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Comment by thereisnospork | Hacker News Reader

Do you think what a person reads has no predictive value on their 'moral value'? (An admittedly vague term)

Trivially: someone who reads NRA's weekly newsletter religiously is more likely to be pro gun, pro republican, and pro 'life', for instance

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This kind of thinking completely discards the concept of intent. People read things for all kinds of reasons. I have a family member who was an avid reader of the "Weekly World News", yet he did not believe in aliens, "Bat Boy", or the illuminati. I used to regularly read conservative blogs and listen to Fox News to keep up with what people I disagree with are doing/saying.

So the problem is that you can make some statistical predictions about what someone's views are based on their reading habits. But you can't morally judge them on that basis because you don't (and can't) know why they read something and what they thought about it. This is similar to how BMI is commonly misused. BMI is a fine indicator of population health, but is not always indicative of individual health.

You need to define a confidence interval for 'know'. We as a society judge and condemn people without 100% certainty as a matter of course. Both at a personal level and systematically, e.g. the judicial system.

To your example of BMI, it would be a perfectly reasonable public health policy[0] to use machine learning to probabilistically identify persons of an excess BMI to send them pamplets and resources for weight loss / exercise. Will the odd fit person get a letter from the surgeon general telling them "being a fatass is bad for their health"[1]? Of course. I don't see why that is a terminal problem.

[0]If a bit creepy for the privacy aspects - which are out of scope here.

[1]In far more words than is necessary, of course

I would not be a perfectly reasonable public health policy to do what you suggest, it would be a waste of time and money. Everybody knows that being fat is unhealthy. The people who are fat and not doing anything about it just don't care, or have other priorities.

Or they have a story far more complicated than what have you have reduced them to being. Just attempting to manage the pandemic in the US has demonstrated how complicated and contradictory people turn out to be. But I do agree that pamphlets about BMI aren't likely to change their outlook. They each need their own personalized moments of clarity about their path and it's not all a sure thing they ever have theirs.

But also, a few people are obese because they are on steroids or they have some genetic issue independent of their choices in life. They are not the norm, but they'll get lumped in with the norm and that's offensive and improper. That said, if FB found out their userbase is unusually obese compared to the rest of a country's citizens, that informs them they have a potential moral hazard in their hands.

But if you're deeply offended at such telemetry, maybe consider no using Facebook. You'll be fine without it. I personally make sure to post ridiculous and contradictory responses to the insipidly and horribly targeted ads they push into my feed. Some of them have gotten me suspended for violating their "community standards" that IMO would not get me suspended anywhere else.

You're using outliers to invalidate far more accurate predictions of the ensemble. You're right about people like yourself. IMO they are not the norm. Most "Weekly World News" readers are, I suspect, far more gullible than you. And far more Fox News viewers agree with their talking points and agenda than disagree or they wouldn't be watching, also IMO.

> So the problem is that you can make some statistical predictions about what someone's views are based on their reading habits. But you can't morally judge them on that basis

Companies are making these kinds of flawed assumptions about you and every one of us every single day. They often then sell that info to data brokers who happily sell that data to others who will then start with incorrect assumptions about you as an individual and let that influence how they interpret the rest of the data they collect about you.

It's a real problem because those flawed data sets you aren't allowed to see, contest, or update are increasingly being used to meaningfully impact your everyday life in ways that you'll never be aware of.

The bottom line is that companies don't care. If they will make more money by being right most of the time that's what they are going to do. You might be the fittest, healthiest person on Earth, but if your health insurance company sees that people in your area code have started buying fast food more often they can decide to raise your rates. They won't tell you why they did it. They'll just do it. You could be the most financially responsible person on Earth but if you live in the wrong zip code don't be surprised when you get denied certain services or told that a company's polices are one thing when they would have told you they were something else if you lived on the other side of town.

That said, it's probably a whole lot easier to make accurate predictions about people than you think. Sure you'd read fox news, but most of your time is probably not spent on right wing sites, you probably aren't leaving comments espousing right wing talking points, and you probably aren't donating money to right wing causes.

With enough data it's not that hard to figure out if you're regularly hanging out at stormfront because you're working for the Anti-Defamation League or because you're a racist.

Algorithms can detect (and exploit) mental illnesses like bipolar disorder and Alzheimer's companies can certainly detect "stupid" well enough for their own needs.

This is a common mistake people make when thinking about marketing data analysis. It's similar to bits of entropy in browser tracking - the resolution of your screen and the fonts you have installed don't identify you by themselves, but when they're correlated their effectiveness scales much better than human intuition estimates.

So you read conservative blogs and listen to Fox News. If Facebook is predicting, for instance, your voting habits, their algorithm won't look only at that. It'll look at where you live, what your job is, the political stances of the people you most associate with, which groups you're a part of and how their members typically lean, what stores you shop at, what search terms you use, and far more metrics than I can list here. Can you honestly say that all of those will point to incorrect conclusions? If you somehow live a live entirely contrary to your internal beliefs you're in a minority so small as to be irrelevant.

Right, but FB can figure out your intent much of the time as well. Simply clicking on a conservative news story might not indicate you're conservative, but if those are the only kind of stories you click on, that's a signal. And if 5 minutes after clicking that story, you reshare it, that's another signal. And if sentiment analysis done on whatever you wrote along side the reshare suggests a positive/agreeable reaction, then that's yet another signal. And the aggregation of these signals, especially if you do this often enough, can often correctly identify your political views.

But that's -not- trivially true.

My politics are idiosyncratic and lean far enough to the left that I have a hard time explaining them to my centrist liberal friends.

At the same time, I read a lot of far-right sources; I do not find them at all compelling, but in addition to the fact that I like to know what the people who think I am a literal baby-blood-drinking demon might be up to, I have an MA in rhetoric and find the discourse to be as engaging as stuff like William Burroughs or The Illuminatus Trilogy...

And I am not alone in that. You simply can't divine much of anything based on their search history and reading list, and that's made even more difficult by the compartmentalization that some of us are using in0-browser to work against tracking.

>Do you think what a person reads has no predictive value on their 'moral value'? (An admittedly vague term)

Yes, 100%. How can it, if we agree all human life is sacred? Are some people more sacred than others? Holier than thou? (getting downvoted for this)

All men are created equal. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Ephesians 6:9 "Slave owners, you must treat your slaves with this same respect. Don't threaten them. They have the same Master in heaven that you do, and he doesn't have favorites."

You're getting downvoted because you're not arguing in good faith.

At this point you're just arguing semantics about the term "moral value".

But that wasn't even the original term. The first comment in the thread was about whether people are "stupid and superstitious".

So pretend the question was "Do you think what a person reads has no predictive value on how stupid and superstitious they are?"

There are many different ways to be stupid and many to be superstitious. Not one of those attaches to a prerogative to ban reading material or assign cognitive attributes to swaths of humanity.

There's a lot of ways to get lung cancer too, but that doesn't stop smoking from being a powerful predictor.

Prediction isn't assigning.

And nobody in this comment chain said anything about banning. In fact the OP specifically said "I don't see a solution to that any time soon."

I introduced morality to demonstrate, with argument left to the reader, how the question you are trying to compel is misguided. Adjacent threads provide context for doing so.

And all you managed to demonstrate being misguided was yourself.

If you like and share enough quotes from and links to Mein Kampf, it doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure out you're a Nazi. And if you don't think that says something about your "moral values" you're sadly mistaken.

(My prerogative to assign cognitive attributes to you derives not from your choice of reading material, but from your apparent inability to realise the above.)

Everyone is superstitious some people are just in denial. It wasn’t an accident that progressive ideology went down the eugenics path, or that countries like China engaged in things like the one child policy. Atheist utilitarianism freed of superstition can justify a lot. As against it, you can repackage the concept of “the inherent dignity of every human life in the eyes of god” into a variety of secular packagings but that doesn’t make it any less superstitious.

Please continue. Explain how those beliefs intersect with moral value.

Please explain how 'pro-life' isn't a moral position. Isn't the position fairly summarized as: 'it is immoral to abort a pregnancy under <insert circumstances here>? Emphasis mine.

Where exactly do you propose this intersects with the concepts of “stupidity” and “superstition”?

The hell is this question? You're the one who equated stupidity and superstition with "moral value"!

Pray tell, which group of people do you think are stupid? Please also subsequently elaborate on how your judgment is objective, and detached from an appraisal that might be interpreted as mere goodness and badness.

I didn't have any particular groups in mind here, because those weren't my comments. And even if I pick a group, it's irrelevant to your "where do you propose this intersects" question because the intersection of those two phrases in this comment thread was set up by you. You tell me where they intersect, if the intent was something more complex than treating them as synonyms.

It's easy to see how pro abortion can be a decision based on money. So it might be considered a practical decision.

The opposite position could be practical in certain societies. A Mexican parent would encourage having the baby. In other areas with more traditional values it might be more practical.

Whatever position you have could be moral or practical or cyclical or spiritual.

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