[ExI] moral guidance please: was Anders on io9

[spike]

Behalf Of Adrian Tymes
Subject: Re: [ExI] moral guidance please: was Anders on io9

 

On Fri, Feb 7, 2014 at 5:35 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

Ethics hipsters, guidance please?

>
Don't.  Straight-up no.  You'd be having laughs - *just* laughs - at the
expense - and it is an expense, in stress and hassle if nothing else - of
someone with whom you have no prior involvement


 

Thanks Adrian.  As I recall you were on the strictly puritan end of the
spectrum last time something like this came up.  Other opinions?

>
There are better ways to get laughs: more enduring (and therefore more
quantity in the long run), and less effort at the same time


 

Indeed?  What are they?  I would go for an alternative.

 

I thought if I played up the whole blue-bloody angle, it might put a fun
spin on it while giving sufficient hints that it is a joke.  There are
plenty of people in this old world who resent the upper crust for no other
reason than they are born rich and privileged.  I thought it might work out
if I put plenty of those kinds of hints in the letter, that if they thought
about it they could figure out one of their cousins was pulling a fast one
on them just for fun.  Prudence?  Purity??  Noooobody hangs those tags on
their daughters now.

 

Actually I think you are right Adrian, for the following.  A few years ago,
some guy rigged up Eliza and sent her into a teen chat room.  Most of the
teens long post-dated Eliza, who came and went before any of them were born,
so they came in as unsuspecting naïve victims.  

 

Under the usual assumption of privacy, some of the stuff these teens spilled
to that simple-minded program, oh my. They blathered away openly about stuff
that couldn’t be pried out of most of us with torture devices; sexual
deviancy, drug use, crimes, maniacal commentary, etc.   Some of them were
hinting at contemplating suicide, all manner of improprieties, eeesh.  The
guy recorded everything.

 

OK then, here’s this interesting sociological experiment, a Turing test in a
way, and this guy has all this data, having recorded all of this vile tripe.
If it had been me, I might have described some of the shocking stuff that
was posted, and how most of them fell for the Eliza trick, how the average
time to figuring out it was a computer program was over 12 minutes, average
number of posts 15, etc.  

 

But this yahoo who perpetrated the Eliza gag did something that haunts me to
this day: he posted everything.  On a website, he left it there for I don’t
know how long.  Didn’t even hide the identities, he just slammed it all on
the table.  That I wouldn’t do in a hundred years, not in a thousand.  That
was evil.  I felt guilty even reading part of the material.  It was
interesting to see some of the comments they made at the end of their
sessions as the teens figured out they had been had.  But posting all that
stuff was wrong.

 

What would bother me about the ImPurity Prufrock Throckmorton caper is that
the identities of the mean bahstids could be more easily deduced by me than
could the identity of the DNA-contributing volunteer would be for them.
Reasoning: I have a thousand data points, they have only one.  I might be
able to figure out who wrote what, if I work at it, but they wouldn’t be
able to find the ID of the spitter.  After they thought it over, they would
realize what happened, and would be annoyed.

 

Parting shot on all this: I have contacted about 120 of my DNA relatives and
I will have to say it has been mostly a disappointment.  My DNA relatives
were not nearly as bright as I had imagined them to be; on the contrary.
They seemed to be unable to reason thru such things as creating genetic
triangulation algorithms, or invent creative ideas on how to deduce
identities of their own DNA relatives.  All this with one shining exception,
one very bright cousin, who was interesting, smart as a whip, well educated,
open minded, creative, wise, kind, all the good stuff.

 

Today, I find in my LinkedIn box a notice about a guy who I might want to
link, based on a mutual friend.  The person being recommended was that
cousin!  There was no reference to 23andMe, no mention or knowledge by
LinkedIn of that mutual interest in genetics, no reference to or knowledge
of our being cousins; only a recommendation based on our mutual friend.  So
I accepted and invited my own fourth cousin to LinkIn.  The mutual friend
was


 


Eugen Leitl.

 

Pretty cool, ja?

 

{8-]

 

spike

 

 

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