scotttobejoking's comments

Workers work harder in a recession. No big surprise. But I fail to see a clear link between a recession and "punishment or pampering".

The one is a general climate which makes you value your job more, and the other is an act of relationship between you and your employer. It's not at all clear whether punishment or pampering is more effective at making you value your job (or your employer) more.

I would suspect that a more valuable line of approach than looking at recession statistics (who's going to manufacture a recession to get their employees to stay?) would be to ask a parent of children whether to use the carrot of the stick. They would probably point out that:

1)All their children are different and respond differently

2)Both negative and positive feedback are needed, but at different times, and in complicated ways.

Edit: clarity of language

For me the issue lies in how Facebook communicates. (Fair disclosure, it's been a long time since I signed up and what they say to get you to share your e-mail contacts may have changed). The relevant section of the article for me is this one:

"When someone “connects” to Facebook using their Gmail, Yahoo, Twitter, Outlook or whatever account, Facebook will ask for permission to access your contacts to “find your friends on Facebook”. While Facebook may actually be trying to find their friend’s profiles on Facebook, Facebook is also harvesting all of that contact data and using it to create “shadow profiles” based on name and email address information. Ouch… And before you ask if Facebook notifies anyone about this process, apparently this page which is ambiguous at best is an attempt." [the "this page" referenced in the quote is the one you linked]

Fair disclosure: my reference for what Facebook should be doing comes from my own subjective personal expectations. These are probably different from yours. Fair enough :-)

I'm happy to agree that FB doesn't violate your privacy expectations :-)

"I guess I don't understand what you think Facebook should be doing, instead? Do you think they have to specifically disclose every internal use of the information they collect prior to collecting it?"

This is a great question, because it's genuinely complicated, and there's no one word answer that will suffice. That's the messiness of relationship...

Every use? No. Every significant use? Yes. For me, secret accounts are significant. What is happening here is an uncomplicated bait and switch. They promise one thing (friend population) and deliver another (friend population + creepy secret dossiers). Facebook has every ability to set the tone of the conversation and yet they oh-so-conveniently forget to ask to use the data for something that is really a big deal. Hiding something major in a help page is a scummy deceptive trick, and if any of my flesh and blood friends conveniently neglected to mention something major in this way I would be mad at them, too.

What Facebook should be doing is this:

FB: Can I import your contacts to populate your friend list?

Me: Sure, that'd be great! Thanks FB!

FB: Cool! Have a nice day!

FIN.

Or even this:

FB: Can I import your contacts to populate your friend list?

Me: Sure, that'd be great! Thanks FB!

FB: Great! Now that that's finished, can I use the same contacts to create shadow accounts for your friends in case they ever want to join?

Me: Umm... where's the link to delete my account?

What I want FB to do is either to not make secret profiles, or at the very least to ask me before they do. Here's the kicker: if they were honest and up front (honestly, who reads the help file?) about what they were doing, I would have said "NO", and they know it. And they went ahead and did it anyway, without asking.

Now, I can abandon my expectations as naive and just expect FB to do every single dastardly Jerk Thing they can possibly get away with, but I don't want to live in a world that cynical. I think this is why we were all so joyous when Google came out with "Don't be evil" and all so devastated when they broke that promise. I'd rather fight a little (even if it's just griping on HN) to recover a world where Jerk Things get called out as Jerk Things rather than give up entirely.

(edit) spacing on dialogue

That's precisely the thing - effective society does ban gossip. Sure, it doesn't get rid of it 100%, but it recognizes it as a harmful thing and stigmatizes it. It does not meekly accept that because some gossip exists and cannot be eradicated, all should be free to gossip however much they like.

Using a binary distinction (private/non-private) for privacy is unhelpful; it is more complicated than that. Things can be semi-private. Privacy is, more than anything, a matter of expectation. This means, among other things, that it is a messy and complicated thing (which it is) because people have different expectations.

You seem to be working off a definition of privacy that is close to "can be accessed by someone else" where in common usage the word means quite a bit more than that.

For example, if I'm talking to a friend in a coffee shop and someone sits down with a mic to start recording us, most people would acknowledge that they are invading our privacy. Perhaps they are legally able to do so. Some people might mock me for trying to have a private conversation in a public place. That doesn't change the fact that if I caught someone trying to listen in, I would consider it a Jerk Thing to do. Not on the basis of legality or even on practicality but on the basis of social expectation. I do not intend to share the conversation with them, nor do I expect them to access it.

Security folks tend to say things like "Expectation isn't a real barrier. You don't have any right to expect people to voluntarily not access things that they physically can." But that's a naive perspective, because social expectation is a real thing and it makes human interactions work.

Now it is true that if we abandon expectation as a real constraint, we will plunge into a dark and cynical world where everything that is not nailed down is for the taking, without recourse. But what I don't get is why we would want to do that. There are some who would say we are in that world; I'm happy to disagree with them.

I'm very happy to stay in the world where other people in the coffee shop would look at the person with the recorder and brand them creepy, because they're snooping - they're trying to access information that (whether or not they can) they're not invited to. I'm happy to keep expectation as a real barrier.

So for example, if you tell your mother your girlfriend's name, it might be a breach of privacy, depending on whether or not she expects you to do so. Your mom might be her boss...

In this case, Facebook is definitely doing a Jerk Thing and violating privacy, because they're working out of sync with peoples expectations. They ask for information for a presumed purpose (to populate your Facebook account) and then use it for an additional secret one.

For instance, if I lent my physical address book to a friend for the purpose of sending out wedding invitations for me, and they made a copy of it so they could flog their pyramid business, you can bet that my friends would be mad, but they would also accept that I was betrayed and that the real privacy violation was on the part of someone who used information they had access to in a way that was not invited or expected.

The right language of what is happening here is that of betrayal and privacy violation.

To say that "Kindness nothing but a particular sort of shortsightedness" falls into the same problems of provability. Kindness is a great many things more than a particular sort of shortsightedness.

The idea you put forward seems to imply that basic human emotions are unreliable all the time, in all places - when in fact they work great at most times and in most places.

Kindness is not independent of cleverness, or of morality, or of decency. The common senses of the words do bleed together.

For example, were Dr Ludwig Guttmann to accidentally cause the deaths of fifty patients, his colleague might comment, "Dear Doctor, that was not frightfully clever of you," and he would say that because the Doctor had done something monstrously unkind towards them and their families.

The colleague uses (in part) his emotional faculties to determine that killing people is bad, and he uses (in part) his analytical faculties to determine ways to avoid killing people. But it's useless to try and rigidly separate the sets of faculties because they live in the same brain; there's no context where they can be exercised completely in separate.

In trying to describe a domain in an encyclopedia, it does little good to use language specific to the domain. If your reader doesn't know what Biology is, it's little use trying to describe it in terms of Microbiology and Immunology. You have to use more general language.

There are are few words more general and meaningless in our language than "organization".

edit - grammar

You're right, digital media bring all kinds of convenience and portability that make them valuable forms of media that should be transferable. (More important is that they should be transferable across formats/devices in time - I don't think my kids will be able to play my mp3s when I die :-)

But digital media uniquely encourage large library size - they are uniquely prone to accumulation.

How many times have you seen the following argument made, "If you made it easy to buy a digital copy legitimately, I wouldn't pirate?" Well, with successful stores (such as iTunes) the purchasing process has been made extremely easy.

What happens when you have extreme ease of purchase coupled with negligible storage cost? That's a recipe for inadvertent hoarding if I ever saw one!

Digital media enable us to lose all sense of scale of how much we have accumulated(because we have no physical objects to haul about. I don't think it's just a certain class of packrat that suffers, I think we all suffer from this loss of perspective.

It makes the question of transferability more acute to us, because we're investing more (money, time, attention) in gathering and consuming media than we would otherwise. So I stand by my original post - this is a first world problem :-)

Oh no - I have so much music that a physical storage model doesn't scale - in fact, I have so. much. music. that I can't afford to own it in physical media! I can only afford to license it for my lifetime! Whatever shall I do?

This isn't to say that transferable digital assets are unimportant, but just to point out that part of the reason people in previous generations did not suffer our terrible woes is that only very few of them tried to accumulate obscenely large collections. (I have 27 GB of music accumulated - that's 16 days of nonstop music. When I cast my eye over history, I am in the obscenely wealthy 0.001% (pick a number) who could command over two weeks of nonstop music on a whim. It's nothing less than obscene.)

If you keep a moderate library, there's nothing wrong with physical media.

1 - Visibility, which you yourself mention. We get to see injustices that we would never see before. Also, like you say, we get to see mob reactions that we would never see before and so we have many more chances to join mobs in a day. 2 - Ease of response. It's easy to post vitriol. It hardly takes any time at all, and you don't even have to walk to someone's house or disrupt your plans for the day. This is a direct result of internet tools that make communication easy, which didn't exist before. 3 - Anonymity, and lack of physical presence. People say things anonymously on the internet that they would never in a million years say to someone in person.

Basically, it's just easier to be in a mob these days...

The basic problem is that people's stories are competing for eyeballs - a personal conflict - and that people are not satisfied with a fair resolution with that conflict (letting the general public decide). They are seeking an unfair level of exposure.

You can't solve the basic problem of conflict technically; the best you can do is to provide fair tools. Trying to provide tools for content access, though, is unrelated (orthogonal, really) to the issue of fairness.

Changing how the content is delivered won't really change things. Either it will be fair (everyone can submit to the API) or it won't be. If it is fair, then every smart publisher will publish to the API (heck, who wouldn't want to autopublish their blog to reddit?) and the result will be a pretty useless firehose :-D

If it's not fair, then you're undercutting democratic filtration...