11 comments

  • madamelic24 minutes ago
    An interesting experiment could be re-wording some of these and seeing how different the rankings are.<p>So have an alternate card titled &quot;Promoting your country&quot; rather than &quot;Propaganda&quot; or &quot;Personal Safety&quot; rather than &quot;Firearms&quot;.<p>Some of these cards definitely present biases that could prime someone to vote a certain way such as &quot;Exploitative Gig Economy&quot; is clearly biased. I would strongly guess if certain cards were worded more positively, they wouldn&#x27;t be ranked as poorly.<p>&quot;Advertising&quot; -&gt; &quot;Promoting your product&quot;<p>Or some of them are so broad it&#x27;s difficult to disambiguate the good from the bad like &quot;Telemarketing&quot;, &quot;Advertising&quot;, or &quot;Pharmaceuticals&quot;. Some of it is awful while other parts are between great and ok.<p>---<p>Another interesting dynamic I was thinking of as I was answering was the axis of &quot;Personal Responsibility&quot; to &quot;Social Responsibility&quot;.<p>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.<p>Maybe another axis of &quot;Protection&quot; to &quot;Liberty&quot; where something is a personal choice but could be seen as bad because it is addictive or otherwise tries to trap the person.<p>So Adult Platform would be fairly squarely in Liberty&#x2F;Personal while something like Online Gambling would be Protection&#x2F;Social.
  • jjmarr12 minutes ago
    Would be cool if it ran until you had an intransitive preference. A is worse than B, which is worse than C, which is worse than A.<p>I thought the point was to show how ranking industries based on &quot;evil vibes&quot; is subjective.
  • pimlottc27 minutes ago
    Text sizes for the subtitles are very small on mobile. The thin font doesn’t help either.
    • DylanSp7 minutes ago
      They&#x27;re very small on desktop as well.
  • Torgin42 minutes ago
    Interesting idea -- ran through it for a few minutes and thought the leaderboard was informative. Definitely could expand this!
  • david_shi8 minutes ago
    What technology isn&#x27;t surveillance technology these days?
  • somewhatgoated23 minutes ago
    Social media is ranked worse right now than Oil&amp;Gas and Weapons - what?
    • akersten17 minutes ago
      Based on the recent comments I&#x27;ve seen around here, selecting whether &quot;Social Media&quot; or &quot;Private Prisons&quot; are worse for society is somehow, inexplicably, a tough decision.<p>Many of the options here are also confusing. &quot;Pharmaceuticals&quot; as one of the options among other generally-considered bad things? Pharmaceuticals have saved millions of lives. Am I supposed to assume we&#x27;re talking about the opiate crisis specifically or something?
    • x3n0ph3n36 minutes ago
      Yea, the last 2 are good things, not bad things.
  • DaryaHr11 hours ago
    What an interesting idea! Quick question: Do you store user data in any way or each &quot;start&quot; 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.<p>Also curious to see diff per region&#x2F;state and maybe as some further vision connection of it to a specific regional stats regarding the topic.
    • maxwellito10 hours ago
      Thanks, sadly it didn&#x27;t pick-up on HN The diff per region&#x2F;state would be fantastic! The stats are shared, nothing &quot;per user&quot;. At first I just wanted to see if it would trigger some interest. There&#x27;s a huge room for improvements, your suggestions are great
      • susam1 hour ago
        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 &#x2F;pool.
  • AndrewKemendo42 minutes ago
    The cool thing here is that when you look at the whole list it’s just a snapshot of the economy
  • smitty1e36 minutes ago
    Really didn&#x27;t fancy this work.<p>You just have context-free character strings to work with here.<p>And then I peeked at the leader board and *really* didn&#x27;t care for the things ranked best at all.
  • OutOfHere18 minutes ago
    I don&#x27;t like this candidate list at all because it obviously reflects the author&#x27;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&#x27;ve been viable candidates, but aren&#x27;t in the list, e.g. moneyprinting, inflation above 1%, health insurance preapprovals and denials, etc.
  • jsrozner35 minutes ago
    Rankings not all consistent:<p><pre><code> - private military 6 but defense 39; - surveillance tech 7, data brokers 9, but facial recognition 14, social media 17, advertising 34; - polluters 3 but coal 26, oil 30, mining 37; - scam 5 but clickbait 15, MLMs 18; - influencers 22 but ads 34 (influencers *are* ads); </code></pre> Though some are: e.g.,<p><pre><code> - lobbying &#x2F; disinformation are close (1,2); - escorts, adult platforms, dating, adult content all 47-50 (nice!)</code></pre>
    • marcus_holmes21 minutes ago
      my take on that:<p>- 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.<p>- 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&#x27;m fine with that. Surveillance tech is always bad.<p>- same for the resources industry; they could create a mine that doesn&#x27;t pollute and cleans up after itself when done. Mining itself isn&#x27;t necessarily harmful (and we need the resources). It&#x27;s the pollution that does the harm.<p>- 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.<p>- influencers are a particularly annoying form of advertising, so I get why they&#x27;re ranked differently. It would be interesting if all forms of advertising were ranked so we could really see what annoys people.<p>totally agree that the sex industry at the bottom is good :)