I read it as sympathetic to the paranoid people who believe these things, and gently steering them towards medical help instead.

Yeah, it's the definition of a game theory prisoner's dilemma type situation. Which normally governments are best positioned to solve. But this one requires coordination between politicians over long timescales, and across sovereign governments altogether.

So it really does require worldwide grassroots activism, which unfortunately is very slow and incremental. I'm not hopeful... Our ape brains are just not built for what it takes.

My mind also went to pharmaceuticals. And how "don't trust big companies" seems to be contributing to the "vaccine skepticism" phenomenon (or whatever you want to call it) and anti-medicine in general. RFK has brought them out of the woodwork.

I've seen acquaintances share fact sheets about times when drug makers were sued/fined for lying to the FDA, harming customers, manipulating prices, etc. All true! So people reasonably ask why they should be "forced" to have their products injected into them. And then they can get into all the reasons not to trust the FDA too...

Logically, just because a company has done some bad things doesn't mean their vaccines are unsafe. Or that the risks are worse than the disease. Or that sometimes mistakes just happen. And of course in their own lives people are hypocrites, break rules, do things like go back to cheating partners, etc.

I don't have a point here except to lament that things are complicated. Of course people are looking for justification of their beliefs. But maybe we should have held these companies to higher standards, and by allowing them to persist we were unwittingly eroding public trust to a tipping point that is now putting all of us at risk.

The problem with vaccine skepticism is that the wingnuts make it impossible to be a legitimate skeptic. And yes, skepticism is warranted. Are we all such severe sufferers of Gell-Mann amnesia??

Vaccine manufacturers are not special. They are for-profit corporations, and the importance of the product they make gives them tremendous power.

For example take a look at Hep B vaccination. I spent hours one night trying to dig up primary source material and research from the 70s to justify it and the 3-course recommendation. It's obvious that Hep B is a serious illness for babies that can lead the problems much later in life, we know that. But how prevalent was it in the USA before the standard vaccine schedule was rolled out? Has anyone actually gone and looked through VAERS over the past 40 years and compared the rate of serious side effects like GB to a counterfactual base rate of Hep B? That's not a trivial statistics project, and nobody that I'm aware of has done it (although I'm bad at searching), yet we continue to vaccinate every single baby with 3 courses of Hep B. It's probably not a big deal, and I'm willing to believe that the people at the CDC probably know what they're doing (pre-2024) and have/had access to the right data and the right decision-making tools to set a good vaccine schedule. But if it came out that Hep B vaccination actually wasn't all that useful and we should probably stop doing it, it would certainly be inconvenient for the vaccine manufacturer. So there is absolutely an incentive to steer legitimate scientific inquiry toward some directions and away from directions.

All that is to say, trusting the science and being a supporter of evidence-based public health requires skepticism, precisely because for-profit corporations are always going to act like for-profit corporations regardless of what business they are in.

I think the comment is saying exactly that "we" need to have regulation that sets the correct priorities, because a profit-motivated business/market cannot do so itself. The tendency to trade off the common good for individual short term gain is explained by game theory.

That's how I took it too. For this to work, the penalties would have to be large enough to make the harmful actions unprofitable for the company (and its executives). Usually, fines given out by government regulators (who are sometimes people who used to work for the industry or will in the future) are small enough to be considered part of the cost of doing business.

For instance, in 2009 Pfizer was fined $2.3B for promoting off-label use of a few drugs and paying kickbacks to health care providers to push them. That year they reported $50B in revenues, so the largest health care settlement in history (at the time) probably didn't even put them in the red.

If fines for law-breaking by corporations were large enough to bankrupt the company, and if executives did prison time as well, that would be an actual incentive to obey the laws.

Want another rich one? After acquiring HCA in 1994, Rick Scott was CEO of the company while it systematically defrauded the US government by overcharging Medicaid and various other schemes. In settlements reached in 2000 and 2002, Columbia/HCA pleaded guilty to 14 felonies and agreed to a $600+ million fine, which was the largest health care fraud settlement in U.S. history at the time.

In 2018 Rick Scott was elected as a US Senator for Florida and now serves on the budget committee. That is, CEO responsible for a huge theft of taxpayer money is now in charge of how all the taxes are spent.

you never know if you don't try

I agree that Facebook could have continued to become something better, and the failure to do so is a direct result of Zuck's own personal flaws and failures and the culture he spawned.

And, they were especially insulted from competitive threats thanks to the huge advantage of network effects!

But businesses are always going to fuck up and have flawed leaders! And I think that was the general point. Social media has turned out to be a major educational moment for society in a lot of regards.

What makes you so confident that this alternate path is actually real and as good as you describe it? You say that the additional market coverage they would've gotten by not being abusive could've easily made up for the profit that they otherwise would've lost, but what makes you think that? The thing here is that any of these megacorporations has hundreds of people dedicated solely to exploring every conceivable strategy they have to making as much money as possible. So why hasn't even one of them from any company thought of what you said? And why did no one try?

Can you name one gigantic, publicly-traded company that made a choice similar to what you described and reaped the rewards on that scale?

The fact that these services need to be not just profitable, but also sustain indefinite growth makes them desperate. All of them start squeezing their customers for cash, be it directly (predatory pricing, subscription services, segmenting their services, raising prices) or indirectly (selling user data, integrating everything they know into their ad services, using harmful techniques to maximize engagement). Personal attitudes just dictate whether it happens earlier or later, but they all will have to do it.

Tech companies seem to have converged on the idea that providing a compromised, but free service is usually superior to anything paid. And it seems to have paid off, Facebook has billions of users to this day. Most people don't care or don't like to think about it. The fix for this would need to be systemic.

> the additional market coverage they would've gotten by not being abusive could've easily made up for the profit that they otherwise would've lost

I don't think anything would have been easy.

But I do think that if you want to be more than a one trick pony, as Meta desperately does, the best bet is leaning into creating value. Getting better and better at that. From whatever unique position you start with.

There is more potential value to create than extract.

Watching Zuck's VR and AI initiatives. It is clear he hasn't a clue, has no unique insights, into what would be useful or non-trivially engaging.

His big vision is to create bigger milking machines. Even before creating something worthy of being milked. Even for a predator, that puts the cart before the hyena.

The article doesn't attempt to define any terms or reference the actual literature, just throws random "good sounding" crap together as if it's valid. I mean they unironically use the phrase "deeply cohere their attentional field." Seriously? Lmao.

Absolutely. One of the footnotes even uses the phrase "deeply cohere their attentional field" as if that actually means something. Barf.

The only time I have to use QWERTY is the occasional touch screen kiosk or something. And you're not exactly touch typing an essay in that scenario.

Back in the in-person days when sharing a keyboard with a coworker was more common, you have the very handy switcher icon in the taskbar.

I believe this was a reference to one of the origin myths discussed in the article.

Not only are Ctl+C and Ctl+V not next to each other, but they move next to other shortcuts that are annoying to mis-hit, like the one to close a browser tab...

Remapping the shortcuts is possible but too much effort; I just live with it.

Fortunately, modern video games seem to understand different layouts and automatically change their input to match the actual finger placement rather than what they QWERTY letters would be.

Same here. I adopted Dvorak as a youth, so when I got my first smartphone I put the keyboard in Dvorak.

That only lasted a few days for two reasons:

1) What you said about the mistakes. It is so much easier to fat finger in a way that makes autocorrect clueless.

2) The muscle memory doesn't translate at all anyway. Obvious in retrospect, but typing with your thumbs is a completely unrelated skill to touch typing. Turns out both live separately and equally in my brain.

for phones, have a look at thumbkey https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key (messagease like)

I also recommend dactly (see also https://ryanis.cool/cosmos/ for a more generic keyboard generation)

Huh, I do use Dvorak on my phone. I have a weird phone typing style with my left thumb and my right index finger.

My biggest issue is how often I hit '.' instead of 'p' for some reason.