J.D. is diligent, stable, dependably accurate, skeptical of change, and non-confrontational.
Accuracy confidence: 49%
We found limited data for J.D., but enough to analyze.
When speaking to J.D....
Emphasize past results
Let them finish their sentences before talking
Don't come across as intense
Don't speak with an informal tone
When emailing J.D....
Ask them something that will require a long, thoughtful response
Use a formal greeting and closing
Don't write with short, casual language and abbreviations
Don't use sarcasm
When working with J.D....
Compliment quality of their work
Expect a long time to earn their trust
Don't say something that could sound like "one-upsmanship"
Don't surprise them to get their attention
When selling to J.D....
Focus on the "here and now"
Focus on your company's past accomplishments and credentials
Don't use hyperbole to make a point ("This is the best product in the world!")
Don't try to schedule a meeting with other coworkers
It comes naturally to J.D. to...
Follow rules and instructions
Get stressed by uncertainty
Pay close attention to all the details
Speak with a tactful, reserved demeanor
It does not come naturally to J.D. to...
Try to reduce or avoid structure and bureaucracy
Ignore an existing process in favor of "their" way
Make hand motions while talking
Forget to respond to an email
Let them finish their sentences before talking? Not a chance!
Okay, I gotta give it to them. They nailed it on a lot of those.
I give them a score of 13 yes (and a handful of those FUCK YES*), three maybe, and 4 huh?
Good luck figuring out which are which!
* But honestly, is there anybody who actually likes being interrupted? They could totally bump up their accuracy even further by saying I like puppies, pizza, and good sex, though not necessarily all at once.
I hope the hand motions one is a huh? I love good gestures and can't even imagine having conversations without them.
__________________
"freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."
- Justice Robert Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Ed. v. Barnette
Pick three people to run this on, show the three results, but don't say which goes with whom. See if they are able to recognize themselves.
I want to see this!
(I do like being interrupted if I'm bored with what I'm doing.)
Using the posted one already, let's take a look.
Quote:
J.D. is diligent, stable, dependably accurate, skeptical of change, and non-confrontational.
So far I could pretend to be an Ensign Steve.
Quote:
When speaking to J.D....
Emphasize past results
Let them finish their sentences before talking
Don't come across as intense
Don't speak with an informal tone
As I went down the list I found myself saying "well, it depends" to a lot of them. For, say, cold calls, emails or initial introductions it's obvious that simply being polite a person would do these things. But as you get to know a correspondent or coworker or other work acquaintance the expectations can be shifted. With these four here, I'd say the only one that always counts is number 3. I'm most ambivalent about number 1, though.
Quote:
When emailing J.D....
Ask them something that will require a long, thoughtful response
Use a formal greeting and closing
Don't write with short, casual language and abbreviations
Don't use sarcasm
I'm not a good conversationalist. I much prefer larger groups or more vocal people around me so I can sit and just listen.
For professional correspondence I do like mostly formal greetings and closings, especially when the exchange can become part of an official record.
But again, this is dependent on what circle the exchange or relationship takes place in.
Quote:
When working with J.D....
Compliment quality of their work
Expect a long time to earn their trust
Don't say something that could sound like "one-upsmanship"
Don't surprise them to get their attention
Yes, no, yes and yes.
Quote:
When selling to J.D....
Focus on the "here and now"
Focus on your company's past accomplishments and credentials
Don't use hyperbole to make a point ("This is the best product in the world!")
Don't try to schedule a meeting with other coworkers
I might prefer a focus on now and future performance/reliability. Talking about what a company had done doesn't necessarily apply to what they're doing now. Though I can be impressed with certain performance achievements. (I recently interviewed with a company that has millions of man hours worked without a safety incident.)
Quote:
It comes naturally to J.D. to...
Follow rules and instructions
Get stressed by uncertainty
Pay close attention to all the details
Speak with a tactful, reserved demeanor
And here again I am a reasonable simulacrumbort of an Ensign Steve.
Quote:
It does not come naturally to J.D. to...
Try to reduce or avoid structure and bureaucracy
Ignore an existing process in favor of "their" way
Make hand motions while talking
Forget to respond to an email
I have and will try to reduce some structure and or bureaucracy, but that doesn't mean I don't respect that which is in place. I haven't exactly ignored an in place process, but I have modified some only to later officially modify it for use by others. Because of a number of speech classes from my yoot, I make it a point to use my hands to talk but I'm aware of it and can control it. I have purposely delayed responding to emails but not outright forgot.
Humans are really bad at training their intuition to correctly assess propositions whose cause and effect are separated by vast expanses of time and space. The privacy disclosure you make today might never bite you in the ass, or it might come back to haunt you in ten years. When it does, you won’t be able to recall the thought process that you went through when you gave out that data today, and you won’t be able to learn any real lessons that will help you get better at disclosure tomorrow.
It's not entirely fair to put all of the blame on individuals for this. Personal data gets out there lots of ways, and many of them aren't something you have control over. That's the problem. Unless people actually own and have the ability to control use of their own data, any attempt to rein it in is just a bunch of Whack a Mole shit.
Sure, some people will happily turn over just about all their personal information in exchange for a silly app or marginal convenience or whatever, and that is fucking nuts. But to live an even remotely normal life, you have to provide your information sometimes. If you vote or drive or own property or have telephone service or accounts with utility companies, you have to tell them who you are, and they store and display that data, and various aggregators scrape and store and collate and sell it to anyone who will pay.
And OK, so you remember a couple of years ago, Facebook had that glitch where it inadvertently displayed users' shadow profiles? They fixed that by not displaying them anymore, not by not collecting them or adopting any other policies that might curtail the type of information they collect. Further, they revealed that their policy is that personal data is not the property of the person whose data it is, but of whoever gave it to them. So I don't have a Facebook account, and never have. However, I used to get invitations from people who would apparently enter my name and my email in some Facebook form. People use address book scrapers and enter other people's personal information into corporate databases without their permission all the time, and that sort of behavior came about so quickly that it just sort of happened. There was no public discussion of whether it was a reasonable thing to do. The technology just sort of came about, and people, including a lot of very low information people, just sort of assumed that it was OK to use it. I've actually told people any number of times that I don't like them giving my personal information to anyone, and the response, almost universally, is to argue with me as though I'm being crazy and paranoid. Everyone does it. I'm pretty sure if I were to provide their contact information to some fly by night door to door salesperson, they'd take exception to that, but it never even occurs to them that what they're doing is actually worse.
The Note to Self podcast had an episode that was really weird, where they were talking to people at Facebook who were openly bragging about all the social experiments they were doing on users without their knowledge right before that story about their emotion manipulation experiment broke. They were totally oblivious to the ethical aspects of what they were doing. Clearly, nobody ever gave that a thought at all, and even more clearly, they're never going to on their own accord. It's not just that they did it, it's that they didn't even predict that it was something that might bother people. They were talking about it very openly. They'd put a lot of thought and effort into designing and conducting their experiments, and none into even considering whether their subjects would be OK with that.
So now, we also have always on voice command devices. Not just dedicated devices, but features built into TVs and computers and cell phones that listen to and record and store conversations that happen in the real world. People are walking around with recording devices in their pockets. Supposedly, they're mostly passive listening and wake on specific commands sometimes, but there is no guarantee of that. And those Samsung TVs--things that sit in your personal living space--have the really poorly written disclaimer, "be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition." Mattel just recently announced they're introducing a new AI Barbie that listens and responds to children's conversations with it and then, optionally, will send parents transcripts.
Has anyone even considered consent there? We have a few states in the US that still require all party consent to record conversations. Does that apply to your phone or that Barbie? If you agree to some EULA that allows Mattel to collect information about your child, what does it do with the recordings of other kids? Does it comply with COPPA requirements?
My guess: Nobody has even considered it, and nobody will ever be held accountable for any violations. Nobody asks those questions ahead of time. People, including the people who develop these technologies, are stupid and short sighted. There is nothing you can do socially to convince people that the things they've been mindlessly doing are harmful and invasive and unethical.
There are data miners and aggregators collecting information whose fundamental business models are indistinguishable from paranoid delusions. Most people will never take anyone's concerns about them seriously because, especially to someone who doesn't follow technology, you literally sound insane just explaining it. Most people will continue adopting intrusive new technologies because everyone else is doing it, and they aren't going to be inclined to acknowledge the problems with it because they've unwittingly been culpable.
Did I mention the time that someone at my grad school had done a research internship at Facebook?
I saw their poster about their research at one of the various poster sessions that would happen. The data they used was text entered into the Facebook status or comment box but subsequently not posted.
I'm sure Facebook has a disclosure somewhere in the fine print that they're saving that data, but I was like damn... I hope the IRB didn't sign off on this shit!
When I clicked on that, Adblock warned me that the site was known to show targeted messages and did I want to block them. Oh, the irony.
__________________
"freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."
- Justice Robert Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Ed. v. Barnette
On a scan I found lots of evidence of people being paranoid and lots of things that the government and others are doing that could be* evil, but no actual consequences. The article could just as well have been about UFOs.
* And will be, I believe, but I need examples
The danger is that people will gradually accept more and more intrusions and become desensitised, right? Talking about paranoia and possible problems won't stop this treat, only actual consequences already suffered.
That article itself doesn't go into a super-lot of detail about the consequences, but there are existing ones.
I mean, obviously, identity theft. That happens all the time. People's personal information gets stolen from corporate or government databases and then sold to criminals, and those people are really fucked.
I'm looking for and failing to find right now something about datamined consumer lists that compiled and sorted people's personal information into lists based on predictive marketing categories, including medical conditions (one was "dementia sufferers"), race, financial status, etc., and would sell them to anyone buying. I've mentioned before that some sloppy dataminers got the idea that my dad is alive and he owns my house. He'd be 90 years old right now, so I get all kinds of sketchy marketing things and outright fraud addressed to him here. Fake bills and legal threats, pyramid schemes, tons of timeshare crap and other predatory marketing targeted to old people. So that's one thing that's already happening.
Another is redlining and other discriminatory policies. It's illegal to discriminate based on race, but it's not illegal to use predictive data that correlates to race and then discriminate based on that. And because it's a computer doing it, and because that computer is not explicitly given racial data, you can actually prove that it doesn't even see race. That's happening already, too.
Also remember that the US has virtually no privacy protections for citizens at all. Corporations have a greater legal claim to privacy than humans do, and they use that privacy, in the form of 'trade secrets,' to deny people information about what they know or think they know about us, and what they're doing with it.
And for that reason, once the consequences are suffered, it's already too late.
There are some things we actually know about, mostly based on leaks of some sort, but we also know that those things are just the tip of the iceberg. That sounds like paranoia, but it's undeniably true.
Nobody is collecting and collating all this information for no reason. Not the government or private companies or anyone. If someone is compiling this stuff, they are doing something with it.
And it's safe to start with the assumption that anything you can think of either already is or soon will be technically feasible. It's not ALWAYS true, but that's the rule, and the exceptions are exceptions.
LadyShea, can we recommend some nice insomnia drugs?
Regards,
Pfizer
__________________
"freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."
- Justice Robert Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Ed. v. Barnette
I'm looking for and failing to find right now something about datamined consumer lists that compiled and sorted people's personal information into lists based on predictive marketing categories, including medical conditions (one was "dementia sufferers"), race, financial status, etc., and would sell them to anyone buying.
...
There are some things we actually know about, mostly based on leaks of some sort, but we also know that those things are just the tip of the iceberg. That sounds like paranoia, but it's undeniably true.
Oh! Thank you, Ensign Steve! That article mentioned one of those data broker stories I was trying to find, also referenced here, selling lists of people with medical conditions, as well as "rape sufferers.
(I want to look up the original testimony, which I'm pretty sure I remembered some other stuff from, but I am still very computer-hobbled, as I need to buy a strange form factor power supply. Send coupons, dickheels.)
And this reminds me of my greatest data harvesting story, which I've probably told before. A while back, I started getting big, glossy, four color brochures from a nearby hospital (Boulder Community Hospital it was) inviting me to attend seminars and presentations about new treatments for PELVIC ORGAN PROLAPSE. Let me make it very clear here that these were not in envelopes. They were brochures sent straight through the mail with my name printed on them next to big, clear letters reading "PELVIC ORGAN PROLAPSE" for all to see. And I didn't get just one. They were pretty insistent. I got tons of these.
Now, OK. I have never had pelvic organ prolapse, although I might also say that if I had, but I haven't. But I must have been engaging in some prolapsey activities. Buying too many potatoes or something like that. Because the fact that I didn't have that condition means that it couldn't have come from any confirmed source, but from something else. Some predictive tool out there was analyzing some data about me, decided that it meant that I had thrown a sleeve, and then sold my contact information to some sort of drug or medical device company so they could send me targeted ads.
I have no idea who it was who did that, what data they collected, or how they reached that conclusion. And I also have no idea what other ideas are floating around out there about me, either, and who is making money writing this fan fiction about me.
I am assuming that it was somehow related to the TV ads that started showing up not long after for law firms soliciting litigants for class action suits against some sort of mesh devices.
And this reminds me of my greatest data harvesting story, which I've probably told before. A while back, I started getting big, glossy, four color brochures from a nearby hospital (Boulder Community Hospital it was) inviting me to attend seminars and presentations about new treatments for PELVIC ORGAN PROLAPSE. Let me make it very clear here that these were not in envelopes. They were brochures sent straight through the mail with my name printed on them next to big, clear letters reading "PELVIC ORGAN PROLAPSE" for all to see. And I didn't get just one. They were pretty insistent. I got tons of these.
Now, OK. I have never had pelvic organ prolapse, although I might also say that if I had, but I haven't. But I must have been engaging in some prolapsey activities. Buying too many potatoes or something like that. Because the fact that I didn't have that condition means that it couldn't have come from any confirmed source, but from something else. Some predictive tool out there was analyzing some data about me, decided that it meant that I had thrown a sleeve, and then sold my contact information to some sort of drug or medical device company so they could send me targeted ads.
It was on page 2 of in this very thread, and "threw a sleeve" is as disgusting and hilarious today as it was the first time.