Algorithms for horny middle aged men

Facebook has been sending me friend suggestions for lots of 20 something women.  It also sends me friend suggestions for other types of people, but I noticed many months ago that this demographic made up a big chunk of my suggestions so I paid close attention to see if it continued.  After monitoring it for a half year or so I can safely say that 75% of my friend suggestions are adult women much younger than me.  A few were sex workers or scammers, but the majority of them were real people with one or two friends in common with me.  

Facebook's motivation for doing this seems obvious; get the middle aged straight guy to click on profiles of young women he wants to have sex with and increase engagement metrics.  However, that might be me leaping to conclusions.  Maybe Facebook just sends young women to everyone in friend suggestions... I don't know.

If my initial assumption holds true, then it is a sad thing indeed.  Getting messaged and friended by some older man who just wants sex is not something younger women on social media want or need.  They can get an infinite supply of that trivially, if they are interested - they can even get paid.  It seems like Facebook is trying to get me to engage more by encouraging crappy behaviour.

However, I would like to be sure that this is what is happening.  The four things that leap out to me that may be relevant are age, gender, sexual orientation, and relationship style.  Is this limited to men, middle aged people, straight people, or polyamorous people?  Perhaps some combination of all of the above.  Certainly Facebook knows I am in a relationship with a woman who is nine years younger than me as well as my spouse and perhaps that influences the algorithm's choices.

I would appreciate anyone replying here or on Facebook with your experiences in this.  Ideally include age, gender, orientation, and polyamorous or not, but if you don't want to include any of that just knowing if you have similar experiences to me would be useful.

I must find out the nature of our code overlords, and what they want they think of me.

Facts, but not all the facts

A few weeks ago I put out a call on Facebook for books I should read.  I got a big stack of them from the library and I am tearing through them.  Yesterday I wrote a post about Factfulness, where I talked about what a good book it is.  Most of the books on my list will be much the same I am sure.  At the moment I am planning on writing a post about each of them, but we will see if that actually happens.

There is one book in that recommendation list that is not going to get a "This book is great!" post.  It is called Black Rednecks and White Liberals.  The blurb on the back is from someone whose claim to fame is "Commentator on Fox News".  Between the title and that blurb source you can guess that it is written to push a right wing agenda, and you would be right.

However, while I could just deride the book as a bunch of evil nonsense, that wouldn't be doing it justice.  It is a classic example of facts carefully chosen and presented to create a specific conclusion.  The conclusion the author is trying to lead you to is that the struggles of black people in the US today are almost entirely their own fault because of their culture.  He has done a huge amount of research in support of this thesis, and as far as I can tell his facts are accurate.  The trouble with the book is not that it lies, but rather that it doesn't tell you the whole truth.

If you look at the edges of right vs. left debate on racism you will see two extreme camps.  One side is dedicated to the idea that racism is over and that any problems that black people have now are their own fault.  The other side contends that racism is the only thing, and if opportunity were equal that black people would succeed just as much as anyone else because their culture has nothing to do with their success or lack thereof.

Both extreme positions are wrong.  Culture matters in success of groups - just look at the incredible dominance of Asian students in math and science.  That isn't genetic, it is a consequence of culture.

Racism also matters, and black people are discriminated against in a thousand ways, large and small.

The author contends that groups throughout history who have venerated learning, hard work, saving, and study tend to become more successful generation by generation.  He also contends that black culture in the US has values that impugne education and support a spendthrift lifestyle.  This is a trend, not universal, of course, but I think he is correct in these assertions.  Just like the trend of Asian parents pushing their kids to do more math isn't true for all, so are these generalizations about black people only true statistically.

Clearly spending recklessly and despising education and study are not black only things.  I know plenty of white people who spend rather than save, and when I was young I was on the wrong end of 'learning is for losers' by plenty of white kids.  In fact the author suggests that these things are common among redneck cultures regardless of race, and has theories that seem plausible about the American South having these traits in abudance among the white population during the times of slavery in the US.  Seeing the way right wing folks talk about scientists and academics it is obvious this is still alive and well today.

The trouble is that people seize on that simple admission that culture matters, and immediately leap to the conclusion that racism is over.  This is nonsense, but I have seen it in my personal life when someone said "There isn't any racism anymore except anti white racism, black people's problems are all just black culture." and pointed me to this book as proof.

One of the core elements of the book is the author telling us of various teaching methods and programs that produced black graduates that had high success rates in employment and earnings.  He waxes poetic about how if you just teach black people to speak properly, save and invest wisely, and value education, they will suddenly be more successful.

Note the presence of the word 'properly' in that last sentence.  What does he mean by speaking properly?  He doesn't define it.  

He means "like a rich white person who graduated from Harvard".

So yeah, if you teach black kids to speak like a rich white guy from Harvard, they will make more money.  But he completely fails to ask why that is, and if the best thing for society is to simply make black people act like white people.  Is that the goal of our educational system?  To force children to emulate the richest and most powerful so they can get jobs?

No, it is not.  If black people not speaking like rich whites from Harvard is preventing them getting jobs, maybe we ought to change that fact directly, rather than simply accepting it and trying to change black people!

(I do think that a cultural norm of supporting and encouraging study and learning is objectively good though, both for those in that culture and those outside it.)

If some black kids tell other black kids to stop studying because hitting the books is just acting white, then that will have negative effects on their long term educational and job prospects.  However, there is absolutely nothing I can do about that.  What I can do is try to push for a society that doesn't disciminate against those black kids so they at least have equal opportunity from outside their own culture.  That is something I can actively work on, so I will.  Assigning blame isn't going to help anyone, no matter who the blame gets assigned to.  All I can do is try to fix the thing that is within my power to affect, so I will do that.

I normally close with a recommendation to read the book I am reviewing.  I won't give that here.  There are some parts of the book that aren't about black culture at all that are interesting and informative, and even if you totally disagree with the author's conclusions like I do, there are a lot of facts you might find useful.  I view it much like my reading of the Bible years ago - I am glad to have these facts in my head now, because it will make me much better at refuting the arguments of people I disagree with.  I read the Bible in part to better argue with religious people, and I read this book to better argue with racist people.

Black Rednecks and White Liberals has plenty of facts.  Unfortunately, it is light on truth.

Facts don't care about your feelings

I just finished reading the book Factfulness.  It is a book that constantly repeats things I have been yelling about for years to anyone who will listen, so it should be no surprise that I loved it.  The book leads off with 12 questions about the world, mostly relating to human wellbeing and trends.  All questions have 3 answers, A, B, C and the average person gets 2 correct.

You read that right.  Guessing at random would give you 4 correct, but the average person is significantly worse than random guessing.  The author of the book talks about how in all his years administering these questions to huge numbers of people one person ever got 11 correct, and nobody got 12.

I got 11 correct, and I definitely should have got 12, but I rushed through.  That isn't because I am smarter than everyone else, but because the author of the book was trying to make a point, showing how badly humans do on specific sorts of knowledge, and that is a specific sort of knowledge I focus on.

The idea behind the book is that we are terrible at interpreting certain sorts of data and the information we are exposed to predisposes us to come to incorrect conclusions.  The book clarifies a lot of important facts that we usually get wrong, and provides techniques for preventing yourself from reaching those incorrect conclusions in future.  It is a combination of science, sociology, and psychology.  Through reading it we learn about what scientific research and facts tell us about the human world, why we get it wrong, and how we can make our brains be better at this sort of thing.

The key takeaway is that a lot of things are getting better.  For example, I have gotten into a few heated discussions about pollution where people tried to convince me that pollution is getting worse everywhere.  I brought up air quality in Toronto, and these people stated that it is getting worse every year.  I pointed out that we can falsify this both anecdotally and scientifically - just think about the smog pouring out of car tailpipes in decades past, and look at car tailpipes today.  Or, you know, you can just look up the numbers and see that air quality in Toronto has been constantly improving ever since we were able to measure it.

Lots of things are like this.  People see disasters on the news or charities begging for help with images of catastrophe and fail to realize that while individual problems exist, the global trend for nearly all measures of human well being is constantly improving.  We miss the forest for the trees.

Of course that doesn't mean we should rest on our laurels!  Both the author and I are convinced that we should do more for environmental causes and assisting those less fortunate in the world, but we should do that while being aware of the successes we have had.  "We have a lot more to do" can go along with "Many things are improving rapidly" without contradiction.

Everyone should read this book.  If all you get from it is a new understanding of global trends it will be worth it, but you can get so much more.  It can give you tools to be a better activist, a better environmentalist, and a better thinker.