Sorry I only saw this until now, vendor side there are a ton of really good products that need skilled engineers. UI/UX, API, backend, all stuff that's vital to the impact of a product. If you're good at that, you just need a little domain expertise to be incredibly valuable.
I totally agree but .. I feel companies evolve in an environment they do not control. If companies could just offer goods and services at a fair price without arsing around and be successful, I feel like we'd have a ton of such companies. I could be overly cynical.
I'm Dan, CTO at Condorsay. We've built a tool that helps you make decisions, alone or with others.
* Summary
The short version of our tool:
- pick a goal (something to decide)
- pick factors important to the decision (helped by GPT-3)
- pick options (helped by GPT-3)
- use pairwise ranking to learn what you or a group think of the options
- see the results, including text notes (if you made the decision with others) and dissenters (people who disagree with the group)
NOTE: it does require a Google login to get past the "factors" screen. However, you get 5 decisions for free, so you can do everything for free. I read login makes HN cranky, but that is how our tool works. (A decision has to be owned by a user in the DB. Also, we are protecting against someone burning tons of money on GPT-3 calls.) Please don't be cranky.
* Motivation
We believe that decision-making could be improved by a tool that puts structure around it.
Some benefits:
- clarity: structure and record your decisions, alone or in a group
- focus: force hard choices with pairwise comparison
- revealed preferences: you actually don't always know what you think, but you learn through the simplest possible gut-level calls (pairwise choices). By the end, the results make sense, even if they aren't what you thought at first.
Further benefits if you’re making a decision in a group:
- alignment: get a group of people on the same page, by having the most important discussions quickly (i.e., where people disagree)
- independence: express your preferences before you see anyone else’s, to avoid information cascade
- asynchronicity: coordinate people in our increasingly remote-work world, mobile-friendly
Happy to talk about paired-choice decision-making algorithms, AHP, GPT-3, or other TLAs (three-letter acronyms).
* Background
James, Andrew, and I worked on Barometer, an effort to use Facebook measurement to promote or demote ads to help defeat Trump in 2020. Even in that effort, we picked what to do next in various different ad-hoc ways. James thought, "Why isn't there a good tool for this?" and convinced us we should try to build it.
I look forward to your feedback and questions. Please don't be cranky.
So... you tried to interfere in an election? I don't get that last part or why that's relevant: maybe you could have said "analyzed potential voter patterns" or some other weasel words. Either way I wish I'd read that before wasting my time trying this (see my other post). Thankfully I can now add you and your "team" to my growing list of activist brogrammers without actual ethics.
I agree with your assessment that name calling is both presumptuous and unproductive. However, I also think you (perhaps inadvertently at an attempt at comedy) set that tone by assuming that everyone who disagrees with your setup is cranky. There are certainly conversations on here which GPT-3 could predict with striking accuracy, but there are usually good counterpoints interspersed throughout.
In any event, I’m loathe to go down the “election ethics” rabbit hole but I would like to a) reformulate the critique into questions as you’ve asked and b) relate it to your current project.
I find it difficult to believe that you think it’s okay to knowingly sway an election through an apparatus like Facebook. Additionally, Facebook’s ability to do so has already been established by prior research published in Nature:
Since the experiment was simply to increase voting, it was arguably neutral. However, the implication is certainly that an election can be swayed. All you’d have to do is remind one candidate’s base to vote and not the other.
It could be “ethical” to explore nefarious uses of Facebook in order to develop mitigations much in the same way people have talked about gain of function viral research. But, I think what makes your endeavor particularly dubious is the focus on beating Trump.
1) Given FB’s own prior research, what made the answer to your research so valuable that it required pushing generally agreed upon ethnical norms?
2) Given that FB (to my knowledge) does not have an IRB, can you describe what processes you used to make sure you stayed within an ethical framework and to that end, what the framework was?
This is related to your current endeavor because you are asking us to sign in with an organization who also has a, shall we say, “fluid” definition of what “evil” means in their guiding ethical framework which is to “not be”. Ethics aside, it is an organization that already has the ability to triangulate an enormous data from a number sources into an immense amount of power.
So, between your election work and Google’s record, if people are “cranky” it’s probably due to the fact that, as someone astutely pointed out to me once, past behavior is a good predictor of future behavior.
3) So then, how do you plan to establish trust in order for people to use our product?
This is prisonner's dilemma / tragedy of the commons. The best-performing ads made more money, anyone who didn't grab attention enough would be strongly pushed towards grabbing more attention by industry norms. It was rational for every individual to grab more attention, but it was bad for the group.
Who's gonna ban? I'm cynical but if it's the ad network, then other ad networks will not ban that behavior and in turn outcompete the one that did. If it's the government (somewhere), there's a high probability the implementation of it will either be unenforceable (slap on the wrist for players making crazy money) or poorly implemented to the point of being counterproductive (can even happen if different governments have contradictory frameworks).
Google is now blocking ads for all Chrome users for sites that have shown ads that are considered bad.
Of course there's a bunch of companies doing rules lawyering to squeak by and they haven't been adding new bad experiences like they should. It does seem like something an online petition would help with though, as the non-CMA members of the coalition would then have more data to throw around about how users view these annoying ad experiences.
Police kill about 1000-1200 people per year in the U.S., depending on who's counting. See for example the Washington Post data. So it's not just tens over a decade.
First, that means ~99.9% of police officers in the US don't shoot someone, so that isn't rare, as the post I responded to suggested.
Second, I didn't say the police only kill tens of people over a decade, I said tens of incidents have made the national news. Only the noteworthy cases make the national news, which is kind of the point here. People's opinions are shaped by the most extreme incidents.
I think we should try to reform how policing is done to improve these issues. But I also don't think it's the crisis that our society has made it out to be recently.
> I think we should try to reform how policing is done to improve these issues. But I also don't think it's the crisis that our society has made it out to be recently.
Perhaps because you don't see yourself as being affected by said perceived crisis. For affected groups, it is very much the crisis it has been made out to be. Besides, shooting statistics are often symptoms of deeper issues that need addressing.
One thing is that the murderers are not punished. They are instead rewarded with paid leaves, pensions etc. The other thing is that police brutality isn't only about murder. There is assault, including sexual assualt. Most are not punished. Even if one gets sentenced, they might get out soon like this fellow.
The CDC WISQARS database contains fatal and non-fatal injuries for many different mechanisms, including firearms. The law you are thinking of is the "Dickey Amendment" which forbade the CDC from spending its budget advocating for gun control. It was named after Republican and galactic asshat Jay Dickey of Arkansas, who thankfully has been removed from influence over national politics by his much-awaited death in 2017. His idiotic law passed out of effect in 2018. Just before he died, in a meaningless act which did not redeem his evil life even slightly, he recanted and called for government funding of research into gun violence.
How would the CDC be allowed to advocate political positions contrary to the constitution, and without congressional approval? As far as I know, it's at least looked down upon when federal agencies advocate that sort of thing, even in roundabout ways.
"The University of Minnesota Department of Computer Science & Engineering takes this situation extremely seriously. We have immediately suspended this line of research."
