"Thank you for applying to ProfitCorp. While you have excellent credentials and passed all levels of interviews, your web sentiment analysis score does not meet the threshold for hire. Best of luck in future endeavors"
> your web sentiment analysis score does not meet the threshold for hire
except you would be lucky if one well-meaning employee would tell you the above sentence off the record in violation of every contract he/she singed with ProfitCorp.
more likely, your life would be a mysterious series of surprise rejections with no or spurious reasons, the latter being especially insidious, since it would lead you to to believe there are aspects of your resume that need improvement, when in reality the missing piece is a "postitive comment generator" to flood every relevant online community with comments like "awesome", "let my know when it is finished" and "we should definitely have lunch sometime".
EDIT: okay i'm being sarcastic again, so in the spirit of improving my web sentiment analysis score, the points i wanted to make are
* these systems are invisible
* once you know about them, they can be gamed
Over the winter, I used a Trader Joe's padded/insulated bag for my laptop. Partially open, because of a broken zipper.
It took me a while to realize that the uptick in friendly conversations with drugstore workers, and the onset of being stalked in my local supermarket, was likely because I now matched some shoplifting profile. It's been a useful reminder of privilege. Though it seemed unfortunate to be wasting people's time.
But here's summer, and sometimes not carrying a laptop at all. And it appears my supermarket, of more than a decade, has retained state. And given they certainly have my card information, I have to wonder how far that state has propagated.
So when choosing a laptop bag, or breaking a zipper, or paying cash, or spotting a possible misunderstanding, you have to wonder, can you really afford to appear different than the norm?
You might be significantly impacted, before (or never) realizing what happened. And thus you get to share in that joy of racial discrimination, pervasive uncertainty. Did the cab really not see me, or choose to not see me? Why did X happen to me, what's going on here?
And yet, the concept of "nudge" has public policy value. Doing noisy profiling, and helping people do the right things.
There's an old line, that the internet is creating a global village. But villages are extremely diverse. From warm and fuzzy, to amazingly toxic. There are tremendous social benefits to "everyone knows you". I just wish I saw more thoughtful discussion of the roles of anonymity, and on aiming us away from toxic.
Couldn't the retained state of friendly conversations just be based upon the fact that you have interacted socially with the people there, possibly induced by your broken laptop bag and thus there is a more open process of communication and friendliness vs. some kind of nefarious surveillance policy.
Also there are all kinds of unconscious social biases that can induce people to talk to us. Perhaps you know expect to be interacted with and thus this orientates you towards social interactions.
>these systems are invisible * once you know about them, they can be gamed
Like listing the full stack of every product you ever worked on in white 2pt font in your resume to pass naive keyword filters and pasting in irrelevant blocks of tags on craigslist
Sure, but for ProfitCorp to effectively screen out anyone with a rebellious streak, anyone with a spine, anyone with strong genuine convictions, would this actually be profitable? Maybe another company will do better actively seeking out someone with bottled_poe's profile, someone who from an early age demonstrated (for the sake of argument, anyway) daring and individuality?
