A Sucker Is Optimized Every Minute 110
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.'"
Anonymous Coward (Score:5, Funny)
Suckering people into registering by calling them cowards if they don't. That's news?
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Suckering people into registering by calling them cowards if they don't. That's news?
-Anonymous Coward
Well done sir.
"nitehawk214"'s on your birth certificate? (Score:1)
Who's the real coward (and sucker) here?? Is that your fantasy name for your failed life??? Yes.
Re: "nitehawk214"'s on your birth certificate? (Score:2, Funny)
I am just surprise that they were already 213 night hawks on the Internet
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and all of them are also registered on slashdot!
Re:Ironic (Score:5, Interesting)
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the mechanism by which the mind optimizes information directly, rather than through simulation
Your entire nervous system is a continuous feedback simulation of body/environment interaction that predicts ~0.25 seconds into the future and adjusts the chemistry of your body to react accordingly. Your mind is the self referential part of that simulation. Everywhere we look in the universe we see systems of enormous complexity emerging from matter and the simple rules of physics, many are also self referential in the sense they display a fractal nature or feedback loops, the human mind is no more or less
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the mechanism by which the mind optimizes information directly, rather than through simulation
Your entire nervous system is a continuous feedback simulation of body/environment interaction that predicts ~0.25 seconds into the future and adjusts the chemistry of your body to react accordingly. Your mind is the self referential part of that simulation. Everywhere we look in the universe we see systems of enormous complexity emerging from matter and the simple rules of physics, many are also self referential in the sense they display a fractal nature or feedback loops, the human mind is no more or less "miraculous" than those systems.
Animals and plants are also continuous feedback simulations. That does not mean that they are as complex or interesting as a human mind (the word "miraculous" is too loaded) .
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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 alway
It's OK, every civilization collapses (Score:1, Insightful)
Future historians will look back on the Inhuman Age with bemusement and hopefully disgust as they recite the resources and technologies we had and let people starve while we calculated to unlimited accuracy how many iPhones transexual dwarves buy during a full moon.
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Scarcity is so ingrained in our flawed brain, we create it in the midst of abundance.
Re:It's OK, every civilization collapses (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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What's so good about knowing others have it worse than you?
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Feeding the hungry sounds great, the hungry will multiply until you can't feed them all.
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No, unfortunately it's a fitness and evolution thing. The minute you bring grain bags to a starving remote village, the hunger goes away and then they immediately start having sex and cranking out more needy humans. You can see this in dependent villages, you'll notice frequency banding in the ages of the children, all conceived at roughly the same time coinciding with aid drops. Feeding the hungry sounds great, the hungry will multiply until you can't feed them all.
Yes, that's why in rich Western countries we have a massive population explosion because no one is starving. Oh, wait...
Sorry, I forgot, it only applies to poor brown people on different continents.
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No, unfortunately it's a fitness and evolution thing. The minute you bring grain bags to a starving remote village, the hunger goes away and then they immediately start having sex and cranking out more needy humans. You can see this in dependent villages, you'll notice frequency banding in the ages of the children, all conceived at roughly the same time coinciding with aid drops. Feeding the hungry sounds great, the hungry will multiply until you can't feed them all.
Yes, that's why in rich Western countries we have a massive population explosion because no one is starving. Oh, wait...
Sorry, I forgot, it only applies to poor brown people on different continents.
Didn't know Kosovanians were brown...
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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?
That's why true capitalists don't believe in equality.
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Future historians will also let people starve. Why would you think things will be different in the future ?
Re:It's OK, every civilization collapses (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Starving people contribute neither production nor consumption
Feeding starving people only helps production if they help to produce more than they consume. If they could do that, they wouldn't have been starving in the first place. And consumption without production doesn't help anybody.
A system that provides at least subsistence-level income for all its members will outcompete a system that doesn't through sheer endurance.
Proof ?
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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, whic
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A negative income tax or universal basic income, along with single-payer UHC and higher education reform (too long to go into) would all be nice.
For UBI, I'd be thinking...
If 21 and younger, $250/month
22-64, $500/month
65+, social security or $750/month, whichever is higher.
If married, multiply by 1.5 times. (But this means less for a married couple, but we can assume less expenses if living together.)
If we eliminate SNAP, I'd add $200/month/person.
Adjusted for inflation every couple years.
Paid for by higher
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Feeding starving people only helps production if they help to produce more than they consume. If they could do that, they wouldn't have been starving in the first place. And consumption without production doesn't help anybody.
Not necessarily - it gives the producers something to do with their surplus production. Apple won't be able to sell iPhones to people who can't even afford to buy rice.
America (Score:5, Funny)
The only place where sloth and gluttony are seen as a preferred way of life.
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And anyone that wants to improve their looks is a fat-shaming shitlord.
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And anyone that wants to improve their looks is a fat-shaming shitlord.
And anyone trying to help them is an evil dictator.
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Naw,just a Wookie the firstlady.
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I am a fat-shaming shitlord, you insensitive clod.
Nice Godwin (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
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"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
To be fair, actively voting in Hitler didn't help.
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Which didn't happen. Hitler ran for President, and lost to von Hindenburg. The National Socialists managed to get about 40% of the Reichstag, not a majority but certainly a very important party. Hitler was then appointed to the office of Chancellor, and took over from there.
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Which didn't happen. Hitler ran for President, and lost to von Hindenburg. The National Socialists managed to get about 40% of the Reichstag, not a majority but certainly a very important party. Hitler was then appointed to the office of Chancellor, and took over from there.
Actually, in the election after which he became Chancellor, the Nazis only had 33% of the votes.
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IBM knew exactly what Germany was doing with them. And it was against the law to sell to Germany. IBM mastered of skirting both the laws of the US and Germany, – to get tabulators into Germany and the profits out.
They didn't need to get tabulators into Germany - they were build there.
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It's a Double Godwin! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Oh so troll, obviously at least five modders completely missed it but the last sentence should have given it away " Fortunately, this is Slashdot, so it's likely I'm the only one who will bother actually reading TFA.", now how many of you suckers clicked the article after reading that sentence and how many of you picked up on the 'real' intent of that sentence based upon the story and the opening paragraph of the comment. Oh so very sly (I won't be reading that article, now or ever, cheeky bugger ;D ).
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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.'"
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For everything you do - or don't do - in your live, there is only one responsible for: that is you.
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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.
Hair-splitting mainframe point aside, that is total bollocks.
Assuming I had any, if I sold nukes to some random terrorist group, do you really think I should be able to say it was nothing to do with me when they wiped out a couple of cities?
Wha'? (Score:5, Insightful)
That summary reads like the deranged, disjointed ramblings of a psychotic person.
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The only thing missing was a tie-in to the Trilateral Commission.
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Read the byline: Timothy. It immediately becomes clear _why_ it reads like the deranged, disjointed ramblings of a psychotic person...
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That summary reads like the deranged, disjointed ramblings of a psychotic person.
Is regular contributor Bennett Haselton now writing under a pseudonym?
Godwinned (Score:1)
Hmm, Godwin in the summary: 'Not since I.B.M. sold mainframes to the Nazis has a high-tech company embraced medical data at this scale.'
Well, comments on this have nowhere to go but up.
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Fuck Godwin and his Hitler comment Nazi-ism.
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Your "gut feeling" is also often wrong, but you don't notice because of your confirmation bias.
Luddism never dies (Score:3)
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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Ah, so that's what the article says. Hats off to you for being able to parse it.
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So you'd rather we throw out the bathwater, baby, AND the washbasin, I presume.
Missed on "chief feature" (Score:2)
Apple Watch's "chief feature" is neither time-keeping nor fitness-tracking.
It's chief feature is a connected touchscreen on your wrist. Period.
Those so-called "chief features" are just necessary features because we only have enough room for one device on each wrist, only have two wrists, and people would feel silly wearing a device on each wrist.
A watch functionality and a fitness-tracker functionality are just needed because otherwise many people would have an excuse to wear something else on their wrist i
Stupid article (Score:2, Interesting)
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 correlat
same difference (Score:2)
Whenever an article delves into the origins of words, I take it as a sign that the piece is literature, not news. In this case it turns out to be an ad for a watch... smh.
Fitness tracking? (Score:4, Insightful)
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I think it's just a short lived fad for most people. They get to wear something nice and shiny, but after a few weeks of the same daily routine, and the same values on the fitness tracker, where's the added benefit ?
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You're missing the optimization! "How about we cut $50 off your bill if you let us watch your biometrics while you surf the web or TV, including some ads?" "Did you hear about the guy whose life was saved because his diabetes app called 911?" "How about $100 off your insurance if you run an app to let your doctor collect heart data periodically?"
IBM selling Mainframes to the Nazis? (Score:2)
Somebody seems to have his history badly messed up. The first Mainframes where sold in the last 1950s. Nazi Germany surrendered in 1945. Hence IBM never sold any Mainframes to the Nazis. The other stuff this person says is probably of similar accuracy and quality.
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A "Mainframe" is a very specific thing, and punch-card handling equipment (what IBM did sell to the Nazis) is something very different.
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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 operati
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No, it does not. You have misunderstood the article (which I also looked at). The key-word here is that a Mainframe is a "computer".
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And yet by harping on it, you miss the forest for the trees. Given that the key information is that IBM sold (thing that helped exterminate Jews) to the Nazis.
In this case, the thing was a tabulator and was very much a forerunner of mainframe computing.
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Data processing long precedes digital computers. The old form of a data record was the 80 column punched card. They could be stacked, sorted, fed into readers that fed the desired fields to a printhead. Databases consisted of stacks of cards. Most of the 'programming' was plugboards that specified which fields would be used for what.
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(off topic, but interesting punched card trivia:)
My father was a programmer on the IBM 650, an early computer which leveraged the old punched cards as the data records.
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So, as soon as somebody does something bad, it is ok to accuse them of something they did not do? This destroys the credibility of the criticism. Yes, IBM did a very bad thing, but it was not this very bad thing.
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Still missing the point I see.
Hint, it doesn't make you look smart, quite the opposite.
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Well,
I guess we can perhaps forgive the author of said article.
From a buying point if few, a mainframe and a Hollerith machine are no difference.
The 'punching card' machines at that time were the bleeding edge of computing. And a mainframe as we define the term right now is the supreme computing power in a single machine.
So for a stupid journalist: that is definitely the exact same thing.
If you had ever read a steam punk novel, you would know that bleeding edge mainframes run on compressed air, holes in met
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Well, I guess we can perhaps forgive the author of said article. From a buying point if few, a mainframe and a Hollerith machine are no difference.
But from an ethical point of view, there is a difference between tracking which Jews you have killed, and keeping track of running times or pulse rates.
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Yes, but you seem to miss the point.
If the Nazis would live right now, like Boko Haman or ISS, they would buy an electric modern day mainframe and do their dirty deeds with them.
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Yes, but you seem to miss the point. If the Nazis would live right now, like Boko Haman or ISS, they would buy an electric modern day mainframe and do their dirty deeds with them.
So Boko Haram buys their mainframes from whom? And no, I didn't miss that you had no fucking point.
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The *fucking* point is: a holerith machine and a mainframe is the exact same thing.
Considering the state of the art of the time involved.
No idea why you bring up nazis, miss the point, bring up moral and insult me now.
Is it "morally" correct to insult me because I'm from germany and the nazis where from germany, too?
Or why do you insult me?
You did not get the point of my last 2 or 3 posts? Is that a reason to insult someone?
Wow ...
So Boko Haram buys their mainframes from whom? If they actually buy them, th
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A "Mainframe" is a very specific thing, and punch-card handling equipment (what IBM did sell to the Nazis) is something very different.
When I was young, computers were either mainframes or desktops. And I'm fairly sure the Nazis weren't PC.
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They sold tabulating machines based on Hollerith cards (yes punch cards). They were indeed put to use for the US census around 1890 if memory serves. These machines were apparently also used by US in tracking who was in the Japanese internment camps.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I... [wikipedia.org]
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And yet nobody sane would claim that "mainframes" where sold in 1890....
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Somebody seems to have his history badly messed up. The first Mainframes where sold in the last 1950s. Nazi Germany surrendered in 1945. Hence IBM never sold any Mainframes to the Nazis. The other stuff this person says is probably of similar accuracy and quality.
If he'd said "computer" some smartarse would have piped up with "but in the 1940s a computer was a person, usually a woman, doing calculations manually".
In case of invasion... (Score:1)
...there should be some way to erase all big data of a personal nature nationwide. Its much harder with data held abroad.
A kill switch for personally identifiable information would be useful, I'm sure no one wants to be the idiot that repeated the mistake of Dutch in WWII...
"Factors that influenced the great number of people who perished were the fact that the Netherlands was not under a military regime, because the queen and the government had fled to England, leaving the whole governmental apparatus inta
Reminds me of my old decision process (Score:2)
It's been years since I've thought about it. When I was young and first got exposed to the whole concept of "making big decisions" I realized something. The process was like this: 1. Gather data. 2. Make chart of pros-and cons. 3. Come up with some kind of way to weight the data, ultimately arriving at some numbers that suggested the best course of action. 4. Screw it all and go with your gut.
It's obvious to think that you could cut out the first 3 steps. The big revelation for me was to realize
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To the contrary... (Score:2)
Sorry... (Score:2)
You lost me at Nazis.