Re:Facebook’s war on free will
by MagicAndi on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @07:28AM
(#15283610)
Interesting article, has similar concerns to those raised by Cathy O'Neil in her book 'Weapons of Math Destruction', and also by Tim Wu in The Attention Merchants. Those of us working in software rarely stop to think about the biases we're hardcoding in our programs, and how it can impact users. We really need to wake up to how we are affecting people's lives.
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I couldn't agree more. Engineers are often so far (physically and metaphorically) from the actual impact of what they work on, it can be really easy to miss the damage it does.
People who work for Facebook must have to work very hard to remember the people they are experimenting on are people, not just "users", and that they don't have cart-blanch with how they treat them. Especially if they are building addiction into their service!
Also, Weapons of Math Destruction is a fantastic book.
I heard a guy say once in a talk, "There are only two groups that call their customers 'users': Drug Dealers and Software Developers."
> Cathy O'Neil in her book 'Weapons of Math Destruction'
For those of you who like listening more than reading, she was on 99% Invisible talking about destructive algorithms and her book a few weeks ago: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-age-of-the-algorit...