The bigger issue

I just read an article about a weight loss app that turned out to be a more interesting article than I expected, given that I’m not particularly interested in weight loss.

Although the primary topic is about weight loss, the underlying topic is about human psychology, and specifically, how easily we can be manipulated by apps. In this case, an app manipulated the author to lose weight. But so often the apps and websites and the algorithms they use are designed to make us click on dumb stuff on the internet, resulting in us believing stupid shit designed to get us all riled up, or sending them our money for junk that we don’t need and probably don’t actually even want.

I’ve seen it in my own life. I’ll go onto Amazon to buy a couple of kitchen hand towels or something reasonable, and then what the hell happens to my mind? The scary thing is, the folks at Amazon don’t really know how it works either. Their software collects data about what we (hundreds of thousands of us) click and when we click, and pretty soon the data shows crazy minute detail such as that we’ll buy more if the background page is one shade of beige instead of a different shade of beige and the “buy” button is turquoise, or whatever inscrutable insights the data shows. They know it works but they don’t know why. We are being tricked by people who don’t even understand themselves how the trickery works!

Meanwhile similar algorithms can now beat all humans at our most challenging games like chess and go. Not only are we being tricked, but we are being tricked by algorithms that are smarter than we are! Algorithms will soon be beating me at the game of who-gets-my-money, just like how the algorithms manipulated this author into losing a truly huge amount of weight in what sounded like a potentially unhealthy amount of time.

It’s such an interesting article that I used one of my 10 per month free share options to generate a link that doesn’t have a firewall so you can read it if you want.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/11/magazine/weight-loss-pandemic.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuomT1JKd6J17Vw1cRCfTTMQmqxCdw_PIxftm3iWka3DIDm8biOEcDIGS-kHAIrVuZtQzw3GfQ8RadacmQvB_y-5UeUxxTg3i6r21pKM4GQRn44SiQjFxmJvXQbEz9TKtNTG1Ie4jz7b65EuLPH3tWvTezX13JwZ6pZA1cVqgjnMOx6_PAfc1joclpYopAZp6RDkLYCOY7bK_W1glZoLwPlyL4RI2WupZRTjUgdWYjrsGewxWAlrMJ2httSd-sJgPfYNKY9usakIoa8H8gr4OC2N3L4vPBpA5Rofcl7QCoqdKc5I_DuGHbmqKwyEFy_Ht&smid=url-share

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