alt Hacker News>Well not "our" creation since only a few oligarchs control most of the companies that engage in this
Do not excuse the millions upon millions of useful idiots who lent credence to the "rulers" stupid projects at every step of the way. A lot of this problem is in the mirror. Those oligarchs would have infinity less power if a whole bunch of people din't agree with them.
I mean hell, go look at HN comments from before Flock was helping ICE and every idiot in the comments cooing about how to optimize the ALPR dragnet to fine speeders, flag drug dealers and apply jackboot to every other class of petty deviant they thought they could tease out and everyone pushing back was being shat on for not being "pro social" enough or whatever.
A meaningful amount of the problem is viewable in the goddamn mirror.
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I constantly learn the hard way in politics that unintended consequences dominate long term. Often they are things that seem obvious in hindsight but nobody reasonable thought of in advance (the people that did are unreasonable in other ways and generally right to ignore even though they were right this time)
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Now that we know how positive reinforcement works, and why negative doesn’t, we can be more deliberate and hence more successful, in our cultural design. We can achieve a sort of control under which the controlled… nevertheless feel free. They are doing what they want to do, not what they are forced to do. That’s the source of the tremendous power of positive reinforcement—there’s no restraint and no revolt. By a careful design, we control not the final behavior, but the inclination to behave—the motives, the desires, the wishes. The curious thing is that in that case the question of freedom never arises.
- B.F. Skinner