I used to work for Meta. I quit largely because of intense frustrations with the company. Meta has made a lot of mistakes, overlooked a lot of harms, and made a lot of short-sighted, selfish choices. Many things about the world are worse than they could be because of choices Meta has made.
So that when I say that they really do have a zero tolerance policy for anyone using their internal systems to violate user privacy, it's not because I'm eager to defend them. It's just true (at least, it was when I was there). There are internal systems dedicated to making sure you have access to what you need to do your job, and absolutely nothing else. All content you interact with through internal tools is monitored and logged. If you get caught trying to use whatever access your job gives you for anything other than doing your job, security immediately escorts you out of the building. This is drilled into new hires early and often. For everything Meta gets wrong, they really do take this seriously.
These contractors were hired to view this data. Your defense of Meta here doesn't make sense. Meta fired them for speaking out about the data Meta collects, not because they saw the data they were hired to look at.
Meta didn't fire individual independent contractors, they terminated a contract with a vendor. It's possible they did so because some of the vendor's employees spoke out but we don't know the real reason.
(I do think these smart glasses are super creepy and I'm not defending Meta's data collection practices.)
We know the course of events. We have brains and can reason. You really expect Meta to come out and say "Yep, we fired them because they whistleblowed"
> I'm not defending Meta's data collection practices
No but you certainly seem to be over here quibbling about epistemology in the defense of Meta
The problem is that your comment and the one you're responding to can both be true: Just because the rules are heavily enforced does not mean the right rules are in place, starting with the fact that Meta is collecting this data to begin with.
> starting with the fact that Meta is collecting this data to begin with.
But that can't be the problem. They're collecting the data that users send them. To avoid collecting it despite the expressed wishes of the user, they'd need to be able to recognize it as untouchable.
And recognizing the data is the exact problem that this African firm was hired to help with. What do you want Meta to do?
> To avoid collecting it despite the expressed wishes of the user, they'd need to be able to recognize it as untouchable.
> And recognizing the data is the exact problem that this African firm was hired to help with. What do you want Meta to do?
This is written as if logically exhaustive, but it misses the very obvious alternative that none of these videos should have been reviewed by a human at all (aka no reason to "recognize it as untouchable"; they're all untouchable).
If you want to get stricter and talk about collecting at all, Meta already has that solution too, by leaving the video in the user's camera roll. Let the user manually add the video to the Meta AI app or whatever if they want to share it with others there.
> This is written as if logically exhaustive, but it misses the very obvious alternative that none of these videos should have been reviewed by a human at all (aka no reason to "recognize it as untouchable"; they're all untouchable).
No, taking that approach would mean that when someone sends you data that you aren't supposed to collect, you collect it anyway. This is the opposite of what was suggested above.
> No, taking that approach would mean that when someone sends you data that you aren't supposed to collect, you collect it anyway. This is the opposite of what was suggested above.
That was in reference to the original story, that human annotation is happening on videos that no one knew were getting reviewed. If you want to talk about not collecting at all, well:
> If you want to get stricter and talk about collecting at all, Meta already has that solution too, by leaving the video in the user's camera roll. Let the user manually add the video to the Meta AI app or whatever if they want to share it with others there.
Ok, let’s see that consent form and how explicitly it states that random call center people will possibly look at anything you record. I’ll bet you a crisp $50 it was a form designed to be as click-through-worthy as possible, being sure to not trigger the “wait, should I do this?” reflex in users, and also not loudly disclosing that you could still use the device without agreeing, if you even can, while still technically “””disclosing””” this information. The tech world has turned consent into a fucking joke.
Right. The whole point is that click-through consent forms get users’ ”clear“ ”consent” legally, but not morally. They’re deliberately opaque about the implications (ask 10 users if they consider recording a video on a device voluntarily ‘sharing’ it with anybody and I’ll bet 9 will say no,) are pretty inscrutable to regular people, are designed to not raise suspicions like a social engineering attack, often mean not being able to use the product they just bought if they don’t consent, (which is manipulative as hell when you’re talking about inessential functionality like telemetry,) and extremely consequential. The only evidence you need for that is how pissed off people get when they find out what these companies actually do with that consent.
There's no allegation that these workers abused their access. The allegation is that their routine work reviewing footage included private content. The revelation is that USERS are using meta glasses non-consensually.
Many things about the world are worse than they could be because of choices Meta has made.
If Facebook were designed with a different set of incentives that prioritized the user, fostered positive engagement, and better respected individual's privacy and data sovereignty - setting a better standard for the whole industry - I feel there wouldn't be all this fuss today about banning social media accounts.
Indeed, on this one point, Meta has higher standards than the NSA used to - Snowden mentioned that employees tracked their current wives/girlfriends so often it unofficially got the codename LOVEINT.
Same for "Meta reads your E2E whatsapp messages". Meta does many things, is probably massively net negative for civilisation, but it doesn't do that.
Anecdotal of course, but I heard that this wasn't at all the case circa 2006 and that (then) FB employees would routinely read private messages and such. Obviously it wasn't a big company yet and probably didn't have those policies yet... (clearly the policies are there for a reason...)
That’s my recollection too - there were some high profile cases and so institutional safeguards were established. They very well may be at the forefront of it - however, it’s a side issue to what’s being discussed.
As someone who worked for a contractor which had Meta as a client, I disagree.
All advertiser support agents were given super-read on all profiles & pages, and I never once observed a CSR being questioned on their use of this access in any way.
> I used to work for Meta. I quit largely because of intense frustrations with the company. Meta has made a lot of mistakes, overlooked a lot of harms, and made a lot of short-sighted, selfish choices. Many things about the world are worse than they could be because of choices Meta has made.
You're still on the koolaid, as many replies here accurately point out. Saying it's not because you're eager to defend them is lying to yourself, because you're smart enough to think of most of these replies yourself. Primarily the fact that these are contractors whose entire job is to watch smart glasses footage and the point your bringing up - even if we believe it at face value - is completely irrelevant to this post.
If you truly want to atone for your sins, you have a long way to go. I don't blame you for having worked there, I've worked at places that are only a little better than Meta (which is hard considering Meta is at the absolute bottom of the entire ladder, including Peter Thiel companies, thanks to Meta's sheer scale of carnage). But its time to completely come to terms with the reality, rather than stopping halfway to try and feel better about your resume.
Yea but no. Meta is a defense contractor that hires out to 3rd parties exactly to do this. so you guys don't get to do that, but a lot of other people are. I hope that helped you sleep at night while you were there. But yea, it all gets bought and sold at the end of the day.
The irony is meta wants to implement verification to protect kids. Meanwhile it's doing everything it can to exploit them most at every single level for profit and for the love of the game. Billions of dollars, the world's most advanced computers all dedicated for it
Said company is literally in court against said government at the moment, after said government attempted to designate it too dangerous to do business with.
There are currently over 1,000 companies involved in lawsuits against the US government right now even if we restrict ourselves to just tariff lawsuits.
Approximately no one in the community thinks this. If you can go two days in a rationalist space without hearing about "Chesterton's Fence", I'll be impressed. No one thinks they're 100% rational nor that this is a reasonable aspiration. Traditions are generally regarded as sufficiently important that a not small amount of effort has gone into trying to build new ones. Not only is the case that no one thinks that anyone including themselves is 100% correct, but the community norm is to express credence in probabilities and convert those probabilities into bets when possible. People in the rationalist community constantly, loudly, and proudly disagree with each other, to the point that this can make it difficult to coordinate on anything. And everyone is obsessed with studying and learning, and constantly trying to come up with ways to do this more effectively.
Like, I'm sure there are people who approximately match the description you're giving here. But I've spent a lot of time around flesh-and-blood rationalists and EAs, and they violently diverge from the account you give here.
In 2022, 11.3% of energy was generated by renewables (hydropower, solar, wind, geothermal, bioenergy, wave, and tidal). It's been growing at just under 0.5pp/year since 2007, when it was at 4.4%.
This is primarily driven by wind and solar. Wind power took off around 2000, and in the years since has grown from 5.6TWh to 434.3TWh in 2022. Solar power took off around 2011 and has since grown from 1.82TWh to 205.1TWh. Hydropower remains the #2 renewable in the US, with a noisy-but-nondirectional generation between 200TWh and 350TWh going back to the 60's, but solar appears poised to overtake it by 2024. All other renewables combined are holding steady or slightly dropping at ~75TWh (though anecdotally there may be some large geothermal capacity coming online in the medium-term future that would change this).
Narrowing the focus from all-energy-generation (e.g. including fuel) to specifically electricity, the US is currently generating 22.3% of its electricity from renewables, a number that has been steadily increasing at about 1pp/year since it was 8.4% in 2007.
Naïve extrapolation suggests we're about 75 years out from 100% renewables for electricity, but of course there are reasons to doubt that. For one, we've recently passed the tipping point where renewables are just straightforwardly cheaper than other sources of energy in many circumstances, and improvements in technology and infrastructure will just continue to make this true in more and more cases.
There’s actually every reason to believe we’ll plateau sooner rather than later because solar doesn’t work in the dark and I don’t think there’s a single grid scale battery system installed yet (the famous one in Australia that Tesla made so much news about is an arbitrage play that has nothing to do with solar energy storage). Cost is not the only factor that determines the energy mix.
There’s literally no existence proof yet that solar can supplant fossil fuels so everything is prognostication and articles of faith that to me seem overly optimistic. All existing growth in solar and wind is paired with a growth in fossil fuels too. So the argument is look at other positive data and yet nuclear somehow seems to directly correlate with fossil fuel usage in the grid without having to look at anything. In other words, our energy usage grows faster than solar and wind power plant construction can come online / it’s when solar/wind isn’t available meaning the difference is supplied by fossil fuels.
I've been involved (or at least following) the rationalist and EA communities since the beginning. I call it a cult somewhat tongue in cheek, but it certainly has a lot more cult-like aspects beyond just "pretty concerned about AI risk." I mean, they have a charismatic leader whose unusual ideas about everything from AI risk to sexuality are more or less carbon copied, and practiced in group houses, etc. in some pretty creepy ways.
Literally anyone from the outside would easily be convinced they were pretty much your standard apocalyptic sex cult, just from accurately describing it.
I don't really care if people on EA forums don't all agree with SBF, but his type of thinking is standard if you use utilitarianism to make decisions in the real world, and it leads to some pretty horrific stuff. Consequentialism / utilitarianism are widely accepted in EA, and if you take that to the extreme, it can justify things like this.
I will never cease to wonder at how so many people can blame so much on people trying to take a rigorous approach to world improvement, up to and including "a narcissistic con-man claimed to do trying to do X, and I can imagine a scenario
where someone could justify doing the shitty things he did to justify X, so therefore everyone trying to do X must also suck and be complicit in fraud and assorted sins".
As the other commenter said, this is incorrect. The input was a sequence of legal moves (not even "real" moves - most of the training data was synthetically generated with "generate legal moves" as the only constraint).
Deducing board state from this is extremely non-trivial.
Alternatively, the prior on "this is not possible" is very low because RLHF & Friends have targeted metrics that, inadvertently or not, discourage that outcome.
Dataset as well. In a forum if you don't know the answer you simply don't post. Only people who think they know will post an answer. In a dialogue you see a lot more "I don't know" since there they are expected to respond, but there isn't a lot of dialogue data to be found on the internet compared to open forum data.
So that when I say that they really do have a zero tolerance policy for anyone using their internal systems to violate user privacy, it's not because I'm eager to defend them. It's just true (at least, it was when I was there). There are internal systems dedicated to making sure you have access to what you need to do your job, and absolutely nothing else. All content you interact with through internal tools is monitored and logged. If you get caught trying to use whatever access your job gives you for anything other than doing your job, security immediately escorts you out of the building. This is drilled into new hires early and often. For everything Meta gets wrong, they really do take this seriously.