A description of what you are supposed to be able to opt-out from on Visa cards is here:
"In some countries, Visa enhances card transaction data and uses it to generate anonymised and aggregated consumer spending and marketing reports and other data products that enable companies to improve their marketing efforts. These solutions help companies identify consumers that they can target."
This is incorrect, you're describing a mitigation approach which may be what is happening where you live, but many other countries are aiming for full suppression and having some success.
Hi Nostrademos — I was involved in this project. We asked a lot of questions and the answers to some others were quite a bit more controversial (we're going to release a new question each week or thereabouts).
But one thing we learned in the process was that seriously successful people doing their thing feel pretty gagged.
It's not worth it for them to write even things that seem uncontroversial to you or me, because someone out there might hate it, or misinterpret it, and start creating problems for them.
Yeah, I figured it was something like that. There are plenty of things that I believe are true but don't say because the blow-up potential just isn't worth it. (And I'm someone who actually likes arguing on the Internet.)
Why not do something actually anonymous, though? Put up a form box on your website where people can write anything in response to the prompt, and let folks access it through Tor? Then post the results with the appropriate disclaimer. You might need to moderate it a bit to cut out crap like "PENIS1!!11!1!", but you might also get some genuinely interesting commentary.
Yeah, but then, like Blind, you just get a bunch of bullshitters. The problem with Blind is that you're getting long-term career advice from a 23-year-old who's obsessed with 'TC'. Even if that person's obsession is in line with yours, he rarely has the experience to tell you what's going to work. Most posts there come from a place of anger and insecure showing-off that they're unlikely to be useful.
Then perhaps mention that. And also why they got the job. We don't need identifying details, but at least the article should expand on that. I'm not having a go, but if you're going to give advice demonstrate how this advice works.
> "I find this website absurd. Is it really just articles by random people which give high-level advice on how to have a career? ... This is garbage and just not redeemable."
Thanks for your feedback. If you look around you'll see it's almost all written by a handful of full-time staff - this piece from an anonymous contributor is almost unique.
Most articles we write at this point are less high-level than this one, though pages that focus on general advice which is applicable to a wide range of people naturally attract the most traffic.
> Most articles we write at this point are less high-level than this one
Flipping through a few pages and I don't see anything all hat redeemable. It's all very generic stuff that "motivational speakers" repeat over and over in slightly different ways. Like, I don't see any specific advice for anything that would allow you to take direct, measurable action.
I get why you do it, though. Like you said, those pages attract the most traffic. It's just my opinion that it adds to the garbage online that does the opposite of helping people.
Are they giving advice on how to become a doctorate, medical doctor or dropout?
I know several people with letters before and after their names with impressive sounding job titles who are pretty clueless about what they actually want out of life and how to be happy.
It rubs you the wrong way that I start with an example that clearly illustrates the point I'm trying to make?
Since it's such a clear strawman, it doesn't clearly illustrate the point you're trying to make for those readers who can see through it. It's common sense to exclude childhood as irrelevant to dating experience. It's common sense, that people will be more active in dating during certain phases in their life.
The whole point of the strawman, is that it appears to support a point by only weakly representing the counterpoint. A fairer analysis has been posted several times in other comments here.
As I've said to others it highlights one weakness with the model - that it will always say a longer possible search is better because it raises your odds to success and the model features no cost for searching. When you add a cost to delay the appropriate time to spend exploring drops massively.
Yes. If I want to make the point that everything on Hacker News is complete rubbish, and I pick out a recent post about "alien lizards invented facebook to enable mind control", that looks like an example that really clearly illustrates my point, right? But it's not, because it's not a good example of the actual content of hacker news.
As I say in the article, the question is how inaccurate these things are - are they good enough to be useful? Or so inaccurate that on balance they're misleading?
"In some countries, Visa enhances card transaction data and uses it to generate anonymised and aggregated consumer spending and marketing reports and other data products that enable companies to improve their marketing efforts. These solutions help companies identify consumers that they can target."
https://www.visa.co.uk/legal/privacy-policy-opt-out.html