> German was the language of science prior to WW1.
I would say well into the WWII even. Especially in the Central Europe, regions under influence of Austro-Hungary, and half of Balkans. Then Germans with Austrians... well... fucked everything up definitely and irrevocably.
In 1989, yes. Guess in what languages were translated the fields in passports of many countries from the Communist block? French, German, and Russian.
> Honestly if you think social networks are just for people who speak english you gotta take a look at the world a bit more.
Depends on how you see yourself. Passive viewer, poster? You're right. Contributor, creator of platforms and systems, advanced content creator? Try doing these without knowing English. Yeah, I mean more generally "the internet" and "the web" rather than social networks only.
What am I really losing though by allowing access? The company is passing on info to advertising networks so they can try and get me hooked on more mobile games.
No one cares who you are, they are just trying to sell ad space.
> No one cares who you are, they are just trying to sell ad space.
That's not true at all. GP comment referenced the fact that foreign companies get the data and then manipulate public opinion by spreading lies in a targeted manner, with the direct goal of cheating elections to get far-right, fascist governments in power globally.
> What am I really losing though by allowing access?
We have a lot to lose here. We already lost our democracy. At least temporarily.
> No one cares who you are
Yeah, they do. They care because that gives them power. We know humans like power and we know it is corrupting.
Your posts are spreading dangerous lies. The ad space is not some innocent thing. It is insidious and threatens democracy, with tyrants and dictators already taking over countries with the help of 'innocent ad space' that 'nobody really cares about'.
You've hit on the most nefarious part of all of it. People say they have nothing to hide, I don't doubt it. What they should be concerned about though is the constant, targeted stream of disinformation.
It's one thing when it's a detergent that is claiming to make your clothes whiter, it's another altogether when it's messages suggesting you might also want a whiter neighborhood.
This is the entire issue: it is not "what you have to hide", it is the fact that you have to hide your identity, your location, your associations, your language and every minute bit of information about yourself to receive unbiased information.
Honest question: have you considered that some people are less susceptible to advertising? I used to think comments like yours were just absurd hyperbole, until I noticed them popping up enough that I considered the possibility that some people really do consider themselves utterly helpless in the face of advertising, and perhaps accurately so.
This isn't really an attack on your comment specifically; I just wonder to what extent this differential response drives much of the disagreement I've seen on the topic.
(you could perhaps say the same thing about the legalization of certain drugs).
Not OP, but the truth is that everyone is highly susceptible to advertising and other methods of mental priming. It is probably true that people are susceptible at different levels, though. However, the brain and our environment interact in highly complex ways that affect our behavior a great deal, and this is what advertising is designed to target. That's why a predominant advertising strategy is to equate the product being advertised with social status, something humans have evolved to be very sensitive to (and other social organisms too).
If you're interested in this stuff, I'd recommend the following books:
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky
People like that are the intellectual equivalent of people who think they can win at three-cars monte; a gift to crooks and a bane to the rest of us. The old saw about looking around the table for the sucker, not finding one, and realizing that you’re the sucker applies. We’re all the same species of primate, and only accepting that along with associated weaknesses puts us in a position to maybe overcome them to a degree.
So I guess the answer is no, you haven't considered it.
My purchase decisions are and always have been pretty simple and articulable: for small-ticket items (eg bath soap), I buy the cheapest thing that I haven't already tried and found under par. For big-ticket items whose value affects my utility significantly (eg smartphones), I spend time doing research and if necessary asking friends who have experience with the products.
I'm not confidently asserting that it doesn't _feel_ like ads don't affect my purchase decision; I'm saying that I don't see anywhere for their first-order effects to affect my purchase process[1].
I'm very aware of the risk of overconfidence here, but this is something I've noticed and wondered about for years. I was pretty unsure of it given the strong prior everyone else seemed to have that ads are all-powerful brainwashing devices. But for years, whenever I have brought it up to people convinced of the ultimate power of ads, I've never gotten anything but lazy dismissals like yours that it's simply hopeless and you're at the mercy of any ad you see.
The two possibilities here are 1) I'm being overconfident and 2) you're not just generalizing your weakness to ads, but universalizing it and unable to admit the possibility of someone who's not as affected. Given everything the above, over all the times I've asked this question over the years, I'm a lot more confident in 2 than I am in 1.
[1] Second-order effects of course exist: the brands stocked by my local Walgreens and those that have visibility in review roundups will of course be skewed somewhat by advertising budgets. This seems inevitable though, and is a substantially different topic than the GP's mention of cognitive sovereignty.
So I guess the answer is no, you haven't considered it.
That definitely isn’t what I said or meant, and it makes it hard to talk to someone who insists on responding to what they’d rather I’d have said in place of what I did say. The only thing I’d add to what I did say, is what darkpuma said.
Furthermore, people who believe themselves immune to being duped are less likely to admit when they've been duped, because for them to admit they were duped means they must first overcome their ego and admit to themselves they can be duped. For this reason and others, con artists love people who think no con artist could ever trick them.
There is a difference in advertising when it is like some "BUY THIS TSHIRT" sidebar thing and the more pernicious "promoted" story that shows up in your feed you are consuming all times a day.
Also listed in this article is an app called Muslim-Pro which apparently helps with prayer times etc. As someone who is not American, I wouldn't trust this as much as everyone is freaking about Huawei being part of 5G.
Just because all the other reactions are so hostile: even granted that some people are less susceptible to advertising, our susceptibility will vary. There will be times when we are tired, preoccupied, upset, distracted. Advertisers can afford to blanket us with advertisements, to lie in wait for our moments of weakness.
To add my own take on this, I think the reason that people who consider themselves "immune to advertising" are the most vulnerable is because they suffer from some sort of cognitive bias where they neatly classify things into "ads" and "non-ads" and never think to question if an instance of the latter is actually the former.
They see the "HeadOn, apply directly to the forehead" low-rent ads and glossy big budget car commercials that associate a sports car with sex appeal or freedom or whatever and think "that's stupid, who would ever be so gullible as to fall for that?" while classifying more insidious things like undisclosed paid reviewers or a subtle product placement as non-ads or even more dangerously, as genuinely informative material. They see effective ads as something else entirely and are thus less likely to resist!
Furthermore, people who believe themselves immune to being duped are less likely to admit when they've been duped, because for them to admit they were duped means they must first overcome their ego and admit to themselves they can be duped. For this reason and others, con artists love people who think no con artist could ever trick them.
Another example: somebody who believes themselves immune to advertisement may casually allow themselves to consume an advertisement (for instance, by failing to use an adblocker.) They may later be in the market for a product in some category for which they saw advertisements, look up facts about various competing products, and make their decision in a way they believe to be a rational appraisal of the product facts, missing the very real possibility that were it not for the ads they casually consumed, they wouldn't be in the market for this sort of product in the first place.
Somebody who is aware of their own weaknesses is more likely to exercise caution than somebody who believes themselves invincible.
This is a perfect example of the hysterical, emotional responses I always see around this topic, where people turn off their reading comprehension and critical thinking skills and turn into shitty pattern-matching buzzword machines. Nobody in this thread said anything about immunity; there's no reason to assume that the hypothetical person I'm talking about has lower susceptibility precisely _because_ he's aware of the effects of advertising and takes steps to control their effects on his purchase decisions.
If you've not taken steps to limit your exposure, then you're too naive to honestly claim you have lower susceptibility. Ad avoidance is the most effective method of ad resistance.
Think of your last (purchase) decision. How much research did you do ? And are you an expert in the field? How did you learn about it ? Can you name five replacements (products) and describe their tradeoffs?
I hesitate to post any thoughts on HN that don't toe the party line, since
these days the modal commenter seems to be little more than a pattern-matching and buzzword machine,
particularly for topics for which the community has a collectively strong opinion. Commenters like
you with some level of reading comprehension and cognitive skills are the reason I still hang
around, so thanks for the response!
Your point is well-taken, and I'm definitely aware that ads' effects are a lot more insidious than
seeing an ad and consciously deciding to go buy the product. Like many new grad Googlers, I started
my career paying my dues for a couple years as an ads engineer and have had plenty of time to think
about and hear a hundred different perspectives on advertising's utility and dangers. So rest
assured, this isn't based on low-effort theorizing like "I don't _feel_ like ads affect my
purchases". My purchases take one of two forms: small-ticket items (eg bath soap) where I buy the
cheapest one that meets my constraints, and big-ticket items where it's worth spending at least a
couple/few hours researching the options. I just don't see how first-order effects of advertising
would creep into this process[1], beyond hand-wavy, unfalsifiable effects on the ultimate purchase
decision (subjectively, I don't notice this either: I end up with the low-brand-recognition
contrarian choice as often as I do the front-running brand).
Given the strong belief most people have in advertising's irresistibility, I started out with the
hypothesis that ads may negligibly affect my purchases as very low-confidence, given the strong
priors from others' beliefs. Over the last decade or so, I've 1) periodically (non-rigorously)
thought about random purchases I've made and whether ads may have had any effect, and 2) brought
this up to people who seem confident that ads are irresistible (both online and in-person), in the
hopes that I'd get a good counterargument. The quality of response has been about the same as the
dumpster fire the rest of this thread is: not only do people fail to offer any defense of the
contrary view, they're emotionally incontinent about someone having the audacity to wonder whether
ads don't wield ultimate power over every person. I still don't consider any hypothesis
high-confidence until I've heard a high-quality defense of the counterargument, but the fact that
I've tried a couple dozen times over the years and gotten only hysterical emotional responses
obviously increases my confidence in my hypothesis over time.
Anyway, thanks for reading all that, assuming you got this far. In your opinion, what could I be
missing? People with the consistent purchase process explained above seem like the violation of
their "cognitive sovereignty" would, at worst, be negligible enough that the phrase would apply to
any of a million uncontroversially benign things about society.
EDIT: I forgot to address this in my already too-long comment: "being an expert" on the products in question seems like a non sequitur, since in a world with zero advertising, the information gap would still exist. The salient question is whether ads _fill_ that gap at all, and it seems to me that they don't in this case. Also, inre "Can you name five replacements (products) and describe their tradeoffs?": yes, generally, excluding small-ticket items where pricing drives my purchase decision.
[1] The second-order effect of advertising coloring what's stocked at Walgreens and the
discoverability and reviews of a product is unavoidable, but that's an information discoverability
problem, not a "cognitive sovereignty" one, and as such is a substantially different topic from the
one the GP comment brought up.
My product example was not very good. I'll try another angle. We humans are very biased towards what we know. Even professionals can fall for it, for example judges reading about a crime in the newspaper before the hearing.
Do you recall the discussion last week about Facebook moderators turning from rational people into conspiracy theorists because they are exposed to that crap all day every day?
I would suspect that it is the folks who think they are less susceptible who are most at risk. In a way it makes me think of the misunderstanding around Dunning-Kruger (i.e. it's not an observation about dumb people, it is a warning to people who think they are smart).
A lot of people think they are not susceptible, then close their MacBook, put on their Beats connected to their iPhone put on their Nike shoes go to nearby grocery store and buy a Coca Cola and pay with their Apple Watch.
Yes you might not use any of these products, but highly likely majority that you do is branded. Also you are more susceptible to purchase certain brans that others, that's why advertisers want to target items that you are more likely to purchase.
This is not necessarily bad, but we learned recently that this mechanism was weaponized and things like Brexit and 2016 election is prime example how dangerous this is.
Where you been? these apps track your GPS coordinates 24/7, have your mic open all the time and get access all your contacts. They then sell this data from data aggregator to data aggregator and finally this data was being sold to bounty hunters or anyone who knew someone with access for a few hundred bucks. You can have an ex, stalker, business competitor etc buy your trove.
Did you read about the Cambridge Analytica scandal at all either? I mean if you are fine about someone knowing about everything you ever clicked like on online and directing adds to rile you up politically then fine. Let the algorithms feed you man.
Maybe those people who's job it is to addict you to a mindless mobile game will have to go and get a real job that actually contributes meaningfully to the economy instead of just redistributing consumer demand.
Some people don't like having data collected on them, period. In the end, most of that data results in emotional manipulation in the pursuit of behaviors that businesspeople want
I worked at Amazon for over 5 years and I currently work for a pretty big company (you've heard of them) that's all-in on Azure. It's got enough going for it that I wouldn't switch even if I were high enough in the hierarchy to make that decision.
Yes, he got himself in hot water with his funding secured tweet and created a big mess at Tesla that undoubtedly diverted a lot of resources that could have been put to use elsewhere.
That's not what the article says at all. It says that 25% of the staff fired in the year prior to the experiment would have been given the "toxic" label had they been subject to the experiment rather than fired for whatever reason. Most of the employees labeled "toxic" were, as you might expect, younger and junior, with less experience in "the working world". The article suggests nothing about some huge portion of Riot's "OG" staff being fired by this policy.
> Riot looked at the preceding 12 months of gameplay of every employee and discovered there was a correlation between in-game and in-Riot toxicity. They determined that 25% of employees who had been let go in the previous year were players with unusually high in-game toxicity
Note that the article you cite also reports Riot as being one of the best places to work (according to Fortune) and indeed explicitly makes the claim that it is not a toxic environment.
It sounds more like the wanted to reduce the turn-over of their hiring process by pre-screening candidates for behavior, rather than dealing with a systemic problem in their organization.
It could be that the results of the re:work article were glossing over unaddressed toxic behavior (i.e. crude language) but it could also be that they were targeting different kinds of toxic behavior.
Now, I wouldn't use the kind of language described by the OP, nor do I think I would feel especially comfortable working in an environment that did. However, I can conceive of other kinds of behavior (with regard to playing the game) that they might have been looking for, including:
* being a "lone wolf" and generally not cooperating with teammates
* persistently blaming others for one's own failings
* taking undue credit for successes
* rage quiting, or otherwise being a sore loser
* trolling others rather than actually playing the game
When I was a new grad I was hired at a company that did QA consulting. I was put on a team with 5 other people to create a integration test framework for a insurance company, who was rolling out a brand new software stack. It's probably one of the few times in my career that I had:
A) The whole team was responsible for the project, if the framework broke we took the blame as a team rather than crapping on individuals
B) PRs got seriously reviewed, there were strict rules about what was a quality PR and our team lead ensured that they were enforced. At the start of the project I lost several days of work because my PRs weren't of sufficient quality.
C) We got a start a project with no legacy code, building everything from the ground up. We had architecture meetings, everyone's input was vetted and valued.
Since then I haven't worked on a team where I felt that things were as cohesive. People make shitty design decisions and are not receptive to criticism. Lots of rubber stamping "approve" on PRs without actually reviewing the code, or accepting PRs without unit tests. Inheriting legacy code which was written poorly, but still has to be maintained. Nothing quite has the same feeling as that first project.
On the flip side - I've been at two companies who don't use branches to develop software, and I've never been a part of a PR process unless I was doing it on my own time :/
It’s natural to hit the brakes. Sometimes that can kill you. Like driving on the highway during the rain and trying avoid fox or dog.
This failure mode (pedestrian jumping in front of the car) is quite often. I drive 10k miles early and encounter this at least once yearly. Last time it was an elder gentleman who felt off his bicycle on the street from pavement. Time before it was a boy with scooter. It happens often and the scenario is easy to test in closed area.
I don't buy the "jumping in front of the car" part. Pedestrians pushing bicycles laden with bags are not known for being especially nimble. Crossing without looking, sure, but assuming the pedestrian was crossing the road, she'd be standing about where the bicycle seat is. That gives half a bike's worth of space before she's actually in front of the car - let's say a quarter of a second if she's going particularly quickly.
I'll forgive a human driver for not noticing a pedestrian and reacting in a quarter of a second. But all the marketing videos have trained us to hold an autonomous car to a higher standard. Certainly a lack of lighting isn't an excuse. The car should have known she was there, identified her as a potential hazard, and been prepared to take appropriate action should her course change. Speeding, along with the fact that the car made no attempt to stop before the collision, is a "back to the drawing board" level of failure.
Suicidal people wouldn't typically try to take their bicycle and their shopping with them. But honestly, the reason she was there isn't really important. The reason the Uber couldn't avoid her is a far more important question in terms of where we go from here. It should have detected her as a potential hazard. It should have been prepared to stop. It shouldn't have been exceeding the speed limit.
A good driver will look back at what they did after an accident to see if they could have done anything to prevent it, even if they weren't at fault. Uber need to do exactly the same thing. Fortunately, unlike a human driver, they have significantly more data than an adrenaline-fuelled mind and some grainy dashcam footage to work with.
Honestly if you think social networks are just for people who speak english you gotta take a look at the world a bit more.