
Personalisation Is Asymmetric Psychological Warfare - edent
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2018/06/personalisation-is-asymmetric-psychological-warfare/
======
pjc50
"Uncanny valley of sincerity" is the key thing here.

I regularly go to the same cafe for lunch. So some of the staff know me by
name, but others who've just started working there don't. And I know their
faces and one or two names. This is how it works on a normal human scale.

The corporate version of this delivers, as they say, _asymmetrical_
friendliness. You see someone you've never met before and they know your name,
birthday, etc. while you know nothing about them.

And especially in the airline context, all this is devoted to more perfect
price discrimination. They know your favourite drinks order so they can _sell
you more drinks_.

~~~
maerF0x0
> You see someone you've never met before and they know your name, birthday,
> etc. while you know nothing about them

This made me think of what it must be like to be a celebrity. To have people
fawn over you, whilst you can barely recall a fan's face for having seen so
many.

~~~
jedimastert
I'm a musician in my area, and my dad comes in contact with a lot of people.
It's not nearly on a "celebrity" scale, but about 2 or 3 times a week I get
called out by name in public by a stranger. It's a really weird feeling. I'm
pretty sure I would hate it if it happened constantly

~~~
dvtv75
Many years ago, I traveled to another city to see a Joe Satriani concert. I
was really hyped to finally see him in concert, and hoped that I'd run into
him and get a CD autographed.

So when I did run into him in the local community space, I had a thought: I
could be another fawning fanboy, interrupting his shopping and day in general,
or I could just think to myself "Hey, that's Satch!" and not bother him at
all.

So I didn't bother him. I've long wondered if I made a good choice or not, now
I think I made the right one.

~~~
sverige
One time in the 80s I took a date to a sushi place in Santa Monica. We ate,
talked, had a nice time. When I went to pay, David Byrne was sitting right by
the cash register. I'm sure he saw that I recognized him when we locked eyes
very briefly, but I didn't bother him, just paid and left. (My date didn't
recognize him -- so no second date.)

My theory is, why bother people just because they're famous? Unless they're
looking for it, which is why I had a nice conversation with Moon Unit Zappa on
Broadway in Seattle at the 76 station, where she was camped out promoting her
movie The Spirit of '76.

~~~
mistersquid
I was in college in the LA area in the mid-1980s and worked for a valet
company contracted by Los Angeles-area clients throwing birthday parties, gala
events, awards ceremonies, etc. Though we were near Hollywood, we didn't often
work for celebrities.

Except this once.

Meg Ryan was throwing a birthday party for her then-boyfriend, Dennis Quaid,
and actors, musicians, and celebrities came to have their cars parked. Most of
the valets were gushing and wowing over this or that celebrity or actor, but I
tend not to care too much about star sightings and don't really go for
celebrity worship.

A gray, older Citroen rolls up and it's my turn to park. Citroen are pretty
low to the ground, only a little bit taller than Porsche roadsters, so even
though I'm medium height I stood high above the car's roof with a good view
into the driver's side.

The window rolled down and there he is, David Bryne, looking up at me and
handing me his keys. His eyes seemed really big from that angle and I don't
even remember him getting out of the car. I do remember that I had a feeling
of awe and admiration (The Talking Heads had broken out on the Stop Making
Sense tour and Byrne was known to be an engaged and consummate artist.)

Though our interaction was brief, Byrne's look suggested he understood I'd
recognize him (I did!) and he looked at me directly and treated me as a fellow
human providing him a service. No haste, no self-absorption, just a courteous
exchange of pleasantries for service.

Or maybe I'm simply susceptible to being star struck by artists whose work I
admire.

------
msp_yc
Now society in towns is infested by persons who, seeing that the sentiments
please, counterfeit the expression of them. These we call
sentimentalists,—talkers who mistake the description for the thing, saying for
having. They have, they tell you, an intense love of nature; poetry,—O, they
adore poetry,—and roses, and the moon, and the cavalry regiment, and the
governor; they love liberty, “dear liberty!” they worship virtue, “dear
virtue!” Yes, they adopt whatever merit is in good repute, and almost make it
hateful with their praise. The warmer their expressions, the colder we feel;
we shiver with cold. A little experience acquaints us with the
unconvertibility of the sentimentalist, the soul that is lost by mimicking
soul. Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize the
Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debauchee of sentiment? Was
ever one converted? The innocence and ignorance of the patient is the first
difficulty; he believes his disease is blooming health. A rough realist or a
phalanx of realists would be prescribed; but that is like proposing to mend
your bad road with diamonds. Then poverty, famine, war, imprisonment, might be
tried. Another cure would be to fire with fire, to match a sentimentalist with
a sentimentalist. I think each might begin to suspect that something was
wrong.

\-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

~~~
tafycent
This still feel relevant today in explaining the push back against modern
liberalism and social justice movements. Emerson was apparently not a fan of
virtue signaling.

------
always_good
I've noticed over the last few years an arms race in welcome-emails trying to
sound personal. Like when you receive this email 10ms after you submit the
register form.

> Hey Dan, was just tailing the access logs and happened to see you register.
> ;) Let me know personally if you have any questions! – Chuck, CEO

It's even sadder when the templating system is broken and you see "Hey
{{firstName}}".

Please, spare us the bullshit.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
OK, but what would you like to receive instead?

Dear Madam/Sir

Congratulations for becoming record #b6aeca9c-b249-4238-87ab-54c8adbf9762 in
our customer database.

Please be advised that becoming a customer does not make you profitable for
us. To earn your place on our hard disk you have to spend at least £23.84 more
with us this year or get at least three of your friends to sign up as well.

Do not reply to this automated message as this email address is permanently
unattended. We are a strictly no-support, no-human-touch enterprise as this is
the only way to make this service sustainable. You don't want to ruin it for
everyone else, do you?!?

You have subscribed to our Unlimited Forever Plan. However, please be warned
that we have a secret fair use policy in place to deter any free riders taking
advantage of our generosity. Penalties and account closures may or may not
apply according to our terms of use.

Greetings

Automated Customer Onboarding System

~~~
tetha
That's a false dichotomy though. I'd prefer a notification like:

> We have registered an account called "Tetha" for "tetha@coyote.acme.org" on
> amazingservice.acme.org.

> If this wasn't you, click <this link> to delete the account.

> If you're interested in the services you can receive on a free account,
> click <this link>, and for further service options click <that link>.

That's short and to the point.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
_> That's a false dichotomy though._

Now I feel misunderstood. I thought it was a perfectly good straw man
argument, not just a measly false dichotomy.

always_good's complaint was about an embarrassingly fake personal tone coming
from a complete stranger representing a corporation. S/he didn't complain
about a lack of brutal honesty regarding an obviously deceptive business
model.

In any event, it's a joke. I agree with both of you. You don't have to be
glaringly dishonest either in tone or in the way in which you structure your
business model.

~~~
tetha
Ok, you just made me laugh.

That comment just triggered work mode too hard, and at the moment, any point
but a hard, way too specific, and nasty to refute point is void at work. It's
been a rough week.

------
nitwit005
This sort of thing always reminds me of Idiocracy: "Welcome to Costco i love
you".

Occasionally you run into a genuinely nice staff member at the supermarket who
immediately learns your name, asks about your kids, etc. Companies notice how
everyone is pleased with that, and then get the idea that they'll somehow
force the behavior onto the rest of the staff.

Everyone is forced to greet you, thank you by (poorly pronounced) name off
credit card, and they send secret shoppers to penalize them if they fail to do
these things. The end result of which ends up being negative, because no one
particularly likes hearing friendly words that clearly aren't genuine.

------
bittercynic
Knowing your favorite drink is obviously not on par with knowing that you're
on thin ice with your HR department, and it is the corporation, not the flight
crew, who has been (possibly) invasive. To me, it feels like a bit of a
transgression whenever a business goes out of their way to find info about me
without just asking.

If you want to know something about me, just ask. I might refuse to answer, or
ask why you want to know, but at least you haven't started off by
disrespecting me. I'm not sure how so many businesses have become confused
about this. Maybe they've calculated that pissing off a substantial number of
their customers is a worthwhile trade-off, but it seems like a bad direction
to go in even if the short-term numbers look positive. </rambly paranoia>

~~~
amelius
I agree with the customer's perspective of this. But there are businesses
where personalization is key. For example, YouTube absolutely needs to know
you in order to keep you watching addictive content. Without this, they would
probably still not be profitable.

~~~
sudouser
related [https://www.theonion.com/mark-zuckerberg-recalls-coming-
up-w...](https://www.theonion.com/mark-zuckerberg-recalls-coming-up-with-idea-
for-faceboo-1826831713)

------
chrstphrhrt
Ever notice how bullies will always memorize these small personal details
about a target and then when manipulating or gaslighting make sure to mention
those facts?

E.g. Oh a new crisis "just came up". I need you to complete this big menial
data entry task that I forgot about for a week right now (drop whatever you
were working on before). Don't you want to make it to your daughter's concert
tonight? Best get it done by EOD so you can be there for her. Next day: how's
progress on that thing you were working on before?

~~~
DmenshunlAnlsis
It’s all about control, and intimacy as a route to control. A bully uses it to
instill dread, a company uses it to influence behavior to make money, but the
root is the same.

------
motohagiography
The inverse of all this surveillance is using CRM for everyday things. I can
often tell when someone (recruiter, SaaS sales, dentist, etc) calls me because
they have an alert in their CRM that the contact is cooling. Is it insincere?
No, that's the depth of our relationship. So long as they aren't pretending to
be zealously enthusiastic in that weirdly corporate, millennial zombie
cheerleader way, I will deal with them.

To me, for airline and other staff to address me by my first name is like
being addressed as "Comrade," where only a counter-revolutionary could object
to being addressed as a comrade, and would clearly require that I be marked as
what I can only assume to be a problematic opportunity, and scheduled for
enhanced scrutiny.

The horses of dystopia have already left the barn, it's just a matter of how
you choose to live out your remainder of it.

"Ok?"

~~~
gaius
We should bring back Comrade as the gender-neutral pronoun.

------
mlthoughts2018
Personalization is very overrated. I remember reading a big NY Times piece on
how their tech team uses an embedding-based personalization and recommender
system, with a sexy blog post about their internal team that implements it,
and I just recoiled in horror.

For one, searching for content on NY Times site sucks. I just want a better
search engine without personalization. Just better categories, tags, search by
relevance to a named entity or narrowed in a time frame, which just works.
Currently it’s an awful way to look for things. Couldn’t they spend
engineering budget better on just search engine problems, rather than some
sexy, over-hyped customer embedding model with all kinds of gadgets to solve
cold start, etc., but which doesn’t seem to actually add value?

The other thing is that you _know_ the whole purpose is to optimize some
notion of engagement that is not actually a healthy measure of the user
getting value out of the product.

I think there could be some minimal benefit to stylizing or customizing
results based on highly aggregated characteristics, like country or a super
broad age group.

But beyond ensuring the user is routed into a very high-level bucket of
characteristics that can broadly determine relevance, anything more specific
to individuals or anything relying on nearest neighbor or collaborative
filtering based on a highly individualized representation, is just flat out
unhealthy, _by design_.

Information retrieval without personalization is like the new version of “I
just want my phone to actually function as a phone.”

~~~
kbyatnal
Here's the article: [https://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/15/on-the-path-to-
per...](https://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/15/on-the-path-to-
personalization/)

Thought it was an interesting read.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
Actually it looks like this is the one I was responding to: <
[https://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/11/building-the-
next-...](https://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/11/building-the-next-new-
york-times-recommendation-engine/) >.

------
maxxxxx
We are on a path to some entities knowing almost everything about most
citizens but these citizens know almost nothing about these entities. I think
a good way would be to open up all data but whoever benefits from the current
asymmetry will fight that tooth and nails. There won't be much profit in data
everybody can get.

~~~
s-shellfish
Honestly, I think that's how life always is (this is the inner artist in me
speaking).

You can have all this data on the outside, and it still speaks nothing of the
person on the inside.

Companies can have every detail of your life parameterized and quantified, but
people can always choose (i.e. get woke) to intentionally conform or to defy
norms. Intentionally feed data that looks patterned, and then switch it up in
a way that makes people scratch their heads and go 'huh'.

You can walk around with your phone in your pocket and have that awareness,
e.g. "I am purposefully taking this route on my walk to work while listening
to this music on repeat for 30 days" because you know people are going to draw
some correlation.

You do 'know' things about those entities, namely, their brains are hooked on
a drug called machine learning. That doesn't void you of your privacy.

~~~
pixl97
>but people can always choose (i.e. get woke) to intentionally conform or to
defy norms. Intentionally feed data

And future algorithms will detect it. Not enough of the population will do it.
At best you'll be classified as a deviant and you might have difficulty
getting apartments or loans. At worst, well, maybe the first with their back
against the wall when the corporate takeover comes.

~~~
throwaway37585
> At worst, well, maybe the first with their back against the wall when the
> corporate takeover comes.

What are you talking about?

~~~
s-shellfish
I'm OP, not your parent commenter, but I do understand the perspective.

This is something that is actually occurring, there really is a psychological
war going between how much information black box entities have about entities
they provide a 'service' for, in how it impacts the experience of living life,
the fact that most people have no choice but be connected to the internet (the
subject of the linked article).

It's a psychological war in that it's an inverted microcosm of the history of
discrimination. Instead of just judging people based on some generalized set
of superficial details like appearance or a quantitative metric of
intelligence, a GPA, resume, etc - a lot of organizations are refining it down
to the most seemingly insignificant and 'supposed' trivial details.

Which is missing the forest for the trees, even though it may be profitable in
the short term. The US has a president that fancies himself a dictator and
looks up to / highly respects people like Kim Jong-un and Uncle Xi. It's the
cultural and political climate so it's clear there are real reality reasons to
show cause for concern. All this stuff influences what people think is
acceptable and where to draw the line. It's all background noise information
that propagates into models of interpersonal boundaries - what people are
willing to tolerate and what they will cry out against. Learned social
behavior, etc.

It supports fear culture and that is another tool people can use to manipulate
and control others. Regardless of whether it actually works, this stuff is the
mentality of some people in power. So when I read comments like the parent
that replied to my original comment (I'm OP), the point is - guide them out of
the conspiracy but understand where it's coming from by describing why it is
true while not necessarily being true.

Fear culture controls. People who want to control others for any purpose aside
from improving the well-being and respecting the autonomy of others are aware
of this. There are plenty of existing technologies (look back to the
development of advertisements) that exist purely to manipulate emotional state
in order to direct behavior, and I have no doubt there are some folks out
there looking to refine it down to a precision science.

The real front lines come down to, how far will they push it before people
'snap' (and you can see that happening with the US president, because
honestly, every intent a 'self' attempts to have on others comes back to
affect the individual 'self'). I think that explains his ludicrous behavior in
a way that has empathy, because you can tell, all that garbage he has done to
others continuously affects his perception on how he sees those around him.
The man can't trust anyone except for dictators lately.

I don't think there's going to be any kind of corporate takeover aside from
corporate rebellion, possibly. Creating a tight association between the
government, the media, and corporate interests is too last century. There are
some interests that seem to be going in that direction, but it's clearly not
all of them.

~~~
jtbayly
You said, “People who want to control others for any purpose aside from
improving the well-being and respecting the autonomy of others are aware of
this.“

But this is precisely the most nefarious type of control. Nothing is more
insidious than the conviction that you are controlling others for their own
benefit.

~~~
s-shellfish
When I say that, I mean 'well-being and autonomy' implies listening to people,
giving them space and time to find their own self, offering guidance if they
request it, affirming they have choice, offering help if they are confused,
and sometimes even being confused with them. It's no different from being a
parent, a teacher, or a therapist.

It doesn't have to be seen as nefarious if it isn't.

------
darkhorn
If you are in Istanbul and you want to use public transportaion with monthly
subsrciption you need to buy Istanbul Pass with your ID, it has your name,
picture etc. Because you provided your ID they know your birthday. Thus, on
your birthdays when you step inside your bus and make your Istanbul Card read
by the device (NFC) it says laudly "happy birdthday!". Because all kinds of
public trasport use same card, like in ferries, metros, toilets, busses, trams
you hear "happy birdthday!" all day in multiple locations.
[https://youtu.be/1mJJPID104s](https://youtu.be/1mJJPID104s)

Oh, and you can see from their web sites where you have used your Istanbul
Pass in the last few months, like "bus M42 Mecidiyeköy-Bakırköy, at 12:34
Today, -1 credit".

~~~
ovao
That sounds kinda nice to me, actually. If I see someone going through a
turnstile and their birthday is announced, I can shoot them a smile and a nice
“hey, happy birthday”.

Little things to invite positive personal interactions between strangers can
be a good thing. That is, perhaps, not the intended purpose, but it at least
seems like a welcome side effect.

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
A very unwelcome side effect of that would be that I don't get to control it.
It's obviously unnecessary for the service to be performed, but they decide to
"invite positive personal interactions" no matter whether I want any of that
at that moment in that place.

------
eevilspock
far worse asymmetry: The Government can spy on citizens, but citizens can't
spy on their government.

This is precisely backwards of a free society.

The Snowden episode both comically and tragically exemplifies this: He is an
outlaw for giving the citizens visibility into the government's surveillance
of those citizens.

National security justifies government secrecy? I believe the opposite.
Government secrecy jeopardizes the security of a free nation, turning it into
an unfree one. It protects and enables corruption and hypocrisy. And it is
used FAR more often in government acts the violate the principles of freedom,
fairness and justice.

~~~
hsienmaneja
He’s an outlaw for having stolen highly sensitive classified info much of
which was unrelated to domestic surveillance. He doused gasoline and lit a
match over a good portion of our secret military ops.

~~~
lotsofpulp
Just because the government deems something "highly sensitive classified info"
doesn't mean it should be, especially not with the US's history. Not that
there are better countries, but considering what the US has done in the recent
past, it shouldn't be trusted.

------
everybodyknows
Personal wellbeing hint: Do not ever joke about an airline pilot's recent
alcohol intake, as the article suggests. This has been done, was treated as a
genuine accusation, and precipitated cancellation of the flight.

Don't fully recall consequences to the joker, but they weren't good, starting
with being identified by seat number to fellow passengers.

~~~
bronco21016
Unfortunately, the day and age of social media requires any accusations,
joking or not, to be treated as real. How horrible would it be for an airline
to allow the pilots to fly when someone suggested they may have been unfit to
fly and the accusation was recorded with employees of the airline shown to be
aware of the accusations. The lawsuits would be ridiculous.

Don’t joke around about things in the airport or on an airplane. Safety and
security are generally number one in the minds of the front line employees.
Turns out we like going home alive too.

------
hellsOtherPeeps
Facebook has somehow figured out that one of my profiles is directly tied to
some of my credit card activity.

I wasn't being entirely careful about locking things down. And now I get some
extremely specific ads, relating to a 30 day rolling window of recent
purchases.

I'm trying to think of the best ways to poison and destroy this linkage, that
was established some time after September. It may indeed be true that I just
have to totally disconnect.

On some level, this is regrettable, only because Facebook absolutely
monopolizes access to the updates some people choose to publicize for
themselves, since those people know no other way to broadcast important
information.

Mostly, these people are not geeks with technical fetishes. They don't have
the slightest inkling about packets, ports, sockets, protocols. They don't
understand that an iPhone does have a root file system. So facebook is it, and
no distributed immitation cheese or diet margarine will replace their coca-
cola brand social media.

What to do?

~~~
eevilspock
[https://gitlab.com/upend/upend.org-
content/blob/master/raiso...](https://gitlab.com/upend/upend.org-
content/blob/master/raison-d-etre.md)

------
o_____________o
This was a great premise, but the rapid escalation into dystopian absurdity
was disappointing.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
I didn’t see any dystopian or even mildly strange parts to it. Can you give
more detail on which parts had some absurdity? All of the examples of how a
customer could have creepily personal information about airline staff seemed
like entirely realistic analogues of the type of personalization efforts
companies make towards customers.

------
cosmic_ape
A bit different, but something similar does happen already, when people rate
taxi drivers, cashiers in a store, or people commenting on airbnb hosts. These
reactions often get personal rather than being based on an objective
evaluation of a transaction.

Point is, the "flight crew"s and even the "pilots" are not the corporation.
The corporation may easily sacrifice their privacy if its believed to
contribute the bottom line. Even the CEO might be sacrificed. The really
private things about a corporation are its finances, its tradeoffs of customer
benefit vs "efficiency", its market segmentation policies, etc.

------
Verdex_3
Here's a thought experiment. What if corporations hired a bunch of people
whose job it was to be genuinely happy that it was your birthday. Maybe they
divide their user group into days such that each day one of these employees
would only be responsible for feeling happy about one or two users' birthdays.
This employee would send you the email. And they would be happy about it and
truly glad that it is your birthday.

Is this situation more or less dystopian?

~~~
clevergadget
This reminds me of the question - if you feel guilty for doing a terrible
thing, is it somehow more forgivable? If it isn't, why are we so horrified
when someone does a terrible thing and doesn't feel guilty later?

~~~
mmt
I'm not sure it's what you intended.. but here's my stab at what you're
getting at.

The key is that forgiveness is primarily about (and, arguably, for the benefit
of) the emotional state of the one granting the forgiveness.

It can be granted independent of any feelings of guilt (which are impossible
to know for sure) on the part of the recipient.

Similarly, someone else's happiness about my birthday is irrelevant to me if I
don't care about that someone, no matter how genuine that happiness is.

------
narvind
Just to take away the creepiness factor, I'd say things like: Passengers who
shared their favorite drinks with us rate us higher because we know them
better and serve them accordingly.

This is akin to amazon's main website changing "We recommend the following to
you" to: "People who bought this also bought" \- to induce a subtle hint of
jealousy that others are getting a better deal and this is totally optional.

Any recommendation system should be a voluntary opt-in feature and should
consistently do a great job at recommending.

------
eeZah7Ux
Finally are article that points out the real effects of corporate surveillance
instead of making vague references to Black Mirrors: it's psychological
warfare.

~~~
o_____________o
> As the cabin crew serves you a drink "Dave! Can I get more peanuts? I know
> you're on your final warning from HR - and I'd hate for someone to put in
> another complaint."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive)

~~~
gowld
Wow, Black Mirror ripping off Community / Meow Meow Beenz

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CI4kiPaKfAE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CI4kiPaKfAE)

------
carapace
Parity is one solution.

"Total surveillance is the perfection of democracy."

> The true horror of technological omniscience is that it shall force us for
> once to live according to our own rules. For the first time in history we
> shall have to do without hypocrisy and privilege. The new equilibrium will
> not involve tilting at the windmills of ubiquitous sensors and processing
> power but rather learning what explicit rules we can actually live by,
> finding, in effect, the real shape of human society.

Parity of information is the difference between Star Trek and North Korea.

~~~
UncleEntity
Yep, like information on Omega where they not only restricted information from
basically everyone but would resort to straight up thievery to ensure it could
never be developed.

Sounds like North Korea to me...

~~~
carapace
Are you talking about tht one lousy Voyager episode? I hardly think that
invalidates the ethos of the whole franchise?

Maybe you prefer "The Orville"?

------
kazinator
No flying experience will be correctly personalized to everyone's true
preferences until we see attractive stewardesses sitting in a few laps.

Until then, it's just a harmless sham.

