It's funny that the graph uses logarithmic scaling which makes the increase look much less dramatic than it really is. On the other hand, a lot of stock charts use linear scaling which makes more dramatic than they really are. I think it should be the other way.
When I did contracting at Siemens in Germany, the son of the CTO ran a staffing firm. He took around 30-50% of what Siemens paid. We did a rough calculation and concluded that the guy must make millions for not doing much. It’s hard to understand why countries are contracting with staffing firms that take a high cut but they do.
I always find Germans as a collective weirdly naive about the top-level corruption that goes on in their country. Don't get me wrong, I don't claim that it exceeds the US in anyway but Americans don't have any illusions about the possible corruption the top brass can be engaging at any point in time. Germans seem to be way too ocd about following the rules at the individual level themselves and policing those around them at an individual level that they don't seem to have much energy left for contemplating top-level or systematic corruption. German pride seems to also discourage them from engaging in devil's advocating when it comes to auditing German darling companies. I'm guessing the VW, Deutsche bank, and Wirecard scandals have at least made a healthy little dent in that collective psyche.
The physics is the easy part. Starship consists of thousands (millions?) parts that are all manufactured to varying precision. These tolerances can add up and cause unexpected failures.
It's more that one of the talking points of the political right in the us is that socialism is bad, while the state owning means of production is a key idea of socialism. So Trump making this happen is very ironic.
I feel this not much different from dealing with large teams of offshore devs. You constantly get huge piles of code of questionable quality written by people who don’t understand your domain. Doing thorough review probably takes as much time as writing it yourself so you end up shipping code where nobody really knows what the problems are and hope for the best.
I also used to think that you can coach people into becoming good performers. But experience has taught me that teams are more productive by magnitudes if everybody gets along and trusts each other. Even one bad performer can have a huge negative impact.
My observation is that anybody who engages a lot on social media is at a very high risk of losing their mind over time. They get caught up in these weird bubbles of constant controversy and group think bubbles . I have seen this with friends but also with more famous people.
For content creators there is a lot of economic incentive. Real science is kind of boring and mundane while controversy is exciting and sells.
It’s one of those “the house always wins” setups. For a while if you have success and integrity, you wag the algorithm. Eventually though, the algorithm always ends up wagging you.
That particular meaning of "audience capture" might be Weinstein's coinage, but the term itself predates that; you can just search Google Scholar to confirm.
Mathematicians went nuts trying to invalidate Gödel. Imo similar phenomena to our senses; chasing an endlessly big numbers with no real outcome but growing some number that ostensibly represents an audience but who knows if its real or just numbers on a screen.
Religious belief is same biological phenom, chasing endless propagation of the religion.
Minds go fractal. It's like Snowcrash but they’re not blank, they speak in tongues, circumlocuting gibberish.
Social media is like a parasite for the brain that slowly drives a person insane. Posting or only consuming.
In some sense, whenever I see someone with psychotic views (in any political, ideological, social / etc direction), it’s not even “their fault” — their mind was simply melted by technology.
Your comment sounds hyperbolic at first blush. But the more I think and observe and read about incoming evidence, it seems correct.
And if we take that as fact, that means Zuck's culpability is nigh unprecedented in private enterprise. The mega-scale profiteering of Apple & Microsoft & Amazon distort markets and elbow out competition but that doesn't compare to the personal misery and destabilization and resulting downstream poverty and violence caused by social media. Purveyors of booze and cigarettes are closer, but those things never threatened democracy or global order. Fossil fuel companies may contribute to climate change, but no one can saddle them with full moral responsibility for selling a product that's the lifeblood of the world. Weapons manufacturers didn't start the wars or cause the instability.
So Zuck and his algorithmic friends - what to make of them? The mind boggles.
I call social media the “tobacco companies of the mind.”
There was a time when it was a mixed bag with some bad stuff but some connecting of friends and letting people find new ones. Then the algorithmic timelines and other stuff came. Since then I think it has become a strong net negative.
On balance it’s the worst thing tech has built. Worse, I think, than crypto gambling. It might be worse than the mass surveillance stuff in terms of, as you say, mental destabilization and social harm.
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