Oooh, I really enjoyed this. The style, while some other commenters had issues with it, was enjoyable to me.
"Some things are fundamentally Out to Get You."
"They seek resources at your expense."
You aren't being paranoid. There are systems out there that are designed to maximize your loss and minimize your gain. This is the way of pirate capitalism, where you aren't concerned about LTV, just about short term value.
Great list of techniques for dealing with this situation, which seems to come up more and more often. Would have loved more examples, but the ones the author mentioned were excellent.
I liked this read. I heavily subscribe to the "only suckers pay full price" philosophy. Everyone is out to get you, and they profit by relying on most people's trusting, docile, harmony-seeking nature. Your cable bill is $0.01 more than last month? Call up and fight it--threaten to drop your subscription. Medical bill you don't understand or credit card charge you don't remember? Call them up and dispute it. Speeding ticket? Fight it in court. Find a small scratch on a piece of furniture you just bought? Threaten to dump it back in the store's lobby unless you get a discount. And never, ever buy a new car! Negotiate everything, even your groceries. You work too hard for your money in order to just give "them" what they want without a fight.
Exactly. Some people enjoy this and that's great. Others are so blinded by the need to not Get Got that they end up working for pennies an hour on some tasks.
Poshmark is filled with products that were barely barely used because people forgot to return - companies have a generous return policy and they still don't return. Clearly, people don't appreciate the value in chasing after a few tens of dollars of money - even when that adds up and makes a difference.
While I understand that this is stressful, there's a bare minimum that some people can do that can save them a good chunk of money every month.
This comment made me realize why I never remember summaries of self help books.
Using examples makes it easier to relate and remember, whereas summaries require an additional step of mapping an ongoing situation to a stored summary in your head, and this is very hard to do in realtime.
> We're pretty close to it, but I would assume current algorithms are not "AI".
Seems like it depends on your definition of "AI". We've got computer programs reading our communication, watching our browsing, and piecing together which patterns are likely to be the same person in different locations.
Then they use that information, both alone and in aggregation with other peoples' info, and finding ads for things that the individual might be interested in.
I understand at least some of the algorithms behind this, and have at least a fuzzy concept of most of the rest. It certainly crosses over into the category of what I'd call "AI". But that's the problem with the definition of Artificial Intelligence: It seems like the most-used definition is roughly "The collection of intelligent-seeming behaviors that we haven't figured out algorithms for yet".
There is also a lot more profit to be made in AIs Out To Get You than AIs acting in your self interest. Machines are turning out very capable of exploiting weaknesses in the human psyche, as the article talked about.
While there is good thought behind this article, I found it unnecessarily difficult to read. For instance:
> "Get Compact when you find a rule you can follow that makes it Worth It to Get Got."
Now, he defined "Get Compact" earlier, and "Get Got", but why is "Worth It" capitalised? I am not sure if it is a typo or if it is also referring to some abstraction made elsewhere in the piece or in another piece by TheZvi. The language is, in general, difficult and abstracted where it doesn't need to be.
There are many more examples of the kind of grammar that makes you read a sentence twice, or second guess yourself, etc. Ultimately, I think this sloppy writing elevates the author's system of writing over helping the reader understand quickly.
Is there a reason to be particularly forgiving? Is English not a first language or is there something else Hacker News knows that I don't?
To make it clear that it has to be really, really Worth It. Not just sort of "worth it", or "probably worth it", etc., etc. You have to be really, really sure that it's Worth It.
> The language is, in general, difficult and abstracted where it doesn't need to be.
I think what the author is doing is defining technical terms--those are the Capitalized Things. They are to be treated as having a particular meaning in the context of the article, which the author doesn't spell out but which can be built up from context. They're technical terms because they either don't have a well-defined meaning in ordinary usage (like Get Got) or have a meaning in ordinary usage that might not be emphatic enough (like Worth It). The point is to get you to think very carefully about what those terms really mean. Which is part of thinking carefully about the underlying issue the article describes.
> The language is, in general, difficult and abstracted where it doesn't need to be.
I think this has a lot to do with Zvi being a member of the competitive magic community. Magic players tend to speak in dense, abstract, reductionist overstatements at all times.
I have much love for the community, but its nerd-jock culture is grating at times.
I liked the style. I found it notably easy to understand. Maybe it follows the structures of my internal thought patterns or something. The sentences are all unusually simple.
Yes, it takes a bit more cognitive processing to follow, but I feel that the idea of the piece couldn't have been expressed much more clearly, given that the subject is so abstract.
The level of abstraction reminds me of Baudrillard's _Simulacra and Simulation_. Now _that's_ a tough read (though it should tickle the fancy of any HN'ers not already familiar.)
"Some things are fundamentally Out to Get You."
"They seek resources at your expense."
You aren't being paranoid. There are systems out there that are designed to maximize your loss and minimize your gain. This is the way of pirate capitalism, where you aren't concerned about LTV, just about short term value.
Great list of techniques for dealing with this situation, which seems to come up more and more often. Would have loved more examples, but the ones the author mentioned were excellent.