Preventing social networking problems

The old saying is "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."

This topic actually began over on LinkedIn, so some context is needed... First of all, I believe that everything on LinkedIn is a scam, some small, some huge. In response to yesterday's probable-scam-of-the-day, I actually offered a constructive suggestion in the Forum over there. LinkedIn responded by censoring it--but I have a copy to share with you and would be interested in YOUR priorities and how you would word your own message to be more or less welcoming.

I actually think this suggestion (with various modifications) would be relevant in most contexts that use a "follow your friends" type of linkage among members. LinkedIn, of course, but also Facebook, Slashdot, Reddit (?), Twitter, Ello, and other examples leap to mind.

This next part is based on the censored suggestion on LinkedIn, slightly edited to fit the Reddit [and Slashdot [and Ello [and Facebook [and now Blogger]]]] context:

[On LinkedIn] I have just been contacted by a probable scammer. Again.

At this point I am quite certain that LinkedIn has no sincere interest in solving these problems, and I didn't even have to study the ToS disclaimers to make sure. All I had to do was look at some of the discussions in this Forum [on the LinkedIn website] to see how they were NOT handled.

Notwithstanding, I'm going to suggest one extremely obvious countermeasure that would greatly reduce the problem. Allow us to send a message to people who want to establish connections with us [on LinkedIn]. Each of us might want to use a somewhat different message, and that is actually good in preventing wholesales scams (though my contact today might be retail).

My [own] version of the not-so-welcome message would basically list three conditions:

1: If you are an old friend or coworker, I am quite willing to hear from you and catch up on your news. However, in that case you know I'm a bit suspicious and would like to make sure you really are who you claim you are, so please include a bit of shared information. I also strongly recommend you ask me a question that you believe only I can answer to your satisfaction. Let's start by sharing some happy times? (Of course sad times will do, too, at least for the purpose of security checks.)

2: If you have some legitimate reason to contact me as a stranger, please say what it is, clearly and concisely.

3: If you are ANY kind of spammer or scammer, you do NOT want to bother me. I will do anything and everything in my power to nuke your identity, unless I can take stronger measures like helping to put you in jail.

Of course Condition 3 would depend upon support from LinkedIn [or other SNS], and it is quite obvious to me that LinkedIn is just another scam of a slightly more legal sort. I'd be delighted to be convinced otherwise. You [the LinkedIn people] could even fake it. After all, those annoying scammers who are abusing LinkedIn are interfering with your own monkey business.

P.S. More evidence of the negative value of LinkedIn in the available tags below [on LinkedIn]. Yes, "Invitations" is fairly relevant, and "Settings & privacy" is in the ballpark, but I also chose "Other" in lieu of "Reporting [suspected] scams", which is certainly one of the significant categories of my interactions with LinkedIn.

Employment Ontology from the Trenches and the Barrage Balloon

Employment Ontology from the Trenches and the Barrage Balloon

An interesting week has me rethinking my employment ontology from another perspective. For review this little table summarizes the basic ontology I'm using to classify work.

	Compensation
Working Conditions		Low	High
	Good	Quadrant 2	Quadrant 1
	Bad	Quadrant 4	Quadrant 3

As Seen from the Trenches Where the Workers do the Digging:

My perspective is always from the trenches, and my primary analyses are usually from a time-based or freedom-based perspective. For today's extension, the freedom-based view is more relevant, with reference to my favorite little equation characterizing freedom:

#1 Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice{~5} ≠ (Beer^4 | Speech | Trade)

From the perspective of freedom there seem to be four choices in play here, but only two of them are truly meaningful. Obviously people in Quadrant 1 want to stay in Quadrant 1, which means they don't really want any change or to make any decision about change. It should be equally obvious that no one wants to be in Quadrant 4, so any offer of a choice that leads out of Quadrant 4 is practically required. The interesting choice vector is between Quadrants 2 and 4, since some people would freely prefer to select high compensation even though the working conditions are bad, while other people would freely prefer to select good work even though the conversation is poor.

Anecdotal evidence, but during my own career, it seems pretty clear that I have chosen to move get out of Quadrants 3 and 4 when I could. There was even one case of a Quadrant 1 that was sometimes pushed into Quadrant 3 by a bad manager to the degree that I eventually found it intolerable and left. Most of my career was spent in Quadrants 1 or 2, but some of the Quadrant 2 cases did involve managing my own expectations, or at least trying to stay focused on the nicer aspects of the work. (Then again, I'm kind of a gloomy Gus, so I often fail to radiate as much happiness as I could...)

As Seen from the Barrage Balloon Where the Managers Direct the Firing:

First I'm going to expand the table a bit and then I'm going to map a few companies into their sub-quadrants. Then I'll try to justify my placement of those companies, basically mixing public perception and the visible distribution of the bulk of the employees. Obviously a major time element as in today's date, 2017/3/27, and my opinions might shift tomorrow. Beware my often questionable opinions, eh? If your corporation happens to disagree, well that's your opinion, too. (For an example of my poor judgment, I'm still holding shares from a dying company... Not going to include that one here, for sure, for sure.) While I certainly would NOT recommend that you invest any money on this basis, I'm quite interested in your agreements or disagreements, or your own evaluations of other companies that you want me to include. In other words, such comments are quite welcome (in contrast to the trolls' always unwelcome comments that oblige me to moderate the comments). There are a couple of companies I'm thinking about commenting on, but perhaps I'd rather have the cover of someone else mentioning them first, eh?

	Compensation
Working Conditions		Low		High
	Good
			Best Buy		Google
	Bad	McDonalds			Goldman Sachs
		Walmart		Amazon

Seems like an alphabetical approach is fairest now? Should also note that I've never worked for any of the original 6 companies? (But still hoping for more candidates, possibly even including some I know firsthand...)

Amazon has the reputation of treating the employees quite badly but paying fairly well.

Best Buy doesn't seem to pay that well (except in relative terms to Walmart or McDonalds), but the company seems sincerely focused on treating the employees well and weighing their happiness along with the customers' satisfaction.

I've included Goldman Sacks as an example of the kind of financial services company where the compensation can be extremely high, but there are major problems with the working conditions. Perhaps the largest such problems are with the kinds of people you have to work with, though that probably doesn't bother you so much if you are one of those kinds of people. Just my personal problem that I hate super-greed, eh?

While the google has an extremely high reputation right now, my impression is that the work/life balance thing is out of whack. They have such a focus on hiring elite employees (in the triple intersection of super-creative, highly productive, and money aware) that they make more money by overworking them, so the imbalance cuts into the quality of their lives.

McDonalds is mostly at the low end, but there seems to be a bit of wiggle room to do a good job, which is the contrast to Walmart. Also there's a lottery aspect in that not-so-distant managers can be well compensated. The forced (and possibly enforced) cheerfulness may even change some employees minds so they feel the quality of the working conditions is not so low.

Walmart is kind of the benchmark for worst of the worst, with the constant threat of termination, to boot.

Ask Slashdot: Why have you stopped reading Slashdot?

14 February 2017

Ask Slashdot: Why have you stopped reading Slashdot?

Oh. Wait! If you stopped reading Slashdot, then you won't read any questions on Slashdot.

Still, I really wish it were possible to ask the wits of yore "Why have you forsaken Slashdot?" Is my memory playing games again? I seem to remember lots of humor on Slashdot, but can't find many traces of late.

Perhaps a poll on the reverse question? "Why are you still reading Slashdot?"

Having a little problem drafting suitable options for that poll... Perhaps:

(1) I love reading the ads!
(2) I hate funny comments and I'm so glad all the wits have left!
(3) Wasting time is my life!
(4) I'm not reading it because I'm just a robotic sock puppet used to harvest mod points!
(5) Just waiting for Cowboy Neal's obituary so I can add a few rude comments!

Obviously my personal problem is that I've developed a rather negative opinion of Slashdot over the years. I want to blame my dashed hopes. Too bad hopes aren't "actors" worthy of blame. I keep hoping that one of the new "owners" of whatever "assets" Slashdot possesses will figure out new ways to enhance and improve those assets. Does that mean I should blame whipslash and his friends? Even though I think he's sincerely a nice person? Too bad sincerity and a ten-dollar bill are only worth a cup of fancy coffee these years.

In my first draft of these so-called thoughts, I approached it from a more historical perspective:

Ask Slashdot: Should the archives of Slashdot be preserved as a significant part of the early history of the Web, or should the latest owners just erase everything and pretend it never happened?

I still believe that the underlying problem is bad financial models, but I don't have the financial data to know for sure. Maybe there is no problem, though I think that assessment depends on the usage data, which is more complicated than it might appear... Do you believe that the quality of the usage also counts, not just the quantity? The quantity of traffic appears to be declining, but what does the data show? Maybe it's just my subjective opinion that the quality (as "measured" by mod points) has fallen off the cliff? Too bad I don't have access to the actual data. It would probably be fun and interesting to analyze it... Need to find my old sociologist hat?

Maybe we should look for a counterexample of a more successful financial model? Everyone agrees the google is successful, right? Oh wait. Making the world's knowledge accessible and useful has been re-prioritized by the economic model. Now the highest priority is making the "knowledge" in the ads available and the utility metric is the sales figures of the paying customers, who are not you or me. Google's massive profits are coming from the inhuman, even subhuman and anti-human, corporations.

Seem to have painted myself into an awkward corner again? Back to square one?

Ask Slashdot: Why am I still reading Slashdot?

As noted, I think it used to be for the combination of (1) Real-world wit, often discovered in posts that had been moderated as funny, (2) Well selected news stories, and (3) Juicy technical rumors that often turned out to be well founded. So let's break that down in more detail, eh?

What would a graph of "Funny mods versus time" look like? Does anyone even collect such trends? Or would it matter, considering how much abuse and gaming the moderation system suffers from? GIGO rulz? For now, all I have is my suspect memories that Slashdot used to be a much funnier place.

So on to the news. Well, that's a place where Slashdot has just failed to keep up with the technology. Hard to blame Slashdot for that one, however. It's like my manual blogging before blogs were defined to exist. Now we have various kinds of news amalgamation websites, and most of them have newer and better features than Slashdot. Is Google News the king of the hill now? If so, that's a really bad sign for Slashdot. Now that I think of it, I'm pretty sure that Google news used to include links to Slashdot stories, but maybe my memory is wrong since I can't remember the last time I saw such a link...

Well-founded rumors? That one has also fallen off the cliff. Oversupply problem? Or just that the production costs of fake news are overwhelmingly cheap? Always hard to compete with free, and I never heard or even imagined that Slashdot was considering hiring any real journalists for such purposes. Now that I think of it, that might be the sort of project I would support if Slashdot had ever offered a financial model that allowed me to do so... Too bad I'm now persuaded that will never happen.

So do I have any grounds to complain?

Maybe not. My appearance might be funny, but I'm not funny and can't recall getting many funny mods for my writings. I do remember getting a lot of insightful mods, but maybe I'm just selectively remembering them

Wikipedia to the dogs

Version 0.3

Wikipedia to the Dogs?

Mostly just feeling like summarizing my increasingly negative feelings about Wikipedia and noting why the good idea is coming to naught. Insofar as it's an Internet-based story and the Internet is so dominated by America, I nearly put it in the decline of America blog, but the top leadership of Wikipedia is quite British and the goal is quite international, so...

My last involvement with Wikipedia was a couple of months ago when there was controversy about the paid editors. I'm increasingly convinced that the entire NPV (Neutral Point of View) thing is a joke, but it's (intuitively) obvious (to the most casual observer) that an editor who is paid by a company that is related to the topic of an article cannot even pretend to be impartial or neutral. My own involvement was mostly in voting on the proposed solution, but at the same time I suggested ways to strengthen it. My basic position was that it couldn't be eliminated, but the best approach would be to make it visible in public, with a more serious public sanction for violations. The policy called for disclosure of such financial ties, but I felt that the disclosure should be made visible with a small annotation on the top of the article, whereas the detection of a violation (such as paid editing that is not disclosed) would result in a big permanent warning attached to the article in question.

At that time, no one at Wikipedia showed detectable interest. Upon reflection, I can imagine that they were worried about damaging their key assets: integrity and credibility. Integrity is about knowing the truth, but acknowledging paid editing has to cast a shadow on the how the truth may become slanted. In contrast, credibility is about being trusted to tell the truth, which would be weakened every time someone noticed a paid editing tag... However, those assets are valuable rather beyond Wikipedia, even including all journalists.

This week's unfunny interaction at Wikipedia involved spammer abuse of Wikipedia, which is obviously a successful but evil financial model. Some of the 419 scams include URLs that are exploiting the integrity and credibility of some website to fool more suckers. An excellent technical countermeasure is obvious, but as far as I know, not in use. (Perhaps some websites are using it, and therefore the spammers never use those URLs?) The countermeasure would be to add a warning to the cited webpage, something to the effect of "If spam led you here, you are NOT about to get big money after you 'help' by paying the scammer with some 'trivial' fee." The warning should obviously include a link to a more specific warning about that category of scam.

The situation is actually worse and better as regards Wikipedia compared to the most common targets, which are news websites. It's worse because the spammers could easily vandalize Wikipedia to support their scams, adding some juicy details to spice up the bait. If the scammers thought it was worth the effort, I'm sure they could add the bait a few weeks in advance, even with a citation to a plausible-looking external website that the scammer has set up. However, the Wikipedia situation is better in that anyone who receives the spam could pop over to Wikipedia and add a warning. Oh, wait. It just got worse again. The spammer could pop over and revert the article to remove the warning.

Now we're back to technical solutions that are (intuitively) obvious (to the most causual observer) and yet another suggestion that I've offered to Wikipedia a number of times over the years, always without detectable interest. There should be a convenient option to "Add a temporary warning" to an article. In a good implementation, it would let you paste in a copy of the spam and its headers, and you would categorize the scam and specify how long the warning should last. The warning would be temporary, but not easy to remove, so the spammer can't just pop over and zap it. Instead of fooling suckers, the potential suckers would see (for the next week or two) a warning such as (from this week's example): "Warning, if you received email claiming that you are about to receive a $10 million VISA card, it is a 419 scam", and including a link to the appropriate article on such scams.

My little story actually begin when I received such a spam this week (but only the latest of many times over the past years) and I added a warning (manually, since there is no such tool) to the spammer's Wikipedia article. A few hours later, I noticed that it had been reverted, so I looked at that person's page and discovered that the reverter of my warning was trying to become some kind of administrator or editor on Wikipedia. Therefore I went to the election page and said that I had to oppose the promotion because I was suspicious of anyone who seems to be helping spammers. I also included a short explanation of the scam in question and the obvious suggestion. That vote was quickly deleted, too, on grounds of some kind of club violation.

My new message to Wikipedia: "Sorry, but if you Wikipedia fools want to support spammers, you can shove your club where the sun don't shine. In addition, I hope the spammers pwn your children's computers to thank you for your contributions to their ongoing success."

I think the funny part is that I really like the idea of Wikipedia and think that broader and more democratic participation would improve the quality and value of Wikipedia. Contributing more to the joke is the oft-repeated claim that Wikipedia wants more support, but the punchline is that I was threatened in some manner for expressing my concerns. "Follow the money" is often a good way to figure out people's real motivations, so I still think my concerns are legitimate. Philosophy is nice but sound economic models are important, too.

Kind of a minor footnote, but maybe it's a karmic coincidence. Most of my involvement with Wikipedia has been to make minor grammatical corrections and ask a few questions on the so-called Talk pages (though perhaps this was the first time I was threatened for writing). However a few days ago I noticed some omissions on a Japanese page and I actually reserved a couple of books that contained the missing data. After this little episode, I dropped by the library and cancelled the reservations without opening the books.

I should make a boilerplate for this closing apology, but... I'm sorry about the need to moderate the comments, but unlike Wikipedia, I am strongly determined not to support any spammers. I welcome your comments and generally approve them within a day. I even prefer comments from which I learn something, which most often means critical comments, even if there's some sharpness in the tone.

Life, the universe, and everything considered as a helix of semiprecious Star Trek episodes

Version 0.2

Life, the Universe, and Everything Considered as a Helix of Semiprecious Star Trek Episodes (and as explored with Internet search engines)

Well, it started as a kind of joke of a meme when I woke up this morning. Initially it seemed like a kind of zen collapse item, then as a humorous meme to claim, but now it feels like an overblown mockery of Delaney's truly original and creative story "Time Considered as a Helix of Semiprecious Stones" from 1970. According to today's google report, the "considered as a helix" meme has 13.5 million. It appears Microsoft's bing is taking it more loosely, with 252 million hits on the unquoted form, but a mere 52,800 for the quoted string. Of course that leads back to a quoted search on the google, which yields 538,000 hits. All of the top hits are to the Delaney story, but this is clearly a highly contagious meme.

The titular form of this blog is then seen as a personal idiosyncrasy. I happened to be impressed by these three memes, with Delaney's as the natural uber-meme. to unify them. However, now I'm more interested in other people's extensions of the original Delaney meme, which I think is captured in the central phrase "considered as a helix"... Both of the unquoted searches quickly lead into unrecognizable territory, predictably dominated by the relatively unusual word "helix". My jumps are generally by 5 pages of search results at a time, and show an interesting range of wit and thought.

Actually, my most interesting discovery is that the google claims are misleading. Apparently the google runs out of steam at 217 results, while the hits are still dominated by references to the original meme, and it isn't clear how to force it to show the rest of the potentially more interesting hits that it claims to know about. That's only 22 pages of search results. In contrast, bing kept on trying to 605 results, when it suddenly decided it had had enough.

Adding -time to the search exposed many more of the derivative memes. Only 21 from bing versus 137,000 from the google? Interesting and stark contrast. In the next obvious step, it appears that I am the first to add "everything considered as a helix" to the Internet, insofar as both search engines reported no hits and unquoted the string for their searches... Kind of amazing how quickly we can get into the unexplored territory, isn't it?

Linear Humans Facing Logarithmic Cliffs

Version 0.2

Every Logarithmic Change Looks Like a Cliff to Linear Human Beings

Thesis: We're basically linear beings and we live on a linear time scale. Any logarithmic change will eventually look like a cliff to us.

The example I've been aware of for a while was population increase, starting from the perception of homo sapiens the hunter-gatherers. We evolved in small-scale societies where we could know all of the people who mattered, but now we live in an international society with so many people we could never meet all of them or learning anything about the vast majority of them. However, from the perspective of the thesis, it's probably best to consider the famous population S-curve, which is often used to depict logarithmic population growth and the eventual leveling off when arithmetic reality collides with and causes the end of the period of exponential growth. (Another extension is to consider how this interacts with the rapid spread of any important genetic mutation to sometimes make evolution appear sort of spastic...)

Now it's technological change that's getting in our faces. For a personal example, I used to feel I was almost up to date on computer technology, but it's increasingly obvious that it's running away from me-and from everyone else, too. I actually concluded that Thomas Jefferson was living in a time when it was still possible for an intelligent person with sufficient leisure to learn almost everything about science.

At this point, we're creating so much of anything that any individual human being can saturate any amount of human time. For example, you could never keep up with all of the movies that are being released or you could spend your entire life just watching the old movies we've already created. Ditto for books, and even for more narrow areas.

Kind of an extended 'application' of my thesis here, but in the Google IO keynote presentation a few weeks ago, Larry Page received a friendly question about showing people the search results they wanted to see rather than possibly more accurate answers that are less satisfying. He generally seemed to be seeing things through rose-called [Google?] glasses, and he replied that he didn't see any problem with this form of personalization. I actually predicted this problem a couple of years ago under the label of "pandering to the user", which has come to pass and is much worse than I thought it would be. (That may have been around 2005, but I can't easily check due to google censorship of the newsgroups.) My first research after Larry Page dismissed the problem was to google "obama birthplace kenya", which produces more than 2 million hits. If that's what I want to believe, the google just gave me enough "evidence" to saturate all of my free time for several years...

However, I've since thought of an even less friendly way to pose the question. I would ask "Did Google help kill Steve Jobs?" When his ultimately terminal cancer was first diagnosed, at least one of his doctors has said that it may have been treatable--but he delayed treatment. I don't blame Steve Jobs for wanting to believe that there were alternatives to immediate surgery, and now I wonder if the google helped him in making that fatal decision. My understanding is that he tried some kind of anti-cancer diet to control his cancer and it failed and he died. Did he get information about that diet from a google search? If just did the search "alternative cancer treatments", and several of those hits and ads look potentially dangerous, but personalization means that your hits will probably be different--and more attractive and specifically appealing to YOUR tastes and interests. As long as someone paid for the ads, I guess the google doesn't see any problem if Steve Jobs made a fatal mistake, eh?

In another perspective, perhaps the saturation of information is driving people nuts, which led me to the AI threat... One aspect is the increasingly difficulty of standing out in a positive way that might drive some people to try to stand out in a negative dimension. When you combine it with increased individual capacity to do good (or bad) things, we humans beings start looking rather dangerous. Maybe the solution to the Fermi Paradox is that any AI is led to a very unpleasant conclusion... If it's creators are fundamentally irrational and dangerous, perhaps the only conclusion is that they must be exterminated as soon as they can be replaced with suitable robots?

Or perhaps I'm just too frustrated by banging my own head against logarithm cliffs?

Wasting Other People's TIme as the Greatest Sin?

Version 0.1

Wasting Other People's Time as the Greatest Sin?

Just one of those early morning wanderings of the brain... So here's something of the logical chain. Actually started from recollections of a great teacher, Bill Martin, who lost his faith while attending the Harvard Divinity School. From the perspective of his deeply religious parents, that leads to speculations about the Harvard Profanity School. Then jumped to considering the nature of the greatest sin, which linked to thoughts of time-based economic theory, where are personal time is the most precious and limited resource of all. In conclusion, the greatest sin must be wasting other people's time.

To avoid the sin, I should just stop there, but I'll just note that I still haven't any answers to the questions posed in Couch Potatoes of the World, Unite. Not even a hint.