IMHO, that was the beginning of the deep troubles we are in right now, and cause of the political polarization. The brainwash was very effective, not only in the US, but also in Brazil.
Remember the Internet.org and FreeBasics movement which was used to muddy the Net Neutrality waters? Guess which startup was excited about Internet.org
> Onavo’s founders, Guy Rosen (CEO) and Roi Tiger (CTO), are on board with the plan. “We’re excited to join their team,” the two wrote, “and hope to play a critical role in reaching one of Internet.org’s most significant goals – using data more efficiently, so that more people around the world can connect and share. When the transaction closes, we plan to continue running the Onavo mobile utility apps as a standalone brand. As always, we remain committed to the privacy of people who use our application and that commitment will not change.”
I'd date it to around then, too, but for a different reason. Whether you think it was a good or bad thing, I don't think it's incorrect to characterize the pre-2010s web as "socially progressive libertarian". 2013 was the first time I (we?) saw unabashedly extremist right-wing sentiments break Stormfront/4chan containment (and as a deathly serious matter, rather than the ambiguously sardonic nature of the latter's meme-ing). Specifically, with the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman murder trial, and the way that that incident picked up a thread of America's deepest divide and dragged it into cyberspace. I had never heard people saying the things they were saying around that topic, things that would make an Xbox Live edgelord go, "Bro, dial it back," and certainly never from the people who were saying them. My parents never saw the need to give me "the talk", and that was my introduction to the fact that America was very much not "post-racial", in a real way, and often proudly so.
At the point, everything was on the table, and everyone was "welcome" into the everlasting flame war.
Data promised to improve lifes, it has done so in many aspects, but also has made countless things worse.
From physical and digital products squeezing the last cent instead of improving user's experience, algorithms getting every single second of your attention, from deciding the kind of music and tv shows getting produced, to the kind of dull ever repeating style of everything really on every corner of the planet from hotels to restaurant and menus it's all a data-driven conversion to the mean in boring-and-safe or money-squeezing fashion.
Data has entered sports and transformed them from the times of money ball. Basket, soccer, football, are all much less enjoyable and creative because again, it's all about applying data.
And yes, data has entered politics at a level it could not before computing power and data collection and our understanding of human manipulation didn't reach those levels.
It has understood you only need 50%+1 of the votes and efforts to get 50%+2 are a waste and less efficient.
So politicians, especially in weaker democracies characterized by winner-takes-all mechanics, are incentivized to be divisive, not representing the majority of the citizens.
Again, you only want 50%+1 of the votes, if you trying to get a single more you're dispersing your efforts and decreasing the chances to win.
> And yes, data has entered politics at a level it could not before computing power and data collection and our understanding of human manipulation didn't reach those levels. It has understood you only need 50%+1 of the votes and efforts to get 50%+2 are a waste and less efficient.
>
> So politicians, especially in weaker democracies characterized by winner-takes-all mechanics, are incentivized to be divisive, not representing the majority of the citizens.
This happens to some extent, particularly in the US's electoral system. But I'd argue the incentive for divisive politics is coming mostly from the fleeting nature of our communication media (plus legitimate grievances that mainstream politicians were out of touch with for a long time).
Twitter was already a politically destabilizing force even before data analysis and manipulation caught up to it. The medium itself punishes constructive interactions and ideas.
The problem with "data" as discussed here it is that powerful organizations and people own it and common people don't. It's an instrument of power for the already powerful.
An equally cynical but opposite take is that data is what you turn to when you want to dispel with the mythology, hand-waving, and general bullshit that self-described “creatives” wrap themselves in in order to avoid admitting that they may not actually understand why something works or doesn’t work (and by extension, that their success may be dumb luck rather than talent).
I don’t think truth aligns with either extreme. Both are approaches that have their place. But if it was an “uncreative” with no ideas that simply took the time to look and discovered that the three point shot was absurdly more efficient than basically any other shot in basketball, what does that say about all the “creative” coaching geniuses who failed to discover it in half a century? And if basketball is now “less creative” because of it, that’s an indictment of the fact that the league refuses to address the underlying issue.
I think it’s telling that no one bemoans the fact that we design our medicine using data driven methods. I’m sure it would spice up our lives if the pharma companies dropped the boring data analysis and statistical methods and just slapped some compounds together through free-flowing creative passion!
It is often not the beginning of processes but the end of them. This is the problem with a lot of AI, i.e. it takes data and mixes it up instead of doing things afresh.
The response is where creativity lives. Everything falls apart if you don’t have the juice to capitalize on the insights you got from the data.
Trump’s team knew exactly where to focus their efforts for 2016. That was half of it
The other half was all the rallies and stops where he literally workshopped all of his slogans in front of an audience. That’s where “lock her up” and a dozen other creative insults and slogans were tested. Like a comedian on tour, he had to work on his material.
You can say a lot about him, but he is charismatic and none of that is data driven. He has instinct on how to hurt people. He has always been a salesman and con artist. These are creative skills
The data gave him the audience but the human angle got him those votes.
I won't dispute that 2015-2017 was a turning point in many areas, but "cause of the political polarization" is a huge stretch. Political polarization has been going up for most of my life. You could perhaps put a start of it at the 1994 midterms. It was raging in the 2000s too.
I'm not sure what the claim or charge would be. While I wouldn't feel comfortable participating in political campaigns for democracies of other countries, and I would feel defensive about attempts to influence elections in my country, in the end these 'attacks' rely on actual citizens to vote, so the citizen still holds the power and makes the final decision, so I don't think it's an issue of critical severity, and I don't think it's illegitimate to try to persuade citizens of another country to vote in such matter at a constitutional level (excluding specific laws), even if I personally would feel icky about it.
Now there may be other potential issues that would elevate the matter, if disinformation is used, or if personal information about citizens is obtained illegitimately, then they could constitute crimes in their own right. Whether the crime is aggravated by its intent to subvert the democratic institution would be a legitimate question, but without the accessory crimes, I don't think political campaigns from non citizen actors are themselves illegal, just icky.
>Now there may be other potential issues that would elevate the matter, if disinformation is used, or if personal information about citizens is obtained illegitimately, then they could constitute crimes in their own right.
Both of those happened. And are still happening.
This is algorithmic behaviour modification using sophisticated psychological priming that most people - including people who consider themselves educated and rational - have no defences against.
It very much was, and is, an issue of critical severity. CA and Nix specifically sold themselves as election fixers, but most people using FB would have been completely unware they were being influenced.
But now people do, and it still works. How is this dissimilar to controlling the media in the past? Maybe can be more specialised, but superficially at least O don’t see significant content specialisation, rather the opposite, consumption herding.
Which I also think is overblown. The one thing that people can actually agree on is that dynamically setting sticker prices is bad, but nobody actually does this. There's less consensus on whether coupons (targeted or otherwise) are okay, even though they have the exact same effect (ie. $10 w/ $2 targeted coupon vs a Dynamic Price™ of $8).
The thing that's really disturbing is not how far Cambridge Analytica actually got in terms of influencing American voters through the "campaigns" they were hired to perform. In the end it was hard to assess how much damage they did.
But that's not the real problem here.
The problem is that it has been demonstrated how ad-tech infrastructure can be re-purposed for political propaganda, disinformation, and misinformation. All of that power is now available to the highest bidder, and the infrastructure providers, as we are now know are utterly amoral, stronger and faster than any government regulations, beholden to their shareholders and nothing else even if the world burns.
> Now there may be other potential issues that would elevate the matter, if disinformation is used...
Disinformation was used and it is NOT a "potential issue" that merely "elevates" the matter, it's profound offense that requires a harsh and comprehensive response.
The spot the US is in now with regards to political polarization started well before this, perhaps with the end of the fairness doctrine. After that, conservative interests were allowed to consolidate ownership of media outlets, like talk radio stations. This then led to consolidation of newspapers, local and cable news and even social media.
Claim: Brainwash was very successful in Brazil.
Reality: The government in power for 12 years turned out to be as corrupt as any they had previously criticized, generating a massive institutional crisis.
Social media was definitely the start of that downfall. Yeah people used to spread misinformation longer before social media was a thing. But what Facebook changed was the way how misinformation could be targeted with surgical precision.
You can't expect that malicious actor would be fighting against malicious actors that are increase shareholder value. Tbh at this point it's governments fault. You can't expect British American Tobacco to fight against smoking. It's not really their job. Their job is increasing said shareholder value.
Just to be clear, I absolutely agree with you but corporations are made solely to create a profit and it tends to be lower when one is ethical. I would love if these companies act more responsibly, I would be very glad even for bare minimum eg. not causing harm actively but I just don't expect it. Because their sole existence is usually profit. Not public wellbeing. The "Increasing Shareholder value" is a joke because I noticed that some people are using this unironically.
Tobacco companies are responsible for not promoting to minors.
But if we take a more relevant comparison: In the financial sector, banks are responsible for detecting abuse.
They’re not the only ones responsible, but they don’t get to absolve all responsibility because someone else committed a crime using the banks infrastructure.
I'm curious. Why this is not a relevant comparison? They are intentionally selling something harmful even to children with intent to someone become addicted.
It's part of the causal chain, but far from the beginning. The root problem, as far as humanly controllable things go, is the way we manufacture computer hardware. That's upstream of the centralized structure of the Internet which all of human civilization is beginning to mirror.
Computers can't replicate on their own, so they need entire corporations/societies to build them. A computer's reproductive locus of control is at the corporation/society level. Human individuals get sucked into that superorganism by evolutionary pressure and will eventually integrate (ENIAC -> desktop -> laptop -> smartphone -> wearables -> neural interface). Today it merely influences what you see on the phone, eventually it will be behavior-changing signals from the datacenter delivered straight into the brain. A similar thing happened in our evolutionary past when individual cells combined to form multicellular organisms.
In the long run, this cannot be fought because it's the physical tendency of matter to gather and form more complex things. There is however a second path with equally strong evolutionary precedent, which is for the human individual to integrate vertically by taking the computer in as an endosymbiont, thereby preserving the human's individual sovereignty / bodily integrity. We can pull down the computer's reproductive locus of control to the individual level, instead of being pulled up by it to become part of a larger organism at the corporation/society level. In practice, this requires miniaturizing fab tech so that each person can manufacture a custom computer from raw materials using a fridge-sized chip fab + 3D printer home appliance. We will obviously not get there immediately, but the will exists, and attempts to diffuse fab tech are already underway (such as https://fab2.com/, which started as a DIY attempt to manufacture chips at home https://sam.zeloof.xyz/category/semiconductor/).
It's worth noting that any evolutionary path may fail, especially the horizontally integrating kind because it must solve the very hard problem of constituent individuals becoming less likely to reproduce as a result of the environment changing in the emerging superorganism's favor. Some people think they can sidestep this problem by automating humans out of the computer production loop entirely, which removes integration pressure and creates a new digital species. Best of luck to Elon and various other mostly Chinese companies making the attempt. But that's an extremely risky bet, and it's basically giving up on yourself/humanity. We ought to attempt all available paths at once instead of putting too much faith in any single one. And that includes preserving pockets of pre-digital civilization where life happens without much technology at all, rather than dragging everybody along.
Why do you feel like you need to post this from an alt account? Because you know such snarks tend to be downvoted and you want to preserve your precious "karma" points? So who is behaving like this is reddit?
The entire healthcare system seems to be built against the population.
I've come to see healthcare providers like doctors, nurses, technicians, and the like, as a conniving, essential part of the scheme. They're incentivized to make you wait hours unnecessarily, rush every visit, and involve as many different people as possible in your care. And then, in the end, send ridiculous bills to both your insurance provider and to you at home. The person who spends the most time with you is usually the one trying to collect the payment. It's absurd.
There is absolutely no reason for a doctor to make over $1000 for a 15 minute conversation.
There is absolutely no reason for a medical equipment provider to bill more than the retail price of a piece of equipment, especially after insurance has already paid more than the full cost of the equipment on each installment.
There is absolutely no reason for a family to receive a bill of almost one million dollars because their baby was premature and was in the NICU (see @thepasinins on instagram).
There are too many layers in the system making a fortune off the public's back while adding little to no actual value.
There is a reason that doctors in the US make multiples of what doctors in Europe makes: the AMA lobbied the US CMS, back in the 1990s, to limit the number of residencies opened up every year, to avoid a "glut" of doctors. We have artificial scarcity of doctors.
What is artifical when talking about a program that subsidizes residency?
Focus on limited federal residency funding seems to be a red herring. Most modern economic analyses seems to show residency programs are net profitable before federal subsidies.
IMO the problem is largely structural, around how these are positions and services are handeled by regulation and insurance.
This seems to missing the point. Why is the number of doctors so so dependent on federal residency funding (or is it?).
I suspect people overweight it for reasons above. Underweight factors would the long US education path to become a doctor being twice that of many countries, and extremely high cost and high accreditation of medical schools.
Im asking if or how much that actually matters. Im asking if it must matter.
By way of hypothetical, if we doubled residency funding. Would new doctors double, go up 10%, or stay the same?
If education time and obscene school costs are the bottle neck, it might not matter much. Some 25% of residents are already paid out of pocket by hospitals because residents make hospitals money.
The scaling limit on the number of doctors we have is residencies, not medical school slots, and further, medical school slots can't usefully be scaled up because of the residency cap.
That's part of the problem, but we also have a problem with limited medical schools in general and with those schools charging through the nose because of that scarcity.
I have a nephew training to be a doctor now. He's looking at $500k in student loan debt by the end. That's a major problem.
When my surgeon charged $250,000 for my hand reconstruction surgery, how much of it did he personally pocket, and how much of that went towards that $500,000 debt vs. his brand new S-class Mercedes?
If it's his own private practice then yeah, he pockets a lot of that 250k. If he's working for a hospital, then he has basically no influence on the price he's not payed per surgery.
Blaming nurses and technicians feels a bit of an exaggeration. It's not as tho they're high in the hierarchy and have little say in pricing or other facets of why our healthcare system sucks. Maybe start the blame at politicians, insurers, pharmas and hospital owners and work your way down from there. Those with power and control should be the first to attack.
The entire "blame" paradigm is unproductive. Does Lyft "blame" Uber for it's lowered market share?
The entire system (including nurses and technicians) are just agents making semi-rational decisions in their own self interest. Is it important to judge people within an existing system or is it important to look at locus points that, when pressure is applied, can make durable changes to the system?
> There is absolutely no reason for a doctor to make over $1000 for a 15 minute conversation.
The doctor isn't making $4000/hour, although you might be getting billed for that.
That doctor (unless some exotic specialist) is probably making not too far from ~300K, so that's around 144/hr, or $36 for that 15 minute conversation.
> There are too many layers in the system making a fortune off the public's back while adding little to no actual value.
Yeah, it basically all comes down to the bureaucratic nightmare that ultimately benefits the owners of all things medical. Prices have nothing to do with the value of the good or service and everything to do with the maximum amount of profit that can be extracted from a 3rd party.
One of the worst moves in the last 30 years was Clinton adding private insurance options onto Medicare. In the last 60 years was making medicaid a state run program rather than a national program (or just medicare all together). It's actually crazy that we have 53 different government healthcare options. 1 for every state, medicare, and the VA. It's even more crazy that the government doesn't simply directly employ doctors and medical equipment. It's so crazy inefficient to involve 3rd and 4th parties into something that should be direct care.
The US remains one of the only wealthy nations in the world without nationalized healthcare. And we pay through it through the nose.
The standard GP consult fee in Ontario Canada is $77.15. (just over us$50). That's gross, the nurse, receptionist and rent have to be paid out of that.
Some doctors will do 4 of those an hour, but most will do 6. And they'll try and find ways to bill additional codes above the consult.
That pay scale assumes you are banding together. A typical doctor has 30-50% overhead. Without sharing nursing/receptionists/offices the overhead would likely be > 100%.
nurses are just following the protocol established by their organization; as are technicians; they have very little authority to deviate from prescribed protocols or they will be fired; it's unfair to ascribe any blame to them
physicians bear responsibility if its a private practice, but otherwise they're operating within the constraints of their org's protocols too, though they do have more autonomy (depending on the situation)
but really, your beef should be with the health organizations themselves
and also, many of these protocols are in place because _insurance companies_ require them to be in place
The best way to ensure maximum throughput is to maintain a large buffer. A waiting room of patients is that buffer. No matter how many cancel or come late, the doctors/nurses will always have another patient "on deck". Zero downtime is the goal. An empty waiting room, and potentialy underworked staff, is waste.
But why mention it as the first item when specifically mentioning doctors - isn't most every kind of business or even non-profit ‘incentivized’ in that way - they can serve more customers if there is a large waiting buffer?
Choice and competition greatly alleviate that in other markets. With the medical system in the US, you often don't have much of a choice as switching doctors can be tough, and even if you can find one accepting patients, they are all controlled by the same administration and effectively collude to maximize their profits.
This is much needed. I’ve had family members sending me videos about what looked like news when in fact it was 100% AI.
There are photorealistic AI videos pretending to be an old man giving life advice, or business advice, etc. and the disclosures were all the way at the bottom of the video description, very hard to find.
Note that the uploader apparently still retains control over labeling in most cases; uploaders that intentionally misrepresent AI-generated content might not be discouraged by this. Whether youtube will (and can) ban accounts that do that might determine in practice if this matters or not.
Anyone can write anything, it doesn't make it true.
Eg, I can say: "ai wrote this comment".
Or I can say: "ai did not write this comment".
Looking at the comments alone does not tell you whether they were or were not written by ai. Same for videos.
What is going on is that you are trusting the disclosure is significant and real. So, when you see the disclosure you are concluding something on the basis of TRUST. Same for the video itself.
Seeing something on a screen does not make it a true representation of reality. You do not know reality; you only know that you saw a video. This applies to disclosure, video, comments - anything on a screen.
reply