
One of the dumbest things I’ve ever published - vernalkick
https://dcurt.is/a-faulty-opinion
======
z0r
It's frustrating to read articles making the kinds of points that Dustin's
original piece did, and it's slightly cheering to see somebody change their
mind. But this:

"There is no valid counterargument to the abstract idea. The fact is that if a
company had better data and analyzed it more completely, they could obviously
produce better experiences for their users."

I think this is something that you don't need hindsight to understand is
wrong. Modern ad driven companies work to maximize 'daily user interactions',
not quality of experience. A lot of people think these are strongly
correlated, but I think optimizing for that is likely to drive your products
into bad directions for users.

~~~
scythe
>"There is no valid counterargument to the abstract idea. The fact is that if
a company had better data and analyzed it more completely, they could
obviously produce better experiences for their users."

There is a simple counterargument to the phrasing: _could_ does not imply
_would_.

When you have relatively little information about your users, the two goals
"make the user happy" and "make the user engage more with the product" are
approximately the same goal. So making the user happy = engagement, with
little data.

But when you have a _lot_ of data about your users' emotions and behavior, the
two goals become separate. A typical business is going to pursue the second
goal, not the first. They're not charities.

It's sort of like an archer shooting at two neighboring targets. With fuzzy
vision, they look like the same target, but with clearer vision, the archer
sees them separately. The users want the archer to hit one target, but the
archer will aim for the other. So, the users may be better off if the archer's
vision is a little fuzzy, to make the targets blend together.

~~~
danShumway
This is a good take, well phrased.

To add another example:

In the abstract, the fact is that a government with absolute monitoring and
enforcement power over its citizens could obviously move faster to improve
society and address injustices.

However, like you said, _could_ does not imply _would_ , and most people would
say that giving governments absolute power to monitor and enforce their whims
on citizens is a terrible idea.

------
apo
Here's the gist of the original piece (from 2014):

> Apple is going to realize very soon that it has made a grave mistake by
> positioning itself as a bastion of privacy against Google, the evil invader
> of everyone’s secrets. The truth is that collecting information about people
> allows you to make significantly better products, and the more information
> you collect, the better products you can build. ...

[https://dcurt.is/privacy-vs-user-experience](https://dcurt.is/privacy-vs-
user-experience)

How the times change. Not a whiff of Facebook. Snowden who? Google was still
mostly not evil.

From the more recent article:

> I argued in my essay that Tim Cook had conflated privacy with security. He
> may have. But in the five years since 2014, the following fact has become
> absurdly clear to me: there is no difference between privacy and security.
> Security is an illusion, just like the lock on your front door. ...

In time we'll all come to realize that privacy is merely a special case of
security. What can't be seen can't be attacked.

Until then, a lot of damage will have been wrought on people too distracted or
naive to care.

~~~
zdragnar
Overall, I agree.

It's a bit amusing, though, that the original piece wasn't far off. I've heard
the 2015 mbp was the best laptop they've made, and since then have been a
number of missteps. I was unfortunate enough to personally experience the
awful lack of a tactile escape key on one of the newer mbp+touchbar laptops
for about a year.

~~~
deckard1
It doesn't take data science to understand that putting a purely _visual_
button on a device that people do not look at while using is a tremendous
blunder.

A computer company forgetting how a keyboard works. Really now.

~~~
zdragnar
Yeah, in retrospect, I probably should have emphasized that I was amused by
the coincidence, not that there was causation.

Obviously, gathering usage statistics from hardware / software analytics
wouldn't have captured the fact that there are touch typists who would be
quite displeased by (a) the loss of the tactile escape key, and (b) the
downward quality of the keyboards in general.

------
sudosteph
First of all, I commend the author for publicly acknowledging their mistakes
here. Though I admit I still struggle to understand the mindset that allowed
the author to make those wrong-headed conclusions on this topic in the first
place. The best I can figure is that this person bought into the great
neoliberal lie of our time - the claim that most corporations will value long-
term societal stability and well-being over short-term profits + market
capture opportunities.

When the author writes the following, I wonder if he is still struggling today
to make that connection:

> The building of tools to aggregate private information in order to
> ostensibly improve user experience has in fact, at scale, caused strange and
> negative things to happen. Some of these things are threatening totally
> unrelated social constructs like democracy, addiction, and human decency.

Those constructs are absolutely all related private information in a
predictable way. They're related by the fact that the disruption of those
fields can be very profitable. Disrupting democracies at scale is profitable
to governments. Addiction has been profitable for all of human history.
Training people to believe that human decency can be something expressed
through which brands of products they buy or do not buy is incredibly
profitable for certain brands that sell a certain "ethos", while
simultaneously convincing buyers that any other sort of direct action
(protests, legislation) are not necessary because the market can make
meaningful change if people would only choose to buy from more ethical
companies.

The problems we're currently facing as a society, due to the the motivations
of powerful corporations being misaligned with the best interests of the
general public is not unique to tech either. It's long past time to
acknowledge that these outcomes are neither strange nor unpredictable.

------
umvi
Unpopular opinion, but: I think too much privacy is bad for society.

Consider the world where privacy is the absolute king:

\- Much harder to solve crimes as police work is thwarted at every turn

\- Much easier to plot terrorist attacks/mass shootings/etc

\- Can't setup cameras/audio recording on your own property/phone/car/etc.
without consent of the recorded (even if they are a criminal) or you are
breaking the law.

\- Hard to create companies that deal with data because of the high legal
barrier you have to clear

\- Much easier to hide your past mistakes, making things like "background
checks" less useful

A world where privacy is king has a lot of problems and a lot of avenues of
abuse. Before you grab your pitchforks, I do think there is a reasonable
compromise somewhere in the middle, but some of the privacy "purists" I see on
this site have some really extreme views, in my opinion.

~~~
kardos
The role of the purists might be to counteract the "privacy is dead and
buried" crowd

~~~
ineedasername
Yes, but I've always disliked the idea that one extreme will balance out
another. Like advocates of Fox News or CNN saying their bias is justified
because is balances the bias of their counterpart on the left/right. In theory
if people watched both, digested the arguments of both sides, there might be
some balance. In practice, it tends to simply entrench people with
confirmation bias.

~~~
ahartmetz
I think you should consider the differences between types of extremism.

The difference between Stallman and Fox News is that Stallman's extremism is
well reasoned and consistent while Fox News is only consistent in serving the
interests of "the man behind the curtain". Stallman offers a base for logical
reasoning while Fox News offers a bunch of positions only good for uncritical
acceptance.

------
DenisM
That post might have been wrong, but that doesn't make it dumb.

When something is wrong and a waste of time (in the sense that the author
should have known better) _that 's_ dumb.

When something is wrong but not obviously so, and it helps us summarize
existing opinions, or guide exploration, and/or otherwise advances the state
of our understanding, it's not dumb.

For example, a wrong scientific hypothesis or a wrong startup thesis is not
always dumb; they are only dumb when the author should have known better, but
chose not to do the homework. Incidentally, this might be the easiest way to
fail a YC interview - demonstrate that you think the homework is beneath you.

It's ok to be wrong, just make sure it's "the right kind of wrong".

~~~
ineedasername
Absolutely. Something can be wrong, but constructively so, adding to the
discourse in a positive way by still raising valid points even if it draws
conclusions that don't quite follow from those points. It's why I often find
myself upvoting things I might really disagree with because I nonetheless
believe it adds to the conversation in an interesting and constructive way.
And conversely, why I sometimes downvote things I agree with when the comment
is shallow, snarky, antagonistic, or dismissive of other possible views.

------
deckard1
This article really grates on me. The author seems to live in a bubble of his
own mind and making. Never once considering that, maybe it wasn't the
expansive changes of a whole five years that set him wrong, but maybe the fact
that he never once considered outside opinion. It's not as if Richard Stallman
or Jaron Lanier or countless other people have been warning against this exact
moment in time for decades now.

~~~
markdown
That's Dustin for you.

He steals "kudos" even. If you hover over a little icon on his website to try
and find out what it does, he'll record it and publish it as praise of his
article.

~~~
Stratoscope
That's a standard Svbtle thing, and yes, it's awful.

Oh! I just realized Dustin is the guy behind Svtble.

------
mekane8
Five years ago I believed this same thing, exactly as you described. I went
all-in on Google services and left all the options to send them data on,
trusting them to be the benevolent system you described. And believing that
the benefit I was getting in terms of cool UX would be worth it.

Now with how horrible ad-tracking has gotten, and the decline in Google's
products (Inbox especially, for me) the shine is wearing off quickly. I'm
strongly considering abandoning the Google platform as completely as possible
whenever my Pixel 2 bites the dust.

~~~
zeveb
Google is bad, but at least they normally let you control your device; Apple
lock things down so much that you can't even do that.

I really hope that there's a real market out there for people who want to own
their phones and control their destinies. I really _don 't_ want to live in a
world where my only choice is which feudal lord I serve.

~~~
ineedasername
This. Though it seems to be getting harder to root android phones, at least
from my very limited perspective. It's also why I'm a bit horrified at the
direction Windows has taken, making some things nearly impossible to disable
or remove. I find myself having to dig into the registry much more than I used
to in order to stop annoying behavior or system-draining processes. (For
example: I'm happy to stay updated with the latest security patched, but _do
not_ reboot my computer on your own authority when I may be running very long
processes on it. Rather annoying to wake up and find a model I was training
was aborted because Update decided to reboot)

------
marcoperaza
> _But in the five years since 2014, the following fact has become absurdly
> clear to me: there is no difference between privacy and security. Security
> is an illusion, just like the lock on your front door. Advanced cryptography
> can prevent immediate threats, but in the long run, it is impossible to keep
> things private at scale. Humans can only build flawed software. There will
> always be bugs. And thus your “private” information is not now and will
> never be safe in the hands of a third party, no matter how competent. The
> only solution is to keep the information within only your control, and that
> is how Apple has attempted to architect its systems._

> _And: (2) If, after Snowden, Experian, and countless other examples of
> leaks, you think security is going to protect your privacy, you are either
> ignorant or insane._

This feels incoherent. Security is exactly what Apple is leaning on, e.g. by
designing iMessage so they themselves can’t read the content.

And just like Google, they are also asking you trust them, e.g. to not release
an update that uploads all of your plain text messages to Apple.

What’s different is the size and nature of the attack surfaces, how
distributed vs. centralized they are, and how each company agrees to use the
data they do legitimately collect.

There are interesting, persuasive arguments to be made in favor of the
different approaches out there, but I think it’s important to have conceptual
clarity.

------
ineedasername
I'm not sure if this represents a personal fault, or something any self-aware,
self-critical person would experience (I hope it's the later) but it seems to
me that when I look back on anything I wrote 4-5 years ago (or longer) then
1/3 of it is at least vaguely embarrassing, with my views becoming more
nuanced, more scaffolded with experience and information as time goes by.

~~~
JohnFen
I think that's normal and indicates growth over time.

------
ggg2
the dumbest thing anyone wrote (and he did it on this later article) is to
personalize the algorithm.

the algorithm is code. put in place by someone. it is not magical. it is not
hard to predict. it doesn't run around gainig sentience.

personalizing the "algorithm" is idiotic. and remove all the guilty from the
operator, who is the one who fine tuned all the trade offs.

think of what he describe as the algorithm as a person that works as your
personal assistant. if that person uses all the info on your life to help you,
they are a good assistant. If instead they use that information in ways you
didn't know about, just like google does, that person is a criminal. yet,
google gets a pass because it wasn't them, it was the algorithm.

see how dumb and detrimental (to everyone but google) speaking of the
algorithm as an entity is?

------
rdiddly
_" The truth is that collecting information about people allows you to make
significantly better products, and the more information you collect, the
better products you can build."_

This is basically right; the only thing making it wrong is the question
"better for whom?"

------
3martron
>There is no valid counterargument to the abstract idea.

I think that there is. It's hard to explain on short notice, but it's the
intersection of the abstract concepts of model overfitting, precognition based
on data (such as pregnancy), and what happens when the products are not built
to serve the user whose data powers them.

------
overcyn
From the title and the domain name I was sure this was going to be about his
2011 article rationalizing that iPhone 4's 3.5 inch screen was a better size
than larger Android screens of the day.

[https://dcurt.is/3-point-5-inches](https://dcurt.is/3-point-5-inches)

~~~
laughinghan
Just because Apple has changed their mind doesn't mean he was wrong? I know
multiple people who won't upgrade past the iPhone SE because it _is_ better
for them. One of them has pointed out that Apple used to market iPhones as
"the perfect size for your hand"\---they don't say that anymore.

------
mychael
This seems like a post he should have published to his private diary. It comes
off very self-important and navel gazing.

Everyone wrote dumb stuff years ago. Move on with your life.

------
robinduckett
I'd say the dumbest thing that Dustin ever posted was when he said his blog
could only be updated by his email address, and then I updated his blog for
him by simply spoofing the sender. Via Gmail SMTP.

Edit: Aftermath. He deleted the blog post. It's still in the way back machine
I suspect.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1441914](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1441914)

~~~
pvg
I think when it comes to superlatives and this particular author, he hit
somewhere very close to the theoretical maximum a while back and it's still
public and helpfully labeled.

[https://dcurt.is/the-best](https://dcurt.is/the-best)

Although if someone has invented a mouthfeelier fork in the meantime and
Curtis has written about it, I'd like to read that piece as well.

------
ljm
I don't know what I just read but it comes across as a delusion of grandeur.

There is nothing about the original article that makes it a 'thesis', or a
'piece', or even an 'essay' by any standard. I was scrolling up and down
wondering if I'd missed something, expecting some seriously detailed research.
It is being given an inflated opinion of itself.

'Privacy vs. User Experience' is a 500 word long opinion. It starts off like
this:

> Apple is going to realize very soon that it has made a grave mistake by
> positioning itself as a bastion of privacy against Google, the evil invader
> of everyone’s secrets. The truth is that collecting information about people
> allows you to make significantly better products, and the more information
> you collect, the better products you can build.

There is no thesis or structure here, it's a fucking blog post. There are no
references, there is no research. It's opinion.

In my personal opinion this follow up is even more dumb than the earlier post
it criticises.

Edit: if I was to offer something more constructive, this follow up post
should be called 'Famous Last Words'.

~~~
esrauch
I think that's an uncharitable view of the author's choice of words. He also
doesn't even use "thesis" in the way you imply, he refers to "the thesis of
the essay", which unambiguously is the meaning of the word that is "the
central claim of the essay".

~~~
ljm
I disagree. You accept his blog post as an essay and in those terms I'll
agree, you can see a thesis in there.

But it's not an essay. It's a blog post. There are no references or sources.
There is no way for you to take that post and research the underpinnings of
its conclusion. It is wholly self-referential.

The original post is a hot-take, it's pure opinion. It's not even a noteworthy
post, it's just part of the Svtble echo chamber and has inflated worth.

There is no essay in either the original post or the apology for it, and
similarly so there is no thesis. Language changes and a thesis now is commonly
accepted as a significant body of work with academic significance and a
grounding in empiricism or at least extensive research.

Going back to the Ancient Greek (and beyond) roots of 'thesis' to claim an
innocent usage of the term is a monumental stretch.

~~~
esrauch
I don't think the lack of sources make it "not an essay". You can dispute the
value of the writing, but it's a bit weird to think it's pompous to use words
with the definition of the most common usage:

Essay

1\. A short piece of writing on a particular subject

Thesis

1\. A statement or theory that is put forward as a premise to be maintained or
proved.

