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0 pointsjohnisgood12d ago0 comments

This reads very dystopian. You are not optimizing to understand people, you are optimizing to weaponize that understanding against them.

When you know what someone will buy based on exploiting their unconscious preferences, and you are paid to increase sales, you will do it. Especially if your competitors are doing it too.

And this happens at scale, invisibly. People never see the manipulation.

In any case, it is not useful for most people. It is useful for the people doing the deceiving.

0 comments

etchalon12d ago

It's marketing. That's how marketing works.

rhubarbtree12d ago

And it’s far more important in capitalism than your products.

With the advent of AI, startups become solely about marketing, sales, and defensibility.

So most of the capitalist system will become of this nature. Doesn’t seem like such a good system, and inevitably unsustainable.

caaqil12d ago

The tech is interesting and useful, no need for the scary moral framing.

The original application of the entire field of data science or ML is/was actually based on this paradigm of finding "unconscious preferences" (your words) and hidden patterns. How one chooses to deploy the tech should be judged on its own.

On the current trajectory of tool/data abuse where Palantir et al. are leading the way, this is very low on the sinister scale.

johnisgoodOP12d ago

I am not disputing that the tech is interesting. My point is about how it is being applied. The examples above are not about understanding people, they are about exploiting their latent preferences (before: "unconscious preference") for persuasion at scale.

Attempting to normalize that by saying "Palantir is worse" does not make it any less manipulative and sinister.

And to be more on topic, Twitter's value as dataset is overstated. Hardly the panacea people make it out to be.

hananova12d ago

To not frame the amorality and negative effects centrally and primarily is to be dishonest. There is absolutely not a single person whose wage doesn't rely on not seeing it, that doesn't see that that entire branch of tech has strictly negative value to society.

But of course, line must go up, and it's not you personally being negatively affected, so it doesn't matter.

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