Comment by frgtpsswrdlame | Hacker News Reader

Comment by frgtpsswrdlame | Hacker News Reader

I think this is going to be the next big challenge in social tech:

Contact: The consequences of growing up amid diversity just discussed bring us to the effects of prolonged contact on Us/Theming. In the 1950s the psychologist Gordon Allport proposed “contact theory.” Inaccurate version: bring Us-es and Thems together (say, teenagers from two hostile nations in a summer camp), animosities disappear, similarities start to outweigh differences, everyone becomes an Us. More accurate version: put Us and Thems together under narrow circumstances and something sort of resembling that happens, but you can also blow it and worsen things.

Some of the effective narrower circumstances: each side has roughly equal numbers; everyone’s treated equally and unambiguously; contact is lengthy and on neutral territory; there are “superordinate” goals where everyone works together on a meaningful task (say, summer campers turning a meadow into a soccer field).

How do we bring people who disagree back together? Technology is really good at getting people to do things which are individually gratifying so how do we encourage individuals to do something which is individually difficult but will have a strong positive effect on society?

Forced anonymity perhaps? Suppose you're a Striper and I'm a Dotter (from the deadly enemy Stripe and Dot tribes), but we both like to play guitar. Well if you show up on my guitar forum I'll be 'who let that filthy Striper in here?!' and will interpret even innocent participation as attempts to stripe up the place, regardless of whether I have been trying to take it over for the Dots or not.

But if we're just Guitarfan_1172 and Guitarfan_3654 then we can chat about guitars and build bonds that transcend the decor war, as long as neither of us goes off topic and starts discussing patterns. Of course the problem is that the positivity is latent and confined to the interior of the guitar forum, unless we meet in battle and then become aware of our mutual guitar friendship which will cause us to re-evaluate our whole worldview.

Think of it as a poker-like game where you have public and private cards. Your public dot or stripe cards are your loyalty to your design tribe, and the # of stripes or dots across all your cards indicate your degree of group identification. But you also have hidden cards reflecting various private interests.

Let's say when you battle another player you're required to reveal one set of hidden cards if any other have the same or more points (or some other ratio) than your public loyalty cards. In this example you really love guitar and have to reveal your guitar cards. If the other player has the same cards they must also reveal theirs, or perhaps the revelation depends on the strength of their affiliation. Of course, by revealing your similarity of interest maybe you lose points among your own (stripe/dot) peer group because you have something in common with an enemy player...

You see where I'm going with this. Of course, any modeling of relationships and disruption built on this framework assumes that tribal affiliation is fundamentally arbitrary, eg as an accident of birth. If it turns out that the Stripers really and truly want to slice up their enemies or that the Dotters really and truly want to punch holes in them then mutual interest in guitars/crochet/pokemon may never be sufficient to overcome their differences. Thus a good deal depends on whether the enemies are opposed to each other by default or have made a conscious choice to fight each other, in which case that's likely to predominate over all other factors.

Hmm that's interesting. I could imagine some social network which asks you for basic but controversial details about yourself and treats those as your hidden cards, say religious affiliation, political beliefs, etc. and non-controversial details about yourself. It would match you up with potential friends based on the "seen cards" (non-controversial facts) and would schedule the release of hidden card information to the match over time. In that sense it would be almost like forcing the progression of friendship, sometimes your hidden cards match and you're both happy, sometimes they don't and you have to work through it.

There's an interesting contrast between completely-anonymous communities (like the chans) and pseudonymous communities (like forums where people have usernames). The issue is that people tend to want to not be constantly on guard in all their interactions, and if they chat about subject A they will often want to chat with the same people about subject B. This is why forums so often have an "off-topic" section that tends toward flamewars.

One issue with the sort of pseudonymous communities, where there is a common identity that persists across discussions, is that once someone is "outed," they can never be un-outed. Systems that rely on forced anonymity assume a single communication channel and no leaks. Also, if a group of dedicated people wants to subvert a community, they can easily do so in a group where their opponents are "playing fair" under completely individual/atomized notions that "we're all just guitar fans!" If a collection of Stripers is able to know that they are Stripers beforehand, or tend to have certain ways of talking about things that secretly reveal their Striperness to each other but not to Dotters, then they can coordinate and increase their own influence to drive Dotters out of the community.

At the end of the day, these systems require some sense of common civility where enough people on both sides are wanting to have the system actually work. If you have to design the system to be completely trustless, that's a hard thing.

Even when staying on-topic, shibboleths will still leak through. The discrimination rate will remain above zero, especially for motivated participants.

I remember internet forums as a teenager. Back when people didn't use real names and profile pics were of random characters or celebrities not our faces.

It honestly never crossed my mind that the people I was talking to could be anything other than white and mostly guys. I come from a country where races basically don't exist so that worldview made sense kinda.

Sometimes I wonder how many racist jokes I made to people who were black or asian and I had no idea. In my defense, those were just jokes/opinions I picked up on the internet, completely learned behavior as I was trying to learn how this "American Society" thing works because most of the internet seemed to follow american society rules.

Anonymity is great, but it has its drawbacks. Had I known the people I'm talking to are black/asian, I would've asked about their cultures and how they perceive this American Society thing I was exploring.

"Forced" anonymity exists in some online communities today. If most participants maintain and assume good faith, and are tolerant of some efforts by bad actors to troll, then it works remarkably well. Problems tend to emerge once these assumptions no longer hold true.

Anonymity allows the content to be judged by every reader on the content's own merit, and colored solely by the reader's perception.

However, it's also rather depersonalizing, as every participant will often interpret the others as manifestations of a generic individual, based on their own mental model of what generic individuals look, act, and sound like. It therefore creates the illusion of homogeneity from every point of view, where in truth the real membership might be quite diverse.

The resulting interaction means that over time, the community will develop a sort of institutional identity, complete with etiquette, mannerisms, and tropes they are expected to adhere to to be welcome in the in-group. Some people will don the institutional identity despite it being radically different from their own, just to feel part of a community.

Part of me wonders whether separating parts of identities through multiple accounts could be a solution for doing this on future social media sites.

You'd have one login, but the ability to set a different persona for certain audiences, like on specific subreddits, Twitter hashtags, etc. That way, the people who want to talk about gaming or TV or movies won't also be able to go through your history and tell that you also post about say, politics or personal fetishes or whatever else.

And bots couldn't be developed to auto ban people for 'wrongthink' based on the other parts of the network they post on.

It kind of assumes good faith actors too doesn't it? One person participating in bad faith just to jerk around the "Thems" would worsen things.

Yes, although I like the idea of superordinate goals because I think it eliminates a lot of attempts at bad faith participation. Republicans and Democrats can be aware of their differing views and meet together and get along and chat about their families and maybe a policy decision if they're meeting at church or to play recreational kickball or whatever, if you put those same people together in line at the polling station you'd get a very different result. Maybe the problem is that we have a tendency to only discuss our differences under the worst possible circumstances. But how do you overcome that? I'm not sure, this article gave me a lot to think about.

(One incredibly minor detail that emerged during the Scalise shooting incident is that Congressional Democrats and Republicans play baseball together... but each party gets its own team. A better way to overcome division would have been to have teams composed of a mix of parties)

The first thing to always keep in mind is that intentionally attempting to engineer social behaviors has historically been the single most devastatingly destructive motivation. Far more destructive than war, famine, disease, or other means of human suffering and death. It gave us eugenics, concentration camps, political purges, the obesity epidemic, and all manner of other ills. It backfires consistently and almost always. It is quite literally the most dangerous game that you can play. Unintended consequences are only something you can ignore if you can claim ignorance of their possibility head of time. We do not have that luxury. We have history.

That being said, the solution is a fairly simple one. Stress critical thinking. In all things. In personal life most especially, but also in other actions. Encourage people to recognize their inescapable biases and to resist them because those biases are irrational and provide no actual benefit.

There are unfortunately strong indications that this might not work, however, and that differing brain structures might actually be at play. Some people might have brains that are essentially hard-wired into an in-group/out-group way of processing the world which is inescapable. And seeking to change that would be seeking to change their fundamental character as people, clearly a morally wrong thing to do. But, we were never guaranteed that this whole 'society and civilization' thing was going to be simple or easy... so I guess we can't ask for our money back.

I will take obesity epidemics over famine, war or some of historical epidemics. Also, holocaust was extension of war itself - the ultimate attempt to kill perceived enemies. For that matter, so was Rwanda genocide.

Why would you think that there are such choices? The obesity epidemic did not come about out of a desire to avoid famine. It came about because the American Heart Association took flimsy scientific evidence that high levels of saturated fat in the diet increased risk of heart disease and then sought to reduce the American intake of saturated fat. They succeeded. They successfully reduced the percent of the average Americans dietary calories which came from saturated fat by 15% which was their goal. Unfortunately, removing saturated fat from foods makes them taste like cardboard. So to combat that, food makers added salt and sugar to restore some flavor. As a result, the total amount of calories consumed on average ballooned, diabetes became an epidemic, and even the heart disease they were intending to avoid through their efforts reached all-time high levels along with a host of other health problems.

No one was starving, and famine wasn't the alternative. The alternative was educating the public and leaving them with the choice, a situation which is less totally effective but more flexible and seemingly less prone to large scale unintended consequences.

I won't get into genocides in too much detail, but the concentration camps were an outgrowth of eugenics, an attempt to improve human health and well-being through "scientific" engineering of the gene pool. It was based, however, upon fundamentally incorrect ideas about how genetics and evolution work, flaws which were known at the time but which were ignored because the idea of rounding up anyone not liked and wiping them out was apparently too alluring for them to step back and say 'we don't have sufficient evidence this would even work'.

"intentionally attempting to engineer social behaviors" is the history of civilisation, surely?

>That being said, the solution is a fairly simple one. Stress critical thinking. In all things. In personal life most especially, but also in other actions. Encourage people to recognize their inescapable biases and to resist them because those biases are irrational and provide no actual benefit.

That's the simple solution?

I have two things to say about it:

First, there are many, many traps to fall into when you develop critical thinking. The way out of those traps is to refine your understanding of critical thinking even more and be more aware of biases. Frankly, this is sustainable only for those who are strongly interested in it - which in my experience is probably less than 10% of the population. Hardly "simple".

Also, having spent time amongst top scientists in academia, and seeing how irrational they can become outside of their field of expertise, I have little faith that critical thinking alone is a solution.

Second, there is a fair amount of research that shows that rational thinking devoid of emotions is infeasible. People with brain injuries where emotions essentially go away (perfectly "logical" creatures) can barely function. Every decision had to be justified. Like why you chose to eat an orange instead of an apple.

This may be an argument from extreme, but the consensus appears to be that a full emotion free approach to problem solving is less than ideal.

You are right. It is simple only in so far as it is simple to state. It does require of the populace a lifetime of exertion of effort. It is certainly sustainable by most of the population in principle, we know that from history and from situations of deprivation where existential or other dangers forced populations to exert that effort in order to avoid danger. Civilization itself is the act of removing such dangers, and when they are removed, the society often then begins abandoning the exertion of effort as it provides no real benefit to larger and larger numbers of the population. Unfortunately this eventually results in the population being unwilling to sustain or expand the infrastructure that protects them. As far as I can tell, this is the largest problem that faces the human species as a whole. Civilization brings about its own undoing.

Emotion and rational thinking are not opposites. I am aware of the neurological cases you're likely referencing, and think that they are extremely important to understanding the interplay of emotion and reason. Without emotion, it is impossible for people to make decisions regardless of the amount of information or understanding available about a situation. Even with a list a mile long of "pro"s set next to a list with only a single "con", a person without emotion can not make the decision to act. It is indeed debilitating. Emotion certainly doesn't need to be eliminated or anything of the sort. It doesn't have to be misleading, it simply can't be relied upon in the absence of reason. Emotions are a basic trained response, and inexplicably linked to the physiological processes of their manifestation. They would probably be extremely useful if we lived in an illiterate possibly pre-lingual tribe on the savannah in Africa where they evolved as an important tool. Our world is far different from that, though, and so we have some baggage we have to deal with. As far as I'm aware, critical thinking is the only tool we've got to recognize and deal with that baggage intentionally.

I think the answer is partially in your quote: emphasis the similarities.

Women of all colors, backgrounds, and economic statuses are sexually harassed and assaulted.

Men of all colors, backgrounds, and economic statuses are sexually harassed and assaulted.

These are facts of reality.

Our culture makes it such that women are more likely to be on the receiving end. But it doesn't make the fact that both sexes in various backgrounds are victims.

How do we help people with emotional or health issues? We don't unless they can pay for it.

Oh, you mean wealth inequality may play into "Us vs Them?" mentalities?

Another example:

Everyone race, gender, and creed has been some victim of society in the past. Irish slaves, African slaves... I knew my great-grandfather on my dad's side; 100% Chippewa Indian with papers to prove it, family documents that went back 3 generations prior to HIM being born, not me.

When suddenly everyone has a historical claim, but society only recognizes the claims of a minority because it can be traced back along arbitrary legal lines (which include by todays standards some pretty horrific violence and theft)... well you have a ripe field for "us vs them" when it comes to which claim.

But since almost anyone can make a claim, and since the special elite we do "prefer" can't show except through cherry-picked historical examples, any reason they should be lifted higher than others. Or that they're divine...

Change all conversations to focus on the similarities.

> I think the answer is partially in your quote: emphasis the similarities.

> Change all conversations to focus on the similarities.

> (GP) I think this is going to be the next big challenge in social tech:

But so far social media is completely reliant on us-vs-them, in- vs out-group differentiation. It would seem that social media already changed dozens of societies across the globe to the worse in the matter of a just few years.

At this point it would probably be a huge success if "social media" were able to heal the massive damage it has caused so far.

Not just social media either, but traditional media as well.

One interesting thing I took away from the article - most of the scientific evidence cited by Professor Sapolsky is built on fMRI analysis of reactions to faces.

Given that most of our online interactions are completely text-based, what cues are we using to determine if someone is Us or Them? Do the same emotion-first impulses apply when our entire perception of another person's identity is based on the content of their written words?

Those who speak fluently and with correct grammar in the language being used and those that do not.

Not technology, but we can start by not self segregating in where we live, not even just on a national or state level, but at the neighborhood level.

Is it obviously a technology problem?

I'd say technology is a contributing factor but obviously not the only one.

I think this is like saying gasoline was a contributing factor to a house fire. Social media and its constant bombardment of drama, stress, and politics has done more to amplify divisions within our country than anything ever before seen in the world.

Why would I want to integrate them? They have some insanely hurtful views, which they stick to no matter the evidence, and society doesn't need them, they need fewer of them and more of us.

In my experience, the people who are best at tech, are the least likely to grok human nature. Pixel Buds and Google Glass result.

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