Have you noticed we're seeing more "time lies"? Two clear ones: "Your driver is 3 minutes away" and "5 minute read". It's the precision that's intriguing. Like "asap" is more a lie about your priorities than about time.
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We’re just encoding the same white lies we used to hide under human fallibility into algorithms that we expect to be more precise.
“I’ll be 5 mins late” from a human is understood.
What’s new is there are people who think explicitly about how to do them and coding it up.
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It’s possible the algos are in fact making best faith estimates, and the “lies” are just from new, unintuitive forms of uncertainty. Eg, a delivery driver that’s tired on their bike, or unexpected traffic, or the pickup before you in an UberPool taking a while, etc
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Sometimes yeah. But sometimes, it seems clear there's deliberate obfuscation to shape user behavior. Like actual faking of number of car icons on the map to create the illusion of high availability. You might not order an uber if you didn't see enough icons.

