An interesting experiment could be re-wording some of these and seeing how different the rankings are.
So have an alternate card titled "Promoting your country" rather than "Propaganda" or "Personal Safety" rather than "Firearms".
Some of these cards definitely present biases that could prime someone to vote a certain way such as "Exploitative Gig Economy" is clearly biased. I would strongly guess if certain cards were worded more positively, they wouldn't be ranked as poorly.
"Advertising" -> "Promoting your product"
Or some of them are so broad it's difficult to disambiguate the good from the bad like "Telemarketing", "Advertising", or "Pharmaceuticals". Some of it is awful while other parts are between great and ok.
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Another interesting dynamic I was thinking of as I was answering was the axis of "Personal Responsibility" to "Social Responsibility".
It gauges how the crowd thinks of harm. For instance, Environmental Pollution is bad because it harms everyone and no one _chooses_ to be polluted on necessarily while something like Sugary Drinks is largely a personal choice that affects no one else.
Maybe another axis of "Protection" to "Liberty" where something is a personal choice but could be seen as bad because it is addictive or otherwise tries to trap the person.
So Adult Platform would be fairly squarely in Liberty/Personal while something like Online Gambling would be Protection/Social.
What an interesting idea!
Quick question: Do you store user data in any way or each "start" resets previous choices?
What`s your plan for this? A public platform? Maybe connection to a specific purpose? I can see attaching non profits links to some causes might help some.
Also curious to see diff per region/state and maybe as some further vision connection of it to a specific regional stats regarding the topic.
Thanks, sadly it didn't pick-up on HN
The diff per region/state would be fantastic!
The stats are shared, nothing "per user". At first I just wanted to see if it would trigger some interest. There's a huge room for improvements, your suggestions are great
This is fantastic! The voting statistics of the community would have been very interesting. I have emailed the moderators to see if they would consider giving this post a second chance at /pool.
Based on the recent comments I've seen around here, selecting whether "Social Media" or "Private Prisons" are worse for society is somehow, inexplicably, a tough decision.
Many of the options here are also confusing. "Pharmaceuticals" as one of the options among other generally-considered bad things? Pharmaceuticals have saved millions of lives. Am I supposed to assume we're talking about the opiate crisis specifically or something?
I don't like this candidate list at all because it obviously reflects the author's beliefs on what viable candidates are. There are many entries there that do not belong in such a list. There also are many other things that could've been viable candidates, but aren't in the list, e.g. moneyprinting, inflation above 1%, health insurance preapprovals and denials, etc.
- private military is different from (and not necessary for) defence. A country having an army for defence is bad but kinda necessary. A country hiring mercenaries is not necessary.
- you can have e.g. social media without surveillance tech, and the harm comes mostly from the surveillance tech. Likewise for the others. Facial recognition opens my phone, I'm fine with that. Surveillance tech is always bad.
- same for the resources industry; they could create a mine that doesn't pollute and cleans up after itself when done. Mining itself isn't necessarily harmful (and we need the resources). It's the pollution that does the harm.
- kinda same for scams - the thing we hate is the scam. The others could do this without the scam, but they choose not to which is why we hate them.
- influencers are a particularly annoying form of advertising, so I get why they're ranked differently. It would be interesting if all forms of advertising were ranked so we could really see what annoys people.
totally agree that the sex industry at the bottom is good :)
So have an alternate card titled "Promoting your country" rather than "Propaganda" or "Personal Safety" rather than "Firearms".
Some of these cards definitely present biases that could prime someone to vote a certain way such as "Exploitative Gig Economy" is clearly biased. I would strongly guess if certain cards were worded more positively, they wouldn't be ranked as poorly.
"Advertising" -> "Promoting your product"
Or some of them are so broad it's difficult to disambiguate the good from the bad like "Telemarketing", "Advertising", or "Pharmaceuticals". Some of it is awful while other parts are between great and ok.
---
Another interesting dynamic I was thinking of as I was answering was the axis of "Personal Responsibility" to "Social Responsibility".
It gauges how the crowd thinks of harm. For instance, Environmental Pollution is bad because it harms everyone and no one _chooses_ to be polluted on necessarily while something like Sugary Drinks is largely a personal choice that affects no one else.
Maybe another axis of "Protection" to "Liberty" where something is a personal choice but could be seen as bad because it is addictive or otherwise tries to trap the person.
So Adult Platform would be fairly squarely in Liberty/Personal while something like Online Gambling would be Protection/Social.
I thought the point was to show how ranking industries based on "evil vibes" is subjective.
Also curious to see diff per region/state and maybe as some further vision connection of it to a specific regional stats regarding the topic.
Also, some of these things are definitely not like the others.
Many of the options here are also confusing. "Pharmaceuticals" as one of the options among other generally-considered bad things? Pharmaceuticals have saved millions of lives. Am I supposed to assume we're talking about the opiate crisis specifically or something?
Oil & Gas are necessary for a country's survival. Good!
The Oil & Gas Industry operate political lobbying and climate change disinformation campaigns. Bad :(
So, which of the two should I consider in my rankings? Both? Neither?
You just have context-free character strings to work with here.
And then I peeked at the leader board and *really* didn't care for the things ranked best at all.
- private military is different from (and not necessary for) defence. A country having an army for defence is bad but kinda necessary. A country hiring mercenaries is not necessary.
- you can have e.g. social media without surveillance tech, and the harm comes mostly from the surveillance tech. Likewise for the others. Facial recognition opens my phone, I'm fine with that. Surveillance tech is always bad.
- same for the resources industry; they could create a mine that doesn't pollute and cleans up after itself when done. Mining itself isn't necessarily harmful (and we need the resources). It's the pollution that does the harm.
- kinda same for scams - the thing we hate is the scam. The others could do this without the scam, but they choose not to which is why we hate them.
- influencers are a particularly annoying form of advertising, so I get why they're ranked differently. It would be interesting if all forms of advertising were ranked so we could really see what annoys people.
totally agree that the sex industry at the bottom is good :)