forapurpose

That's hypothetical. What actually happened was what I wrote in the GP: The effects were replicated almost every time, except sometimes they were weaker.

On the other hand, I'm not sure I'd trust a typical end user to protect themself otherwise. Are they going to secure their OS profile? Avoid malware?

Saying market analysis is nothing new is similar to the argument that police examining phone records is nothing new, therefore mass collection of metadata is not a problem. The changes in technology make the analysis associated with marketing far more powerful - with orders of magnitude more targets, more data, and more analysis applied to each individual - to the point where there is a risk to society of mass privacy violations and mass manipulation.

And when this risk is applied to the political sphere, it becomes much more consequential. As the the Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower Christopher Wylie was quoted in the article, it was used by "Steve Bannon [to] build his insurgency and build the alt-right". Do we want this power, and the people who control it, to control our countries and societies? Probably people buying LL Bean jackets didn't know it would be used in an attempt to manipulate them.

I'm not dismissing the fact that big questions remain: How effective is the manipulation (the biggest question in IT, IMO), and what makes some manipulation dangerous and some just regular persuasion? But these are very serious problems that might undermine things as fundamental as liberty and democracy.

The two prior replication studies that I know of - the first was several years ago and raised the issue in the public mind afaik, then second maybe in the last year - both replicated almost all of the effects. The problems were that some effects were weaker than in the original studies. Are you saying that this most recent attempt at replication shows a large number of studies with no significant effects at all?

That raises different questions than 'psychology studies are all wrong', and I'm still waiting to see a serious discussion of them. So far, what I see is news (studies not replicated) and condemnation (like this article), from which I don't learn much.

[0] That's not necessarily a condemnation of the researchers: Imagine a set of studies that, each time they are performed, have a 50-50 chance of producing the strong effects or weak effects. Which studies in that set are going to be the ones that you read about? It could be selection by randomness.

I think the more accurate interpretation, which applies to authoritarian or totalitarian power, is that they don't tolerate competing power structures. A competing power structure, whether a political group, a labor union, a spiritual organization, can easily become a political organization and therefore a threat to the power of the government. If they are organized and independent, they are a threat. The government's motive is to protect and enhance its own power.

Think about the Falun Gong: Certainly they were no threat to the "national integrity" (whatever that means precisely) of China. Also consider labor and human rights movements, who have no interest in separatism. In fact, democracies are much more stable governments in general, and are more likely to preserve "national integrity".

Think also about the Chinese military, which IIRC is under control of the Communist Party, not the government. They are careful to not allow it to be an independent power structure - an independent military has been the downfall of many authoritarian governments (usually replacing them with another authoritarian government).

The parent comment presumes knowing about these people, what they need, what they should do, and that it's your business to change them. That's a lot of judgment and on very little information.

I also am not a fan of the idea that people in poverty should spend no money on pleasures, that they must live as aesthetes their whole lives - almost as a sort of penance or to prove their dedication. These are people's lives; I hope they enjoy them and I'm certainly not the one to judge them for it.

But some people produce even less that that ...

I'm not sure what you are asking for: Evidence for the third paragraph? That's in the first two paragraphs. My economic theory of why the labor market works out that way?

But let's also consider that in private industry, a great many people in finance make more money than almost every professor. In almost every major sport, a backup professional athlete makes more money than the U.S. general in charge of security and of every military asset and operation in the entire Mideast. How many professions make more than doctors who save lives daily? Than teachers?

The issue is that the current labor marketplace does not allocate resources to those who provide the most benefit to society.

EDIT: Added the last 2 paragraphs

> mysteriously

Is there a basis for this word?

> [People in dictatorships] may be less vulnerable [than people in democracies] to attacks from outsiders, but they are much more vulnerable to attacks from their own government.

What the study is saying is:

> Our research implies that insider attacks from within American politics can be more pernicious than attacks from other countries.

That is, I'm comparing the vulnerability of people in democracies to people in dictatorships; the report is comparing the vulnerability of people in democracies to attack A or attack B. We're not disagreeing.

> women who don't identify as belonging to an underrepresented group

The existence of significant numbers of such people seems to be the object of much speculation on HN, possibly because it would undermine attempts to increase the representation of women. However, I have not seen evidence that such a population exists. Also, underrepresentation in this case is much more a matter of math and not one of chosen identity.

Another way of looking at it: We do emphasize accuracy in data in business databases - again, we'd never accept the error rate common in 'general' information. Why don't we put the same emphasis on data elsewhere?

I would expect people in China and in the Chinese government to also be more vulnerable to misleading and suboptimal information, because there is a lack of competing ideas.

Are you talking about what happens in Japan, or what happens where you live (if that's not Japan)?

> tax evasion

Per the article, the charge was under-reporting his compensation; taxes aren't mentioned in the article. The reporting could be a corporate requirement independent of taxes, as one alternative example. Was he arrested for failing fiduciary duties as a corporate officer? Lying on a corporate report? Corporate tax evasion? Personal tax evasion? The article doesn't seem to say.

EDIT: I was reading the NY Times article. The article linked above also doesn't mention taxes, and says it's a violation of what seem to be corporate reporting laws:

[Ghosn] had for many years understated his income in reports submitted to the Tokyo Stock Exchange and had conducted other "significant acts of misconduct" including misusing company funds for personal purposes.

Tokyo prosecutors believe Ghosn's underreporting of his remuneration constitutes a violation of the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act.

* The corporation investigated its own chairman (and CEO of its larger alliance), based on a whistleblower's report.

* A corporate chairman/CEO was arrested by the government, and the accusation is not massive fraud but under-reporting his own compensation and making personal use of corporate assets.

* A chair/CEO of a global corporation wanted $8.5 million in salary, and that was considered too much (this was a response from European stakeholders too). He took less.

Perhaps some people with experience in Japanese business can provide context for what we are seeing.

EDIT: Corrected Ghosn's title

EDIT2: Corrected the allegations by the government. I had been reading the NY Times article, not the one linked above.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/19/business/nissan-carlos-gh...

I think the only difference, in this respect, is that one technology has been around longer and the other is still the cool new thing. Someday, in a forum about whatever the new thing of that moment is, someone will ask the same thing about people who work in IT.

Mollusca Tullie (to the East, in the Unfathomed Fens) is actually a small settlement of nomadic halflings—built on the back of a giant snail. They defend the snail with their mastiff cavalry and in exchange, the snail provides its shell as a shelter.

Are there online communities where this sort of thing is common?

All I've seen is allegations and anecdotes and I fear an attempt to establish 'fact' via repetition, especially given the politicized nature of the issue (and this article and publication seem to reinforce the politicization problem). I find that only clouds issues - it's anti-information.

While that is a serious invasion of privacy, there is a far more critical issue of using this technology to suppress and abuse political enemies or those who are unable to defend themselves (minorities, undocumented people, the poor, etc.).

If you are interested in specific individual collections then size might matter; if you are interested in Polynesian art, then possibly you could exhaust the Met's or Chicago's collections (I don't know).

But in some respects the two museums are the same size. And to go off on a tangent, I now find that I gain much more by spending a long time, maybe 30 minutes each, with a few works of art, rather than spending a few minutes each with 100 works. So for me, a museum with 10 great (IMHO) works would be plenty big, and better than a museum with 100,000 works that I have to sort through or walk past to find the ones I'm interested in. (Though the odds that the 10-piece museum would have what I want are a bit longer.)

Also, much artwork these days is 3 or 4 dimensional (time), so 2-D reproductions have even less fidelity.

I don't know how up-to-date it is.

> Lemmings talk about it critically ...

The only people I see blaming GDPR are GDPR critics. And, curiously, they all are repeating each other's arguments sort of like a herd of ...