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Chamath Palihapitiya, a former vice president for user growth at Facebook, feels (some) guilt about his role in expanding the social media giant:
Palihapitiya's criticisms were aimed not only at Facebook, but the wider online ecosystem. "The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we've created are destroying how society works," he said, referring to online interactions driven by "hearts, likes, thumbs-up." "No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it's not an American problem — this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem."
He went on to describe an incident in India where hoax messages about kidnappings shared on WhatsApp led to the lynching of seven innocent people. "That's what we're dealing with," said Palihapitiya. "And imagine taking that to the extreme, where bad actors can now manipulate large swathes of people to do anything you want. It's just a really, really bad state of affairs." He says he tries to use Facebook as little as possible, and that his children "aren't allowed to use that shit." He later adds, though, that he believes the company "overwhelmingly does good in the world."
[...] In his talk, Palihapitiya criticized not only Facebook, but Silicon Valley's entire system of venture capital funding. He said that investors pump money into "shitty, useless, idiotic companies," rather than addressing real problems like climate change and disease. Palihapitiya currently runs his own VC firm, Social Capital, which focuses on funding companies in sectors like healthcare and education.
From a partial transcript:
You don't realize it, but you are being programmed. It was unintentional, but now you gotta decide how much you're willing to give up. How much of your intellectual independence, and don't think, yeah, not me, I'm a genius, I'm at Stanford. You're probably the most likely to fall for it. Because you are check-boxing your whole damn life. No offense, guys.
Previously: Facebook Founding President Sounds Alarm, Criticizes Facebook
(Score: 4, Funny) by VLM on Monday December 11 2017, @11:17PM (3 children)
I donno about checkboxing, people who like to increase their score for the sake of the score, completionist types.
I'd have gone on a conformity tack where I recall some of the A+ students in high school/uni were very smart, but most were hyperconformists who would do whatever the authority figure said, which is strongly rewarded in high school, well, at least rewarded by the teachers even if peers made fun of them. Having never been to Stanford I'd imagine this extends to there. I would imagine the campus is mostly kids who've never rebelled against a homework or teacher or parent demands or anything in their lives. Possibly an aspect of SJW misbehavior is here's kids who've never said "no" to any authority, ever, not even once, or they wouldn't have gotten in, who are now free and go hyper opposite direction wanting to burn it all down at the other extreme.
There's a lot of brainwashing in school. It works really well until it doesn't. Some decades ago, I remember my locker neighbor throwing her clarinet (or whatever it was exactly) into her locker and some, rather unusual for her, swearing and screaming because she only played that god damn thing for four years to get into Notre Dame and she didn't get accepted so fuck that god damn thing shes never going to play that piece of shit again and she dropped out of band class as of five minutes ago and fuck the clarinet and fuck band class and fuck Notre Dame and whaa whaa whaa. Which was pretty unusual to hear a petite and usually very polite and well spoken 18 year old uni/college-bound high achiever conformist girl screaming and crying in the hallway. Apparently she had been trained like a rat in a cage that if she pressed the bar by playing the clarinet for four years, she was a guaranteed her rat award pellet which for her was admission at Notre Dame, now she's like "where's my fucking rat pellet?" and freaking out. All brainwashing seems to end that way, this was just the funniest most memorable story I can remember of brainwashing ending. Ironically she was hot, so she's probably a trophy wife in a mansion somewhere now, so school doesn't matter anyway, and a degree in clarinet playing from Notre Dame isn't going to get her a better barista job or McDonalds job than a degree in clarinet playing from the local state U, so she was basically freaking out about nothing, which makes the story even funnier.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 12 2017, @04:47AM
It's okay VLM, you can stop pretending. We know that it was you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 12 2017, @04:51AM
Just like we knew all the time.
With love (yeah that's bullshit), from Berkeley
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 12 2017, @03:07PM
must you refer to SJWs in everything you write? it's like ethonal fueled yelling about jews. it gets old to hear a common source of blame laid out with no bearing on the conversation.
completionists, authoratarians, introverts, extroverts. they all exist. and they aren't SJWs because it explains your present worldview if they checked boxes that they hoped would get them to succeed in their group.
when you try to relate about decades ago experiences with people that used to be ironically hot because their conformity somehow make them less physically attractive (and so you've promoted her to trophy wife due to her assumed uselessness over these past decades) you can at least try to feel sorry for her in that she did what the adults she trusted said would work for her, and it didn't. and she learned a lesson that many people still haven't learned -- you can't believe what people tell you just because they seem to be in a position of authority.
she's probably way smarter now, and I would expect she still is upset about that. she probably grew up to be a cynic