s2e19: Uncanny Valley; Network Du Jour; Streaking Considered Harmful
by danhon
0.0 Sitrep
So the thing about part of this is a little bit of characters have a network that is a bit of life in the villera memory of the generation of something else. Don’t look at a connection of the Valley syncate and it’s going to take the time to be a problem with a financy. There are a whole bunch of edits of a money bothering what they do incredibly because it can imagine a little bit like Chinese Shoeldoo[c] – the Internet. So what stack me from some problems and the last ten year old Google and I think I might be clear to more so you can’t just. Not here. Service is being that much shows something that start than on the internet and the internet’s concernnation of the target place to make an organisation is that the real heading the real complex that’s a problem that appropriate the algorithm.
1.0 Uncanny Valley
This feels a bit like a situation where the Turing Test for a self-driving car is a car that someone else thinks is being driven by a human, but more safely, instead of being driven by a regular human, but not safely. So, via Alexis Madrigal’s newsletter, the amusing idea of giving computer vision systems Rorschach tests[1].
[0] Google’s self-driving car was involved in its first accident with injury after being rear-ended
[1] Move over, Turing — Medium
2.0 Network Du Jour
[0] Graph Genome Offers New Reference Map of Human Genes | MIT Technology Review
3.0 Streaking Considered Harmful
For starters, it feels like the approach to behaviour modification in a lot of these services it a bit skin-deep. Lark, an app that stands out to me because of how well-written its conversational interface is, is one of the rare apps that I would say is reasonably kind to you and is wanting to take a long term view. In this case, the kind, long-term view is the one that says that it’s OK to have an off-day because tomorrow is another chance to do something different. That doesn’t stop Lark from recognising progress and building up a good habit when it sees one – if your activity profile is trending in the right direction for a few days, it will tell you. But it will also make a point of not resetting a streak (because it doesn’t count them!) to zero just because you had an off day.
I guess the point is this: data is brutal and doesn’t know that the universe is unkind, uncaring, and doesn’t give a shit about you. You can be an amazing person and have hit your 12k steps per day goal for every single day for over a year – congratulations, you! – and then have it reset to zero due to something completely out of your control. But most software and services that we have right now aren’t particularly a) empathetic to that happening, and b) sympathetic when that happens. They just reset you to zero. In which case if you want to get anywhere near your previous record, you kind of have to knuckle down. This just doesn’t work for long-term behaviour change. It increases, every single day, the cost of failure – because it’s as if you’re climbing a staircase that is simultaneously getting narrower with every single upward step that you take.
So: I really don’t like streaks. I really don’t like systems that purport to be simple (ie: just set a goal to hit every day!) but don’t take into account the fact that one day, your goal might be achievable and the next day it just might not be. Or that one day’s goal might be 10,000 steps and the next day’s goal might be 300 because hey, you just really, really, really needed to spend the day in bed. That’s not kind. That’s, well, just a bit dickish.
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Of course, this could be the output of the neural net right now and you wouldn’t even know, would you.
Look, a slug.
Best,
Dan