The People Vs

I think it's kind of common knowledge at this point that that we're each in an adversarial relationship with the tech we use, and that e.g. while I'm trying to unaddict myself from social media, the social media companies have 1000 smart people whose job it is to hone the product specifically in order to keep us coming back. It's not a fair fight, and it can't be.

What I think we haven't collectively internalized is how much that's true for many of our other interactions with many other institutions. This podcast episode I just listened to on Small College Closures was an interesting example of this: universities care intensely about their "yield", what % of the students they offer admission to will actually enroll.

The universities are modelling your likelihood of accepting them based on a linear regression with thousands of variables, e.g. people who come for a campus visit are 7.5x more likely to enroll than those who don't.

Here's the bit that I should have predicted, but didn't: universities set your financial aid accordingly. If you go for a campus visit you'll get a lower financial aid offer, because the university knows you're more likely to enroll anyway.

I think we should basically assume that any time we're interacting with a well-funded institution whose income relies (in aggregate) on getting something out of us, that they're making extremely detailed and deliberate efforts to get that something out of us.