I can share a similar approach I'm finding beneficial. I add "Be direct and brutally honest in your feedback. Identify assumptions and cognitive biases to correct for." (I also add a compendium of cognitive biases and examples to the knowledge I give the LLM.
I don't see their comment as trolling. Reducing the negative impact Meta already has is a more accurate description. Given their track record so far, you'd be a tiny minority to even get to work on that instead of ad/user engagement optimization for example.
For every teen with poor body image issues there are likely 5 people served by Facebook in some way that they deeply appreciate. I talk to family members in Algeria who I'd never be able to reliably keep in touch with otherwise, and friends in Europe love FB marketplace. Yes, a service for 2-3 billion people has drawbacks. It's disingenuous to say that it doesn't improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people, though.
Facebook's algorithms fueled the genocide in Myanmar. How many muslim lives is FB marketplace worth?
Do you talk to family members in Algeria through FB or WhatsApp? WhatsApp would have been just fine if Zuckerberg didn't buy it before US regulators rolled out of bed.
I think it's hard to argue that anyone's life is improved by a company that shows such a lack of respect for its users. We could have social networks that respect us, but Zuckerberg systematically purchased them or squashed them in the cradle.
>Facebook's algorithms fueled the genocide in Myanmar. How many muslim lives is FB marketplace worth?
FB marketplace didn't cause those bad things.
FB has done bad things due to perverse incentives, but for individuals working at the company you can't deny that at least some people can have a positive experience making positive impact to the world.
The lungs plead their innocence, “We give life!" But the blood they oxygenate feeds the mitochondria that fuel the muscles that power the claws that tear into the lamb's soft belly.
Correlation vs causation leaves a lot open, chronically sick with a number of illnesses people may sleep more. Their mortality risk is also higher. I'd wish we could see controlled studies that randomly assign people to different sleep durations. You also have to control for gene mutations that affect sleep requirements https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/genetic-mutation-...
It's certainly possible that the relationship is not causal and can be explained by correlations with depression, unemployment, sleep apnea, etc. However I'm not aware of any study that definitively proves this. It would be great to see a study similar to what you propose.
In general I'm fascinated how too much of a good thing leads to increased mortality and small amounts of a bad thing leading to increased longevity via hormesis and would love to see if the same extends to sleep.
Some examples of hormetic longevity influencers: caloric restriction, alcohol consumption, exercise. Even DNP a straight up poison has been shown to be increase lifespan in animals provided the dose is small.
Different people are trying to get different things from Facebook. I use facebook but disable notifications and unliked all pages/companies. Crippling the annoying parts to them allows people to have their Facebook cake and eat it too. Without being bothered by stupid notifications mid bite.
I remember a professor who equated smartphone use with smoking, he told people to go outside with the smokers if they wanted to use their smartphones/Facebook.
I once made a recommendation of "people checking their smart phone" to add as an idle animation for a Facebook game I was working on once. So makes sense to me!
It really depends on the person, thats great you recognize that you do well in the corporate world. Unfortunately in many places the company would own your spare projects due to the intellectual property assignment rules in their employment contracts. Beyond that some of us strongly dislike conformity and being a replaceable cog in the corporate machine. Connecting with one's customers and seeing directly how what you build helps them instead of dealing with corporate politics is a huge improvement to me.
I feel much less replaceable, since I have rights. You can say "nope" to your boss. You can't do that to your customer if he's the only one paying your rent this month. And the smaller you are the more others will push you around, not because they are mean but because they don't have to think about you, and just like you they are tired and barely get done more than 80% of what they want to do. And in some cases people are really parasites and will suck dry everything that's too weak to fight back.
This definitely depends on a lot of factors. If you do work where you are easily replaceable sure. Most software developers don't have anything special rights wise as so few unionize. As an independent developer if you choose work in niches where the demand is greater than supply you can fire your painful customers anytime and move on to other ones. Different solutions work for different people.
A professional code of ethics with no weight behind it is about as effective as a code of ethics I upload on a random blog tomorrow. That's what ACM's might as well be, since it's not even universally known by professionals, let alone adhered to.
Depends on where you are, in some US states you can get licensed to call yourself a software engineer. This holds you legally liable to the code of ethics. It often influences court cases involving companies too: http://ethics.acm.org/code-of-ethics/using-the-code/
That would satisfy "weight." It's conspicuously lacking in the ACM code of ethics (and basically every other code of ethics someone puts online with no industry buy-in).
For current issues yes, it doesn't matter you just fix it and get the results. If you want to prevent it in the future it helps to know which one causes the other. Then you can focus preventative efforts on the factor that causes the issue.
Unfortunately without putting randomly assigned teams into controlled settings to test this, how else can we figure that out? I want to know too, but this seems expensive to test to any high level of certainty for the causation.
Welcome to the fuzzy world of social sciences my friend! More seriously, these guys need some help from other disciplines (psychology, sociology or business administration). There are so many ways this thing could go wrong... Reinventing the wheel can be a cool side project, but won't get you published anywhere.
Randomly assigned teams sounds like any straight out of college hiring pipeline, although controlled settings is harder. Google has done research on this, although I don't think they've done much with it.
I agree, the title is certainly overconfident if not negligent. Preventing people from writing inaccurate communications would be the topic of many studies and papers by itself though!
