I would argue that aggregated, anonymous viewership data is a net positive to society, as it helps content creators better cater to demand

And I would argue that this very quickly becomes a race to the bottom, where the viewing of mass produced trash accelerates because "that's what people want to watch" becomes "we'll flood the market with cheap mass produced bullshit" which immediately becomes "people love watching bullshit and our stats say so!"

I also don't believe for a single second, based on their past records, that Sony, or LG, or whoever, are actually properly anonymising this data

“Reality TV” is a prime example of racing to the bottom of mass produced trash.

No,it leads to content which is attention grabbing, not better. They are not the same thing.

It also creates an echo chamber effect, X is popular so we make more X.

Our culture is already revolving around rehashing what's "proven". The most original and interesting ideas may come from those who oppose that trend, and these ideas are most likely to drown in the sea of slop.

Also the "content" "creators" who are most likely to benefit from tracking are the giant corporations - we're just making the rich richer.

Also somewhat related: https://rubenerd.com/stop-calling-people-content-creators/

Question about anonymous data is well, why not do it where the content originates? Sale of discs? Rental instances online. Number of times something was streamed... Why does it have to happen on end device, when it is entirely possible at source.

broadcast has no return path

Probably more importantly these days, neither do companies have access to data on their competitors. Your TV manufacturer will happily sell them some, though.

> content creators better cater to demand

That's actually the perfect description of why 'content creators' aren't called artists. They're not creative, they're regurgitative.

Society needs not faded, watered down, muted copies of originals. It needs more originals to inspire more creativity.

Originality is an art unto itself.

What you are right about, however, is the profit inherent in bland copies, which means there's a market out there consisting of dumb, easily satisfied cattle, to be milked by the lazily regurgitative bottom feeders that know only 'what's trending' and have said subscribe! more often than they've had hot meals. Those saviours of society.

Unfortunately, benefit to society seems to very rarely be the goal anymore.

Cynically, as time goes on, it feels more and more as though we exist to be maximally extracted from, rather than to enjoy any intended benefit (where the benefit is not a happy byproduct that exists only because it is massively subsidized by aforementioned extraction).

> Unfortunately, benefit to society seems to very rarely be the goal anymore.

If it ever was. Most of these businesses are still owned by the same people--the Sam Altmans, the Brins and Pages, the Elon Musks, the Steve Huffmans--who started out with the "not in it for the money" and "do no evil" rhetoric, and now their actions show that all that was just a lie from the start.

Call me naïve, but I actually suspect Brin started out believing in "do no evil" and changed over time after becoming ridiculously wealthy. Having the misfortune of actually knowing some of the other people though, I firmly believe they were shitty from the beginning.

Not living up to your word because you lack the moral fortitude, rather than having ill intent from the beginning, is still lying. You said you would do something, then ended up doing effectively the opposite. "I didn't lie, circumstances changed" is a bullshit cop-out, especially when it's a billionaire saying it.

When I was five, I said I was going to be an astronaut.

As an adult, I took no action to make that happen; was I a big fat liar?

Yes, but at least the only person affected by that was yourself, and not millions of people.

Is a doctor allowed to abandon their Hippocratic oath because they aged 15 years?

If he does, did he lie when he swore the oath?

If he lied when he swore the oath, is he still a doctor?

BTW, I like this game: 'endlessly avoid making a point'. The winner is the person who gets the other one to end up questioning something that is required for a shared reality -- thus effectively admitting they might as well be arguing with themselves.

In my opinion your question is unanswerable because if he lied when he swore the oath he was never a doctor.

Can you explain how your question connects to the rest of thread? I can explain the thread if you don’t understand it, as you admit.

Please do explain because if you are trying to make a point it is escaping me.

Sure. @sokoloff was offering a rhetorical question showing the absurdity of calling a statement in the past a “lie” just because the contents of that statement didn’t come to pass.

A falsehood isn’t even a lie if it is spoken when it is actually false unless the speaker knows it is false. Arguably less so when at the time the truth of the statement couldn’t actually be known. Later it was found/determined/decided that @sokoloff would not be an astronaut. So the statement was shown to be false. But that doesn’t retroactively cause the statement to be a lie.

Notably pointing out that such statements aren’t lies is not a defense of the subsequent behavior that caused the original statement to become a falsehood.

Your response was something of a non sequitur focusing instead on whether a doctor is “allowed” to do that, but whether a doctor is allowed to do that would have no bearing on whether he lied in the past. I got the sense that you were implying that this behavior was bad behavior but to use your example, no defense was made of the doctor breaking his oath.

My question used your example of the doctor to reframe @sokoloff’s original rhetorical question. Is a doctor who breaks his oath an oath breaker? Yes. Did he lie when he took the oath? Only if he always intended to break the oath. If you believe he didn’t intend to break the oath at the time he swore it, you have to conclude that he didn’t lie, even if breaking his oath is otherwise undesirable behavior.

So your point is that someone must define the difference between a person 'telling a lie', 'giving their word', or 'swearing an oath' in order to make the argument that that person went back on their original principles, because if they say 'lie' instead then we will pick apart that instead of relying on their intended meaning.

And my point is that if we dissect the meaning of the language long enough we end up questioning our own existence.

My point is that these differences are already defined and common knowledge.

This isn't on the order of splitting hairs when trying to define something nebulous like consciousness. There would be quite a difference between @sokoloff saying, "I am going to be an astronaut" as a child, and if he were to say "I am an astronaut" now.

What is the 'intended meaning'? The poster made a claim that is false. There is no ambiguity about what was said regardless of presumed intent. Any concerns about questioning our own existence seem extremely premature at best.

I think the intent of the original comment 'they lied about doing no evil and we should dislike them for it and feel betrayed' is key here. Yes, technically 'lied' is not the correct term, but nitpicking it by using a completely different scenario (a child making a grandiose decision motivated by the nature of childhood) is going from 'wrong term' to 'fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of trust'. I think a better example than any of the ones brought forward would be a loan. Would you trust a child to pay back a loan or to be able to conceptualize the requirements of what it means to commit to doing so? If not why would that be a useful example of honesty in this context? Sure, the child would not be dishonest about the payment, but you wouldn't trust them with it.

The parent comment was making a statement about dishonesty in the sense that when an adult makes a commitment, we hold them to that unless we do not trust them, and those were people we thought we could trust. They have gone back on that and now we think they are deceitful because they betrayed our trust. Whether or not they believed it at the time they said it still makes them scumbugs for having changed their mind at a later date.

This is not a technicality or a nitpick. The scenario offered was different in order to make it easier to see the error, not to suggest both scenarios are somehow identical in every regard. Your doctor scenario also demonstrates the difference.

Regardless, suppose you did lend that child money and they didn't pay you back. Then suppose as young adults, they come back to you and ask to borrow money again. If they always intended to pay you back and have now matured (and maybe even ultimately did pay you back years late), you'd be far more likely to lend them money again than if you found out somehow that he never intended to pay you back the first time.

There is meaningful difference between "This person committed to something and ultimately didn't live up to that commitment," (or only lived up to it for a certain amount of time, etc.) and "This person lied when they said they were committing to something because ultimately they failed." In one case they changed their mind and perhaps knowingly went back on their word or were unable to live up to their word due to forces outside their control. In the second case abuse of trust was the entire plan. Both of these say different things about the person who violated our trust and whether and with what we can trust them in the future.

Lying requires the speaker to know that what he is saying is false. That’s what the word means.

By all means castigate Brin all you like but if you want to show he lied in this instance you have to show it was always a lie.

> just a lie from the start

Ugh. Such a naive and simplistic take. People change, for better and worse. And the figureheads that unaccountable nerds love to bash here are sometimes just that, figureheads.

And apologists are sometimes just that, too.

no, money seems to only change people for the worse. the rich ones who are good were good all along.

This has been the norm for most of human history, except for brief periods of time after the people being extracted from organised themselves enough to kill the people doing the extracting.

Flowers can’t be eaten. They’re just for someone to look at. Heck most people probably don’t even look at them and buy it as a part of a ritual or formality. Does it mean the flower industry is of no benefit to society?

Most things we do are in the end just burning energy to create, move and destroy things in the process. The guys who benefit from ads buy salad from shops employing people. It’s arguable that anything that increases economic cycles is of at least some benefit to society. That’s the advantage of capitalism.

This isn’t some flowers that actual humans enjoy, it’s fucking spying and it’s ad industry bullshit. Don’t try and put lipstick on a pig.

Yeah, but people who grow or sell flowers are not on the same level as the very very good engineers who develop these dystopian systems. The people in the advertising industry who make these systems could absolutely do more good for society in a different field.

This is an example of the broken window fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window)

It's a curious thing, though. We have this idea that economic activity with consent is beneficial, and without consent it's theft and harmful. But this is a rule of thumb. The vast majority of things people do are - variously - pointless, inefficient, sentimental, superstitious, idle, crazy, and otherwise indefensible except by the reasoning that its our right to do what we like with what we own, what we've earned and paid for. This we call wealth, and having it makes us feel happy and secure, but to actually centrally analyze it and assess its usefulness would be a bad thing. That would only make its value evaporate. We want to be free to do dumb things, and not to be told.

Ad revenue means tvs priced for less than they ought to be, it's a trade-off for consumers. You could quibble about the externalities but it's ridiculous to suggest there's no upside, for anyone. If that were true they wouldn't sell.

You can't claim something is a benefit for consumers if the consumers are not offered a competing product without the predatory features for more money. Let's put a 'dumb' TV on the market and regulate that 'smart' TV boxes have to say 'this is cheaper because we make most of our profit from it by screenshoting what you watch 100 times a second and selling it to the highest bidder' and see what the market thinks about it.

Also if you buy a TV with no ads or other predatory features, then they push a software update that adds them. You can hardly say the customer was a "rational actor" who made an informed choice if you change their property after you sold it to them.

If the demand is strong enough, there will be. No one leaves money on the table. As it stands, it's deemed too risky.

I'd like another querty productivity phone as good as the BB curve 9320 or Q10 was, and willing to pay, but it probably won't happen.

You are presupposing that people are going to be omniscient. Without knowing the downsides of the thing they are buying that is cheaper, there will never be demand for something more expensive that doesn't have them. My argument is that if we put on the box what the thing does, many fewer people would buy it, and there would be demand for something that doesn't have those 'features'. It is easy to justify after the fact which is why they just do it and when it becomes common enough people stop caring because they already invest money into it.

'The market is the solution' is true only as long as human factors are seen as market distortions and mitigated through regulation.

It's about as fair as burning own money to sell at loss to undermine competition I'm afraid.

You could probably say the same of engineers/scientists that are employed by wall street or google/facebook/surveillance-advertising businesses.

Could and would

Under end-stage capitalism, the one and only thing driving the market is maximal extraction of all conceivable value within a financial quarter. There are no other concerns. The market inherently cannot consider any other consequences or benefits beyond short term gains at any cost.