I think the article’s argument depends on Amazon having a great search engine that can surface the Pareto frontier of air friers, not just a single universal best. Then contaminating that great engine with ads that strictly make it worse.
But as you point out, there’s reason to think Amazon’s search engine is imperfect, especially for new products. Ads are the messy, side-effect-laden solution for that problem.
Claude will sometimes claim that my prompt contained implicit assumptions, then argue against them.
That can be annoying, but it also happens in debates between people, and sometimes the implicit assumptions are real and (sorry) load-bearing. So it can be an appropriate conversational tack.
As a US citizen who takes our country’s free speech norms seriously, I don’t think Meta should be aiming to deplatform even the hateful content I vehemently disagree with.
I think government should work more on helping people find alternatives to social media. The “town square effect” that makes people feel forced to use these apps is real and pernicious. That feels like a better target for regulation and taxation than content. If your business moat is based on network effects, perhaps there should be the equivalent of a land value tax on your network.
I think there is a distinct difference between deplatforming content, and simply not monetizing it. You have the right to shout in the town square but I do not have to put money in your cup when you do it.
I find those advocating for censorship of right wing voices to be pretty unconvincing, and often acting in bad faith (like this article and its cherry picking)
Reddit and Blue Sky are almost entirely left-wing rage-bait and conspiracy theory content these days, and they amplify such content right to the top of the default feed, yet you rarely see the right calling for these platforms to censor their users.
If the right can learn to tolerate different opinions that they find offensive, then it’s reasonable to expect the left to do so as well, without resorting to these contrived cancel culture talking points.
The vast majority of political violence and riots in the US these days is orchestrated by left-wing movements and individuals. The assassinations of Brian Thompson, Charlie Kirk the attempts on Trump, all the riots surrounding BLM and George Floyd etc
Obviously directly inciting violence is not acceptable, but cherry picking obscure instances of it, while simultaneously overlooking the far larger problems that exist on the left, is bad faith. The threads celebrating the murders of Brian Thompson and Charlie Kirk are some of the most shared Reddit posts of all time, with zero self-reflection from the left about this double standard.
> If the right can learn to tolerate different opinions that they find offensive
Ah look, it's the hallmark of well-reasoned thinking. I have seen this exact phrasing numerous times over the past week, did the bots learn a new talking point? "The right" sure is doing a lot of tolerating around abortion, trans identities and women's bathrooms and sports.
Or break the companies up like we did with Bell. Any social media platform with over 20 million MAU in the US gets broken in two, and companies with over 1M MAU must offer open federation under some reasonable terms.
I suppose you are not at the end of the hateful content. It's easy when it's a group, but how small does the group have to be before they should deplatform it? 100k, 10k? 1000? 10, 1? Is one person okay? If I and a bunch of fellow idiots publish rubbish about you and you alone attacking you on facebook with our fellow 1,000,000 followers, would you still vehemently disagree with facebook deplatforming the hateful content?
Business is not bound to any sort of freedom of speech. There is no such thing, it does not exist. The first amendment covers government actions only.
If I owned a social media network, I wouldn’t let Nazis, MLM peddlers, transphobes, pro-gun advocates, or anti-vaxxers, among others, on my network. That’s where my moral compass lies.
Now, you might say that’s unfair, that’s not an open forum. I’m not being open-minded to other ideas or freedom-oriented.
You don’t have to agree with me. Go use someone else’s product.
The thing is, Zuckerberg has uniquely overarching control over Meta in ways that most public companies don’t. He has controlling special founder’s votes, he is the guy in charge, equivalent to a dictatorship.
That means that anything Meta allows on their platform is a reflection of Zuckerberg himself. Whether or not that’s how the eyes of the law views it is very different than how it is from a moralistic “who is responsible?” angle.
Zuckerberg can stop all hate and anger on his platform in one business meeting. Plenty of other platforms (public and private companies) including HN don’t allow the kind of conduct that Facebook and Instagram allow wholeheartedly.
He chooses not to hold high standards for his platform because anger, fear, snake oil sales, and purposeful disinformation campaigns, among other shady business ventures, are profitable.
And here we are, debating whether he and his company are responsible. After all, they just provide a neutral platform, right? If I get hit by an Amazon truck, it’s not their fault, that was a subcontractor! Companies enthusiastically create these mechanisms to detach themselves from the harm they bring.
I think you may be misunderstanding the post. He is not saying that Meta is prohibited from censorship by the First Amendment.
He is saying that the US has free speech norms (not laws) where it is acceptable for people to get together and rant about X, Y, or Z. There are limits (e.g. calls for violence), but they are few. Anyone who does not like the speech can leave the room, try to argue with the speaker, or make their own speech in another room. It is not the social norm to shut down the speaker, make the speaker unemployable, trash or bankrupt the venue, etc. Those actions are contrary to the norm.
That is simply not true. One example is a hilarious skit by an Australian comedian (John Safran) going to salt lake city and knocking on doors asking if he could talk to people about atheism. The amount of violent threads he received is quite revealing.
In my personal experience having lived in the US and several other countries, I found officially people can say much more things (i.e. due to the strong freedom of expression laws), but in personal settings you are much more likely to be shut down, fired, threatened with violence, ostracized... for stating unpopular (in that social environment) opinions, in the US compared to the other countries.
Meta is a private organization[1]. It is not “the US.” In fact, most of its customers aren’t even in the US.
Private organizations dictate their own social constructs. It’s not acceptable to proposition sex at a book club, but it’s acceptable to do that at a swingers club.
This idea that private companies follow the social norms in the US is only partially true at best.
It’s socially normal for me to talk about how my company sucks and I hate my boss with 100% of my friends and family, but doing so at my place of employment isn’t okay. That’s one major example where my company doesn’t follow social norms.
If what you say is true then YouTube should allow hardcore pornography since over 90% of men watch pornography. It’s socially and legally acceptable, with numerous legal brick and mortar businesses specializing in that market. But they don’t allow that because they are a business that doesn’t want to engage in that business activity.
I think it’s easy to mistake the current state of private social media as “open” in the way you describe just because it looks open. To your point, not a lot of speech is banned outright, which seems parallel to US social norms, but whether or not something is banned or removed from social media is almost meaningless because promotion and multiplicative reach is the domain of the algorithm.
The algorithm doesn’t promote and multiply the reach of content based on whether that content is most aligned with social norms. It’s promoted based on whether it makes money or causes users to stay watching the platform.
In real life, you don’t hang out with your friends and family most who make you the most mad or generate the most shocking content. But that’s how social media works because social media isn’t real life.
This idea that today’s social media platforms are a neutral vessel for speech is flawed right from the start because of that algorithm.
[1] publicly traded, private as in “private property”
Facebook wants to get that speech in as many rooms as they can, because they figured out a way to profit off of the emotional reaction of the people who were already there. They offer free hosting for community groups of all sorts in order to bring people to the rooms they can profit from.
Taxes, debt, loss of shareholder value, and infrastructure buildouts are all highly visible to large swathes of the American population.
Republicans are an anti-tax and to some extent anti-debt constituency. Liberals are also fairly anti-tax, unless it’s limited to taxing the rich. There’s opposition now to all forms of new energy infrastructure: to oil/gas/nuclear from the left and many liberals, to wind/solar from the right.
There are no “easy ways.” Only hard fights, against both sometime allies and longtime political opponents.
> Are you not just noise competing with other noise, drowning out the valuable signals in your domain for your own personal gain
You have an audience willing to give you the benefit of the doubt to learn something they’re unfamiliar with.
It’s specifically the fact that you chose to highlight a topic that makes your audience pay attention. Perhaps nobody else could have gotten their attention and adjusted their perspective the way you can. Not necessarily because you’re intrinsically better, but because they’ve chosen to pay attention to you.
I’m scrolling Hacker News and this post happened to be on the front page. Your comment happened to be the first comment. Im in the audience for OP and for you. If this post or your comment hadn’t been here, I’d have been doing and thinking about something else. Is that good or bad? I don’t know. But it is different. The human tendency to be receptive to convenient information sources, regardless of their novelty or whether they’re of maximum quality, may be adaptive.
> If this post or your comment hadn’t been here, I’d have been doing and thinking about something else. Is that good or bad? I don’t know.
Indeed the consequences are not thought about often. My motivations for commenting are for catharsis and parasocial connection, and (if you're like me) your reasons for reading are for entertainment and parasocial connection. I believe most of the dressing up as "being accurate and helpful" or "learning new things and growing" are just negotiations that make it palatable to our conscious sensibilities and self-image.
> The human tendency to be receptive to convenient information sources, regardless of their novelty or whether they’re of maximum quality, may be adaptive.
And that begins to touch on another aspect of my demotivation, which is, "Why bother creating value? It won't help the reception." Unless you're contributing some huge objective boon to humanity, the reception largely boils down to marketing and dumb luck. I've seen too many of my life's works languish in obscurity to put any more emotional attachment into the thing. One must labor only for one's own inner satisfaction, but what if that means one is left with no motivation to labor at all? Then, I suppose, that's just the death of a laborer and the birth of a slacker.
Since 1974, when science increasingly underwrote policy, it’s become entwined with politics through the EPA, climate change, treatment of gender and sexuality, public health, mandatory teaching of evolution, and “critical race theory.”
Conservatives don’t have as much of a problem with science when it avoids “impact science” and sticks to topics that don’t conflict with church teachings or business interests.
But trust in science has never been universal. Trust in institutions and experts had to be built painstakingly over generations. The Social Transformation of American Medicine is a great account of this process for American doctors.
IPOs are one-shot, sealed-bid auctions, and the winner’s curse applies. There are separate equilibria where the company maximizes its cash gains or its fully diluted market cap. It can pick which to target.
“Leaving nothing on the table” would mean selling few enough shares at the IPO that you have to overpay to get shares at the IPO. Previous valuations are known, as is that implied by each choice of IPO price when looking at the book. So the skill is just in the company not needing all that much money and being great at generating hype.
Many autistic children have extremely limited diets. For example, a geneticist friend of mine saw a case where an autistic child had been referred for genetic testing because of horrific, chronic, spontaneous wounds on gums and skin. Turned out to be scurvy, because he had exclusively eaten Wheat Thins for the last 3-4 years, which aren’t fortified with vitamin C.
I would fully expect that a monotonous diet leads to a heavy skew in the gut microbiome as specific bacterial species that thrive on that diet are selected for, others against. It makes some sense that a fecal transplant could repair the damage. If the diet has shifted or expanded, the transplant could lead to long term benefits by restoring newly-viable bacterial species, perhaps by facilitating digestion of the new types of food.
I’d be curious to see a factoring out of the diet composition, gut microbiome, genetics, and severity of autism symptoms.
The microbiome might have some modulating effect, but the fidelity of gut-brain axis communication isn’t so strong that our gut microbiome is driving us around with highly specific inputs.
The theories for how gut-brain axis modulation works include altering the balance of nutrients that get absorbed and modulating the vagus nerve, primarily. For someone with autism it might be possible that altering some of these balances could make the condition better or worse, but that’s all theory without much foundation.
What is known, however, is that diet has a massive impact on the microbiome. Even the mechanism for that is obvious: Bacteria thrive on different foods, so if you eat more of one class of nutrients and less of another then the microbiome proportions will adjust based on which ones thrive on that diet.
I’m not going to pretend to be an expert here, but I remember a study that found gut bacteria composition predicted whether or not an individual was chocolate-craving or not in individuals eating identical diets: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17929959
putting aside what others have commented about the truastability of studies and similar
- what all studies show is some vague "craving" for something generic, e.g. the link between iron deficiency and craving for ice
- but what you see in autists is often a far stronger effect and not just for eating something, but also against eating most other food. A craving for chocolate does not remove appetite and willingness to eat other food. It just makes you really want to eat chocolate.
- more important the way autistic people get fixated on a monotonous diet is far more specific then any effects we have observed from gut bacteria or other similar sources AFIK. Like lets say your gut bacteria might make you crave fish. You autism on the other hand might make you crave dino formed fish sticks with a specific texture. And there is just no way gut bacteria care about your fish sticks being dino formed or the specific texture of them... But a autistic person often does care, quite a bit even.
Yes, restrictive behaviors and powerful adherence to familiar routines are a general feature of autism. It’s not specific to food. The comments trying to draw complex links between food cravings and these behaviors are missing the fact that this type of behavior is not limited to foods. Food is only one area where it might manifest.
Mine is just an anecdotal experience but I have Asperger's and the reason I eat the same food is not about disliking other food. I actually like most food. I eat the same stuff because:
1) Eating the same food frequently means I don't have to spend any of my cognitive cycles on deciding what to eat.
2) I know that this food will sit alright with my digestive system. Everyone I know personally on the spectrum has stress-related digestive issues.
For snacks and small meals I will eat citrus or microwave a small sweet potato and this helps with Vitamin C.
Autistic adults are not children and using dino-shaped fish sticks probably does not represent most adults on the spectrum.
You have to be careful with microbiome research because it’s a buzzword that gets crammed into a lot of research papers to imply something bigger. This is a single paper from Nestle Research Center (yes that Nestle) from 2007 that doesn’t even cite a number of people sampled in the abstract.
They didn’t run any experiments trying to change the diet or microbiome. They just correlated dietary preferences with some markers that might be correlated with the microbiome.
The paper does not say anything about how changing the microbiome might change preferences. The simplest and most well tested explanation is that dietary preference are driving the microbiome.
There’s a lot of woo-woo microbiome discussion out there that misses the really obvious basics of how the microbiome comes to exist and thrive: What you eat is what the microbiome eats, so changing what you eat will change the composition of bacteria that thrive. People who prefer chocolate are correlated with people who prefer sweet diets. High sugar intake is proven to alter the microbiome.
It makes sense for chocolate given that cocoa flavanols are prebiotic fiber for GABA-secreting bacteria which of course affects the parasympathetic nervous system.
The paper didn’t say that the microbiome was driving food preferences.
It measured some bio markers and some dietary preferences and claims some correlation.
The correlation is that what you eat fuels the microbiome. So your diet influences the microbiome by fueling or starving different bacteria.
Complex theories about causality going the other way through complex chains of flavonoids to bacteria to neurotransmitters to the parasympathetic nervous system sound impressive with all of the big words, but it’s such a complex theory that would need other testing to even begin to understand if there was something there.
Testing the other direction is easy and obvious. You can grow many bacteria in a Petri dish and see that some grow better or worse with different nutrients.
But is it driven by a desire for the diet, or a desire against things that provoke an undesirable reaction?
I am forced into an extremely limited diet to avoid provoking my body any more than I have to. And, notably, one of the first reactions used to be something not tasting as good as it used to (or in one case tasting worse than it had.) It doesn't always happen but when it does it's a near 100% accurate test--the only time it ever fooled me the actual culprit turned out to be something my wife put on her face.
I saw what happened to my mother (very similar path, but started much later in life), I already knew how to isolate what was giving me trouble before it ever happened. Most people don't, though, especially when dealing with things where it isn't high on the ingredients list (or, sometimes, not at all--they are strong about requiring manufacturers to list what they put in, but there is no such requirement about noting what they fail to take out from a natural source. Not to mention being allowed to specify that most evil of ingredients "artificial flavors". The second most evil being "natural flavors.")
Yes! My son who has autism would eat anything we put in front of him until age 3, when his weight, appetite and health suddenly and alarmingly crashed. Ever since that episode, he's had a much more restrictive diet and food preferences. Night and day.
They never successfully identified what happened. Just diagnosed it generally as failure to thrive.
There’s some research on sudden onset autism being treated with antifungals; so at least sometimes a sudden change may be the result of something very specific in the gut.
You seed the gut with nutrients. having lots of fiber and a varied diet increases the number of species that an adult has which is between a couple hundred to a thousand or so.
Our guts are generally dominated by a bunch of beneficial bacteria.
which for many is not the case for a variety of social economic or behavioral reasons. Add in with explosions of bacterial populations due to alcohol or sugar and you can see how we can change our gut biome drastically from week to week.
I’ve noticed I really need to keep alcohol and sugar consumption in check. Sometimes it seems like one drink is enough to kick off a gut ecosystem collapse, and other times my gut is more resistant to the effects. Definitely trying to increase fiber consumption significantly.
How do you know that is a “gut ecosystem collapse” as opposed to hypermotility? Or an overgrowth of the gut ecosystem? Or a problem with the intestinal lining?
Observing that if you eat/drink something specific then you get the shits is valid. Concluding that it is due to a specific mechanism is not valid unless you have something objective like a test supporting that.
It’s like if your train is late and you just conclude that it must be because the steam condenser’s gasket is leaking based on nothing. Maybe true, or maybe the conductor broke his leg, or there is a signaling failure.
If you drop an ACME 100Kg anvil on your foot, you get a broken foot, and you can conclude "this fucked me, I won't do it again". But if you say "I suffered foot ecosystem collapse" and people ask you what that means and how you identified it, whinging about how people should stop asking stupid questions because all bad things are bad therefore they must be the same thing, is not helping anyone.
With IBS-D every meal can result in a loose and unsatisfying stool output! Don't ask me how I know. GLP-1s actually make a hell of a difference for me.
Simple starches and sugars (the former being rapidly converted into the latter) are probably the most harmful ingredient once we exclude actual poisons. And they’re just as normalized with most food being primarily composed of them, even though normal people barely need them.
autists have often a much much stronger need for habits and avoidance of change. This includes a change of, or a less repeting/habitual diet. The effect if applified due to autism being commonly comorbid with ADHD and hyper fixation on specific foods being a very common thing (not (mainly) caused by gut bacteria as the effect is too strong and too specific to be "just" a preference caused by gut bacteria)
but this can lead to a imbalance of gut bacteria and that can have an reinforcing effect on wanting a even more monotonous diet, but in the end this is AFIK "just" a secondary reinforcing reason not the root cause
this relies a bit on a healthy brain to make s good correlation. an unhealthy brain might make a bad diet just out of habit/compulsion rather than driven by their biology.
We usually call these our "safe foods" and yes, it is a very real problem for many of us in the autistic community, specifically around nutritional deficiencies. In a similar vein, as a child I went several years just eating plain Cheerios. For a close friend it was chicken nuggets.
"letting me" is hardly how I'd put it. More like I would refuse to eat any and all food unless committed to a hospital stay. Eating Cheerios and taking supplements was a compromise for my exhausted parents and they were more at a loss of what else to do. I don't think you understand what living with someone with moderate to severe autism is like. It's not being a "willful child" it's an entirely different experience than what most parents are exposed to.
Given how many kids are told to just "shut up and eat it" - and/or didn't have extreme pickiness but got DX'ed perhaps as an adult - I'd say there's a ton of research required to even suggest this as a plausible cause (even for a limited number of cases). It might make things worse, but I highly doubt it's causative.
There is a very popular wrestler who works for WWE who goes by the stage name Triple H. Triple H was part of a group called D Generation X, or DX for short. A clothesline is one of the most basic wrestling moves. This is not sport wrestling, but entertainment wrestling.
> [...] the treatment, which involved a bowel cleanse and daily transplants of fecal microbiota over a period of seven to eight weeks
Maybe I'm misinterpreting what the process of that daily transplant looked like, but I expect they ate a not insignificant amount of hospital food if there were 7-8 weeks of daily treatments.
I didn't realize it was such a protracted process, but even if it's a long series of daily treatment, they aren't going to admit you for that if it can be done outpatient. You will be admitted if it's a risky enough procedure that it requires extended/overnight observation. If you can safely go home and come back the next day that is what they will ask you to do.
Ya, the word "transplants" here seems to mean something very different than you're interpreting it as.
This isn't a hospital procedure like an organ transplant. It's material placed into the recipients colon through an enema, nasogastric tube or possibly even just taking some pills.
So it might range from done at home to done during a 30 minute visit to a clinic.
I know it's nothing on the scale of an organ transplant, but (other than pills) those things would still lead to the patients being at the hospital. And with frequent enough visits to a hospital, you would probably eat at least some meals there. That's all I meant (and said).
In my experience (instant cure for recurrent c. diff) a fecal transplant is easier and simpler than a colonoscopy, which themselves are easy enough to be outpatient.
But as you point out, there’s reason to think Amazon’s search engine is imperfect, especially for new products. Ads are the messy, side-effect-laden solution for that problem.