The algorithm has absolutely no way of knowing what I want. It can only guess by looking at what I've viewed, and the real motive is always to keep me on the site and maximize engagement.
As I said: negativity maximizes engagement.
Let me give you a simple example. Lets say I walk past you on the sidewalk and say hi. Not much engagement. Now lets say I walk up to you and punch you. I have just maximized engagement. Which is a better interaction?
> In any case, hateful let's-do-a-genocide ultra free speech didn't help.
have you read 1 thing by any political revolutionary of the past? ones you like. washington. lincoln. malcolm x. rosseau. they're quite violent, and would get censored by your 'lets-do-a-genocide free speech' laws.
the world is roughly 100000% less violent than it used to be, and the violent crime rate has not increased much in the past 5-10 years. this is a total lie.
This isn't a lie, but it's also more nuanced than this. The world has been seeing a massive decrease in poverty. At the same time, only something like 4.6 billion people have internet.
I'm not saying that social media causes a flood of violence, I'm just saying that there are violent social contagions that should be addressed. Think of ISIS's social media campaigns for recruitment.
> Or is cultural and social inheritance as influential as genetic inheritance
No, it isn't. For intelligence, in adulthood, it clearly isn't. For harder to measure skills, current estimates are at around half and half, but the error is mostly in the environment category. So much general-population variance is genetic (and that's only amplified at the highest skill levels - you need great 'cultural and social influence', but also great genes, lol)
> Did they try to marry their own? Naturally - out of snobbery and opportunism if for no other reason.
fun fact, the trait that shows the most assortative mating is intelligence. curious!
> I used to live in an upper middle class area, and a worrying number of the people were very polished thieves.
and I know a worrying number of lower class thieves. '20% of rich people are grifters' doesn't impune rich people as a whole, any more than Tony the crack money launderer impunes poors.
> Australia and NZ are dont have an authoritarian govt
a lot of people would disagree here, see the (correct, based) coup of the aus govt over the judiciary allowing them to at will deport migrants, or the controls on going outside in australia
i still fail to understand what the issue with having billions of money is. the best part is these people ignore that money is just a stand-in for power, which they absolutely fucking hate, and that if you ban billionares people will still have more power than a billionare via other mechanisms :)
massive power differentials are a physical property of a complex system. not everyone knows how to run the internet, and anyone who does has power over ... most of it. any 'scale' will lead to a larger power differential than being monkeys in caves, which already was not 'nice'
did you forget you were arguing that billionares are inherently bad? all you argue here is that ... if laws were good, we'd hve had 100m tsla/twilio/stripe 30 years ago
> best there's no behavior to encourage, person A just got lucky
the behavior of ... understanding and creating a useful service like pagerank? or amazon?
> relying on this dynamic entrenches privilege
this is quite ridiculous, this is only believable if you consider having 3-4/5 quintile parents as 'privileged' as having ten billion net worth. equally so when you look at where their parents came from (quite often, poor farmers who immigrated) or their history (jews who had to leave poland or germany due to the nazis js)
> because it's much harder for women and people of color to become the next Steve Jobs
> quite confused at [broadly this is just luck], what studies?
I would recommend reading Success and Luck [1]; it's well-researched.
>> relying on this dynamic entrenches privilege
> this is quite ridiculous, this is only believable if you consider...
There are pretty good [2] papers [3] about it, which convinced me and might convince you.
> so? heard of 'lisa su'?
Your post uses a lot of anecdotal evidence, which is a fallacy [4]. I encourage you to build up a habit of diving deeper. Oftentimes our intuitions are wrong because they're influenced by our local experiences, which are very rarely representative. It's why we do things like run studies and experiments, because we've learned we can't trust our experiences and intuitions. This pattern is, unfortunately, widespread and leads to a lot of problems.
This is actually a great little microcosm of one such problem: income inequality is a huge problem in the US; societies with dramatic income inequality are historically corrupt and unstable. However, it's counter to a lot of people's intuitions and experiences. So whenever someone tries to rally people to address it, people like you toss out lots of unrepresentative anecdotes (and employ other common fallacies) to try and convince people either it's not a problem, or that it's a feature and not a bug. And it works, because these fallacies are common bugs in the way people think about things.
It's up to us to recognize these patterns in ourselves and others and work against them.
Anecdotal evidence doesn't really count when it's something you have personal and thorough experience with. Sun sets and rises, don't need study for that. Similarly, people who start and direct large enterprises have a strong command of people and understanding of their field. "Studies" don't disprove that.
> income inequality is a huge problem in the US; societies with dramatic income inequality are historically corrupt and unstable.
This seems ... less than proof of anything. Past societies were highly unequal due to 'half the population gotta farm' at the very least, so comparing them to modern societies seems like a mistake, and at any rate the 'successful' integrating empires were, well, integrating empires. Modern society hasn't existed for that long, and the US (land of inequality!) is quite a bit more stable than many poorer and more income equal (or ... poorer and less income equal!) countries. Historically, societies in europe were much more successful than ones outside europe, yet you wouldn't take that correlation as a causation, so i won't take yours either.
Anyway, you cant just throw a book at me and expect me to read it for a HN comment without laying out its argument at all lol
Your second paper says that 'racial discrimination exists'. The idea that asians somehow derive most of their success from systemic racism and entrenchment - "Overall, these results paint a picture of a rigid income structure by race and ethnicity over time" - seems absurd. Your second paper doesn't say anything about meritocracy though.
Your third study is also just 'black people are poorer'. That doesn't mean understanding of an opportunity (not 'general skill', but local, specific skill) doesn't lead to success. So i'm left with a book (i don't have time to read it, it's midnight) and two papers that don't relate to your point. Maybe asians are just really smart? Maybe they work really hard as kids while the whites play tennis or soccer, which explains why despite being 13% of the population they're 52% of the coders?
