[phreeza]

It's quite funny to me that people are running these kind of almost scientific experiments on a fully human-generated and in principle knowable system. The reason are understandable of course but it does seem like a waste of human energy.

[gibspaulding]

You see this a lot in gaming too. There are entire sites, devoted to figuring out what various weapon attachments actually do in Call of Duty. If you poke around the Minecraft wiki you'll find the same thing - people working out exactly how fast you can move with different potion effects or how scaling works when leveling up enchantments.

Theoretically, all of this information could be found in the source code, but without it gamers are left to an endless research project.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

I'm not convinced that having the source code is necessarily a perfect shortcut to accurate results. Video games, in particular, seem to be subject to a decent amount of emergent behaviors such that scientifically measuring things is honestly probably a better option than trying to read the source code to find out what the developer thinks should happen.

[spijdar]

At least in the case of gaming, I think (some) people actually enjoy this aspect. It's a waste in a lot of systems, but in an "art", I think it can elevate the experience, at least for certain games and genres.

An interesting inverse of the norm is the Roguelike ADOM. Most similar games from the same time period like Angband, Nethack, and DCSS were open source, while ADOM was a free, but proprietary game. The other games' secrets were open-book, with no real secrets to speak of as the source code is scoured by players. ADOM remains sort of interesting to me as there are red herrings in even the machine code to throw off reverse engineering, and genuine secrets that open source games simply can't have. I've always appreciated that you can't simply look at the source to know everything, anyway.

[gibspaulding]

You are certainly right, there's a certain appeal to the mystery!

I remember reading an article on the Minecraft wiki about how to achieve the slowest possible movement, which is of course a totally useless thing to do in game, but you could see someone had put a ton of thought into working out how to do it! And who's to say that your slow machine is less an expression of artistry than playing the game "right" and building castles!

[LegionMammal978]

Minecraft at least is effectively open source; however, many of the quantities being measured are indirect consequences of the physics engine which would be difficult to derive from the constants in the code.

[capableweb]

Agree. Then you imagine that the entire SEO industry is basically based around the idea that a company has a algorithm only they know, and the industry is trying to reverse-engineer that algorithm. If they released a whitepaper describing exactly how it works, the entire industry would have to change their ways to consulting already public information instead of experiments like this.

[Veen]

If they released a white paper explaining how it works, the search results would have even more spam than they already do.

[shadowgovt]

Interestingly, they are likely to find things that the developers themselves don't yet know.

These systems are large and complicated and time is finite. When it comes to analysis of a written system, there's a lot more time free-floating in the global network of users than there is in the group of a dozen, maybe a hundred, developers who wrote the engine (many of which have immediately been re-tasked to write something else).

[yomansat]

Here's an example you might like:

https://twitter.com/JoelBurgess/status/1428008041887281157

[chillingeffect]

Great systems view, that's the general basis of cooperation vs competition. we keep some things secret, stimulating other people to expand energy and think creatively instead of doing it for them. It becomes wasteful when the energy required to produce new information and techniques is impossible to obtain. e.g. in massive inequality: a homeless person just can't gain the skills to obtain a job, or an oppressed population can't overcome the excitation energy needed to free themselves. It's also the reason we outlawed monopoly in the U.S., only to reach the local minimum of duopoly.

[the_biot]

OP is an SEO company. Wasting human energy is what they do.

[tonmoy]

Haven’t we been doing similar thing with for example stock market analysis when we analyze a company’s earnings/management etc?

[valyagolev]

it's like calling adversarial ML a waste of energy. we use this approach for the problems where we want to preserve a lot of variety in solutions

[zerkten]

This is tangential, but it could similarly be used to describe many support teams which staffed by non-technical folks, or are cut off from engineering for cultural, political, etc. reasons. It's a complete waste of energy, but for various reasons people get put in these situations and experiment instead of talking to an authority in another department, or getting an expert on their team. It can be sustained for a surprisingly long amount of time as well before someone gets called out on inaccuracies.

[picture]

Similarly, there's also "research" being done to decipher and understand Apple's hardware and software. It does seem like a waste of human brain cycles.

[eraserj]

Ironically, they failed to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

[bmitc]

The opaqueness of human systems is a real issue. It basically describes 99% of issues in the workplace, and those are systems in the small.

[renewiltord]

The waste is the point. One might as well wonder why I keep my password secret and force hackers to break it.

[_jal]

> but it does seem like a waste of human energy

Legal processes are enormous wastes of human energy on what are usually negative-sum games.

In only humans could cooperate.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Legal processes are enormous wastes of human energy on what are usually negative-sum games

I don’t know if this is true. Private legal disputes can be purely antagonistic.

They can also be a form of short-term adversarial long-term adaptation to new information. Court cases, on the other hand, produce precedent (irrespective of the legal system). That, too, helps guide a society through novel circumstances.