By that logic, buying a slow phone can also just be undone.
A perfect solution that works 100% is not the goal. Small influences that can help you change behavior can still be beneficial. Maybe they doom scroll 5% less because of this tweak? Still a positive change.
Maybe it can work to some degree for some people. But there are other methods that should help much more effectively, without being self-destructive and miserable. I view this solution in similar categories as, say, suggesting someone should drunk themselves off to the point of passing out, because you know... at least they won't scroll at that point probably? And yet there are some very obvious downsides of such approach.
I mean if someone wants to try something in this direction, but without the misery, I'd suggest things like making the screen monochromatic, which will make the content seem less appealing to the brain, but without that being a nuisance.
It’s not as if Palantir is a co-op or something. If you work there you’re working on the things the bosses want.
They’re not going to turn around and say “gosh, you’re right, the tech we’re making is going to enable a police state, I never thought!”. They know. They’re fine with it.
If 50% of engineers choose not to work for Palantir for ethical reasons, they have to hire from a reduced talent pool. The company will have to pay more for talented engineers but can probably still succeed. If 90%-99% of engineers refuse to work for them, they're going to have a much harder time of it.
Palantir is the police state. They are not redeemable, as they are fulfilling their original mission. I urge people to see what the founders say on X, chilling.
You think these tactics work at a company like Palantir? Or even most companies? That’s not how these power structures work. These companies tend to already filter for people who align with the built in politics and ethics of the product being produced.
I would encourage anyone to familiarize themselves with the "banality of evil" [1]. Interestingly, there's this quote that's very apropos today:
> “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule,” she also says, “is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer holds”
Anyway, the idea of this is "evil" is an accumulation of small, otherwise inocuous actions.
Consider the recent movie "Zone of Interest" that was set outside Auschwitz and never showed any of the atrocities. The whole point was that even on the steps of mass murder, life still appeared in many ways "normal" [2].
That’s literally what this whole article was about. Removing a high correlation performance test, that black candidates didn’t pass as frequently, and replacing it with a very low correlation questionnaire that provided a more diverse applicant pool while weeding out highly qualified individuals.
Exactly. From the article: "As originally scored, the test was intended to pass 60% of applicants, but predictions suggested only 3% of black applicants would pass"
They still had to pass the performance test. It was just no longer the first step in the process. I want to be clear, that doesn't mean the questionnaire was a good thing. It just means that the questionnaire did not lower the bar.
Instead it reduced the applicant pool in a sudden and unfair manner, which is it's own issue.
No, read the article again. They didn't need to pass the same test to the same degree - the criteria was also changed to have "qualified" and "well qualified".
It's worth nothing that this change happened before the questionnaire was instituted. (The paper referenced in the article was from 2006, I haven't dug enough to find a date for when this change was made, but the narrative in the article also establishes this act as happening in the '00s.) Additionally, from the Conclusions:
"Reweighting was based on data collected from incumbent ATCSs who took AT-SAT on a research basis; some of these employees achieved overall scores less than 70 (that was one of the reasons for the reweighting effort – a belief that incumbent employees should be able to pass the entry-level selection test)."
I don't think this proves that the update to the test was good or bad in overall competency, but I do think it's worth investigating if the test should be updated when existing employees are unable to pass.
I’m not familiar with Bambu, I’m a Prusa user, but if I had to guess you would always be able to print via microSD. It would be wildly unpopular to disable local printing.
A perfect solution that works 100% is not the goal. Small influences that can help you change behavior can still be beneficial. Maybe they doom scroll 5% less because of this tweak? Still a positive change.
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