Chuck Klosterman's "Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs" has a chapter on the Real World, "What Happens When People Stop Being Polite." It'd probably be the most work to seek out, but it's my highest recommendation, well worth it. He's a pretty entertaining writer, and has some great insights here. He tracks down one of the early stars and points out a few frightening ways that real life interactions mimic reality television shows.
> Taken from the surveillance camera of the gas station where you bought a lottery ticket like a chump.
Of all the things, this is the least I'm worried about in the long term. Storing video is expensive and rarely makes sense for businesses beyond 30 days. I setup a 64 camera network for a client and 20TB of space stores about 15 days of footage. Sure, disk space is cheap but at over 1TB/day, 500TB/year would cost about $15k in just HDD and triple that if you want redundancy with proper maintenance. I'd find it hard to justify the ROI on everlasting storage unless the store's selling diamonds.
Even for a small mom and pop store with just 6-8 cams, it can be $2k/year just in cost of storage. Pretty sure they would rather spend that on inventory, marketing, or staffing.
I agree with your argument now, but space is constantly getting cheaper so this won't hold true for long. Also, there is nothing stopping people today from reducing the resolution, dropping X% of frames, compressing, or any number of tricks to make the storage cost/value ratio much more appealing.
Making cops wear body cameras is the big fad issue right now, but it's kind of weird how no one is pointing out the public access to all police cam footage means ever interaction you have with the police will available to the public forever.
I regularly advocate for giving them discretion as to when the camera is on. Of course the rest of the process should be designed so that they want to turn them on in charged situations, but there's lots of situations where taking the choice away from them is going to be harmful.
You're being far too literal in reading this as just video storage. It's more than that.
The key is that selective editing of any narrative can create any story you want.
That, and costs of storage are falling tremendously. I remember when the idea of having more than a few minutes of video on disk storage (I had 2-6 GB at the time) was ludicrous. I've now got 88 GB of video, the bulk of it YouTube or Vimeo content I've saved, largely lectures and documentaries. Being able to review that on demand is quite useful.
It's not up to you whether you get to dwell on failure if someone else has a record of it and decides to use it against you or monetise it to the tabloid press. We're already seeing the phenomenon that when someone goes over a threshold of public visibility, their entire social media presence is scanned for objectionable comments.
It seems weird that people (or maybe media) act like they want honesty, but if someone were to say "I messed up that time" that seems like a pretty big headline.
I'm annoyed that even changing your mind in response to criticism or evidence is loudly condemned as a "U-Turn". There's great pressure to pick a position early on and then stick to it, no matter how indefensible it is.
The media aren't interested in honesty and wouldn't recognise it if they tripped over it in the street. They're interested in feeding the scandal machine. If there isn't any scandal, make one.
Do we know that? There's plenty of powerful people in the world with impostor syndrome.
In any case, it's not very constructive advice. Telling depressed people that they shouldn't beat themselves up because it leads to failure just makes them beat themselves up for beating themselves up. IIRC, the best practice is to teach self-compassion: it's okay to be down on yourself sometimes; just let it happen and keep moving forward as best you can.
Upon reading what impostor syndrome is, I had the weirdest feeling.
I don't have this problem with your advice specifically, but with this type of advice on the internet in general. Everyone tells people what they should do, but there is no how they should do it. (I've had the same problem with the limited books I've read, and haven't gotten much advice from people.)
Yeah, and it would be awesome if we didn't have to have squeaky clean, unrealistic politicians. That is a really small sample of people, who are a) weirdly repressed, or b) amazing liers.
This is just another name for "hindsight is 20/20", which is a facet of "confirmation bias". If you look back at the tape, you can pick out whatever shred of evidence that supports the already known conclusion, and ignore anything to the contrary. Confirmation bias is more general; it's not just about hindsight, but about seeing false associations anywhere due to cherry-picked observations.
Popular culture thrives on gleefully parading around the failures of others in a vicious 'They are just like us!' cycle that gives celebrity to people purely because we find them unbearable. We're all guilty of letting it in at some point; right from the first moment you laugh at watching a man get hit in the balls with a football.
Saying 'I don't pay attention to that' is simply not enough. Your lack of participation does nothing to solve the problem and like it or not, culture is not going away.
Engage and promote entertainment you find valuable. Engage and promote advertisers that fund things you believe in. Engage and contact advertisers that fund things you believe are detrimental to society.
And if you have something to say that you feel is important but is not supported by anything in popular culture, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE find a way to generate content so that the rest of us that want to back you can engage and promote your voice!
>The winner edit, even in its artifice, is a gesture toward optimism, the expectation of rewards waiting for that better self. Whenever he or she shows up.
I've never seen an email from them that I was glad I read. I appreciate they're facing a hard problem, but they really need to find a way to filter out low quality content or improve notification targeting.
I think the writer's points are clear enough that he shouldn't have to refer to the group of Bill Cosby's victims as an "army of accusers" to get through to the readers. Maybe I am wrong and this is a necessary step to demonstrating the overall thesis?
The implicit objection in my comment is similar to other HN user's objections that start discussions every day, assuming my objection has merit. Your comment makes no difference to my comment.
A few comments from the perspective of having worked in and around tech for over a quarter century, much of it involving data acquisition and analysis (largely industry, not government).
First: the "loser edit" isn't just about video, it's about any narrative -- text, images, audio, video -- and how it can be construed. There's a reason I've enshrined the infamous words of Cardinal Richelieu, Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal-Duc de Richelieu et de Fronsac, on my G+ Profile: "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged."
Second: Sensors and storage are proliferating like mad. If earlier ages were largely notable for how much wasn't noted (as in: recorded in any fashion), the present age will be notable for how much that is noted is never accessed. How many hours of YouTube video are uploaded every minute?[1] Which means there's a tremendous trove available for mining.
Third: Search of non-textual data is becoming vastly more effective. Being able to first utilize metadata to restrict your search space helps, but as Google is demonstrating, the ability to describe video and search for it is pretty scary.
All of which means that the ability to collect, edit, and distribute a narrative which trashes any given individual, with their own writings, images, spoken word, and video, is tremendously high. We've been seeing that in the area of political discourse as a growing factor over the past decade or two: Declan McCullaghs false story of Al Gore's role in developing the Internet (Gore did play a significant role in establishing legislative support[2]), the Dean Scream ("In a nutshell, you are not seeing that Dean's speech fit the tone of the room."[3]), or in the past few weeks, John Travolta's "awkward" kiss[4] -- a single instant gives a much different view than the context in which it occurred.
Which is a point that media commentators have been making for a long time: that information devoid of context isn't meaningful. See Neal Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death[5]. Written in 1985, it includes a very Twitter-ish sounding description of randomly-arriving extremely short decontextualized texts -- the telegraph wire. There's a story behind the term "telegraphic".
And there's a fifth point as well: with a putatively comprehensive record, it's quite possible to either bluff or fabricate stories, with increased credibility. While that's a timeless tactic itself -- I believe it was during the second Presidential campaign in the United States, supporters of John Adams spread the rumor that Jefferson had died (or vice versa) -- it was a profoundly dirty campaign.[6] But with an archive, it's possible to claim, or fabricate, or construe a story that is very, very, very difficult to refute or combat.
And that's going to be a growing problem going forward.
2. "[F]ormer Vice-President Al Gore never claimed that he "invented" the Internet, nor did he say anything that could reasonably be interpreted that way." http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp
