saying "Airpods Disconnected", even though the Control Center on the phone reports them as connected).
Tried restarting the app, and disconnecting and reconnecting the Airpods with no luck.
I would add to this that in my experience, many teams actually perform better when co-locating, even if individual people on that team would prefer (or feel they individually perform better) remote.
Covid normalized remote working, but also didn't necessarily make companies and teams _good_ at it; I suspect RTO is easier than fixing the fact that your org sucks at remote work. It is hard to do well! it requires different strategies than just picking some software.
Partial/voluntary RTO also is the worst of both worlds: people coming in the office to sit on Zoom with colleagues who never do. Ultimately, I think RTO is a valid choice as a company, and a lot of orgs are coming to regret not messaging from the beginning that remote would be a temporary arrangement during the pandemic.
RTO may work as long as your teams are geographically co-located and return to the same office. In my experience, a lot of teams in recent years have been staffed without this aspect in mind, because with remote it made no difference. So now, even with RTO people still have to constantly sit in remote meetings / work rooms with the rest of the team in other office(s), and the benefit of in-person collaboration is still lost. Arguably, this "remote between offices" mode is the worst of them all, because remoting in from the office almost always results in an inferior experience compared to remoting in from a well-tuned home setup.
the reality is that nobody knows how to measure performance, and nobody does. it is all based on feels and a simple confirmation bias, rather than being backed by the research
In Berlin I enjoy exceedingly cheap daycare for my kids (80€ for 2 per month, would be lower if I didn't pay the optional extra costs), as well as generous parental leave in the year after a child is born, with salary subsidy from the state.
This is not an unusual policy situation at all in Europe, although indeed not universal.
These are complementary, not opposing policies. You can have funded childcare and longer parental leave funded by the state. I live somewhere that has both (not in the US, perhaps obviously).
I am a consultant, and while I agree with the sibling comment from jonathaneunice (especially the point about being what I call "business therapist"), there is one thing I will add: a lot of what you are paying a top-tier consulting for is _speed_.
Many organizations, especially large ones, are very slow at making decisions, even if they ultimately make the right ones. Bringing in people outside the hierarchy to synthesize a great deal of info from across the org, and give upper management the insight to make a decision quickly (and, depending on the engagement and the firm, also implement it) is very often worth the bill at the end.
I will not pretend all of the work we do is 100% the most urgent work all of the time, but I have helped make the sausage for a number of years now, and despite the usual disparaging comments in this thread, it really is often an intellectually rewarding environment where you work with smart colleagues and help people solve real problems.
My wife is a management consultant and it feels 80% of her job is just interviewing people across different levels of the org and tell executives what the hell is actually going on and what the real problems are.
The amount of filtering of information going on throughout several layers of management is insane. People just keeping their heads down and not forwarding important information because it will affect short-term results/workload is insane in large companies.
IMO every large company should have dedicated people conducting _actual_ interviews with all employees regularly, outside the normal chain of command. Not that bullshit anonymous peer assessment crap. There is no reason companies need to pay external consultants crazy amounts of money for this kind of service.
By the way, the other 20% is usually just applying some common sense and/or industry best practices to the problems detected on the 80% part.
Worked with McKinsey once as a senior product manager at a computer company. The partner was sharp as was one of his associates; the other one not so much. But they talked to a lot of people. Basically, they created a big spreadsheet that kept our business planning people busy and off our backs. And told senior management that we knew what we were doing (which we did).
Yes, it was expensive but it kept the company afloat/independent for a few years longer which is about all you can ask.
>There is no reason companies need to pay external consultants crazy amounts of money for this kind of service.
I think there's always a degree of suspicion that the person from internal audit or HR can really be trusted vs. an external consultant.
I've never done management consulting myself although I have done IT industry analyst consulting (with jonathaneunice). But I have worked with management consultants and consulted with large IT companies. My general sense is that it brings clarity and outside affirmation to issues that upper management was unsure about. So, in that sense, it accelerates processes that people are unsure about. Doesn't mean it's always right. But a lot of time making a decision is the important thing.
If you lived in Ireland in that period, you benefitted from Irish government services, schools, police, fire services, etc. You participated in the community (hopefully), used roads, bought things in shops, so and on so forth.
Regardless, the idea that the government can only tax you if it directly gave you sufficient benefit, _in your assessment_, is of course nonsense. Taxes are what you owe to the society you live in, not about what society owes to you.
If you are lucky enough to be internationally mobile, this does not exempt you from contributing to the communities you spend time in as you travel around the world. You cannot expect to arrive in a country, earn money from it, and depart again without paying your fair share of taxes.
If you do not like how a country has structured its tax law and what priorities it has as a society, you are of course always free to not move there in the first place.
> benefitted from Irish government services, schools, police, fire services, etc. You participated in the community (hopefully), used roads
That is a terrible basis for argument: we mostly each get similar usage of services (roads, police, yadda yadda) which should be an argument for a fixed amount of tax per person (a poll tax).
If you wish to argue that we get what we pay for: then rich people pay wayyyyyy more so they should get more government services???
The wealthy surely don't get better policing: instead the wealthy pay heaps for their own insurance and security systems.
Be careful making any argument based on services received for money spent because the well off pay a lot and don't receive a lot for it.
Without society it's pretty hard to be well off in the first place. The entire concept of property becomes pretty meaningless without some very basic concepts of a legal system and territorial integrity. Without that you can only own what you can physically defend.
Wealthy people and large companies do generally employ security, but that is merely supplemental. They enjoy the backdrop of a society where the vast majority of people at least recognize the basic concept of ownership, and where protection from external state actors is provided. More to the point, they live in a system where most people see negative expected return from just killing them and taking their stuff
Abstractions like insurance further require a system where agreements can be made and mostly enforced, and where the need for the insurance is low enough for the premium to be workable.
The small security team at any given company is there to handle the the exceptions that don't conform to the larger society's rules. It doesn't replace that protection entirely. You'd need a standing army for that, and you'd have to work full time just to maintain its loyalty.
Even with no direct services whatsoever, people benefit from society in more or less direct proportion to their wealth -- and arguably the benefit accrues exponentially as wealth increases, given that this enables the exponential growth of capital.
> Without society it's pretty hard to be well off in the first place.
What a pointless argument - you could just as easily chose cause and effect in the other direction: without businesses then society has nothing. Zero businesses, zero tax income.
My main point is that society needs to encourage business owners. If marginal tax is too high, then owners have no incentivise to earn themselves an extra dollar. When owners earn less then society gets less.
There's a balance to incentives.
I'm not working currently because my taxation rate is too high. I'm fine with that since I value my time highly. However financially my country could be getting more from me by lowering my taxes enough to encourage me to work. But voters don't care about what is sensible - they care about optics - and politicians care about voters more than they care about the economy.
I find this softer position much more amenable than your GP comment.
However, you conflate "businesses" with "entities that pay only some minimal poll tax". It turns out that progressive tax does not preclude complex society. Corporate tax does not kill business on touch. All you've argued for is the existence of the Laffer Curve.
Commercial activity predates currency, and is omnipresent across every tax system that has ever been tried. Where money, there trade. Where trade, there value-add. Or at the very least, combing the beach for pretty shells.
There are tribes without the concept of personal property or money, that make things and build value. No tax can extinguish human creativity.
I'm cagey about secondary effects, but I'm cautiously optimistic about debasing the trait of self-enrichment. I see no reason to take on faith that people acting out of self-actualisation would build a lesser technology. You know you're on a site full of nerds, right?
The existence of the internet protocols is a case in point.
Conversely, I prefer a world without facebook and robocalls.
...such as corporate welfare, political influence, favourable prices on public land and institutions, regulatory capture?
The acid test for your frame is whether you would have made as much wealth on a desert island, with no market, no value-added inputs, no communication and no currency. If so, then great, you truly did not depend on society. I admire your self-reliance.
Otherwise, you have benefited from the sum effort of every human, living or dead, in the chain of causality leading up to the circumstances in which you made your pile. I'll leave natural resources aside.
I _love_ that a bunch of libertarians are seasteading. More should go. I am happy to write off tax debt for anybody who goes seasteading for, let's say, five years.
If your raft calls into port for trade, then you pay duty and sales tax, but at that point you've admitted defeat. It's not like they'll accept your raftcoin anyway.
If e.g. retention correlates to watch time (or some other metric like "diversity of content enageged with"), then you will optimize for the short list of metrics that show high correlation. The incentive to have a top-tier experience that gets the customer what they want and then back off the platform is not aligned with the goal of maintaining subscription revenue.
You want them to watch the next thing, not the best thing.