@aparrish imho rewarding humans for becoming more predictable / punishig them for the oposite is abusive constriction of human reasoning to an easily emulated smaller subset. An ex of mine did this, insisting people around them behave predictably. After a while I took to retorting with "I'm not predictable; I'm human." Along with language complexity arguments about some computations being impossible to embody in a finite state machine. Add in the visceral horror of the idea of simulations of us having algorithms run against them to predict what will work against us, and .. it's a ghosthack. Making people more predictable is a ghosthack against free will itself. Because the essence of free will is that its result cannot be predicted.
(The Verge article, meanwhile, is pretty solid. There are a couple more points it could have made, maybe, and it had room to be more confrontational or even click-bait-y if it wanted to (although that's a stylistic choice when it doesn't get in the way of journalisming), but it's.. very solid.)
(ARGH, wanna derive enjoyment from sharing Bad Takes that I run across and laughing at them with friends but also wanna not participate in/reenforce/normalize Cringe Culture...)
@kaniini Some other way to achieve "Self-reported statistics are self-reported, and like sure are useful if you trust the reporter but also equally useless if you have reason to doubt the reporter, because they're self-reported."?
@kaniini Maybe, but it would probably be helpful for one small instance to (one that's already a pretty stable, closed, adn tight-knit community not interested in expanding or anything and that has no reason to care about what its numbers are), just to keep it in perspective.
@I_am_journei The difference is, Louisiana is 49% below sea level, but lasagna is like 87% below sea level right now?, I'm really sorry I was carrying it to the potluck but I got distracted while crossing the bridge and I dropped it??