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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

In the age of publicity it doesn't matter if you agree or disagree with an idea, it matters that you helped it spread.

I don't know that there's a fix for that.

The fix is not to take this “dangerous meme” stance.

The very assertion that you must protect people from exposure to various ideas is deeply problematic and against everything the Enlightenment taught us.

The Enlightenment didn’t envision ML-assisted data-guided state-actor-resourced propaganda efforts. The Enlightenment imagined rhetoric and persuasion as something like single combat: one man’s reason pitted against another. It didn’t imagine massively resources organizations throwing millions of dollars at studying quirks of human cognition so as to optimize the short-circuiting of reason itself.

I’m a proponent of Enlightenment values, but the bottom line lessons that we derive from those values were derived in a wildly different context. An Enlightenment for the modern day may very well look different than “old school” Enlightenment. It may very well one day shape up to being open-minded about what socioeconomic datasets you let your pet AI graze on, rather than being foolish enough to ingest slogans from all comers.

You’re not wrong, but it’s also true that at various times the written word and advances in its production and distribution were seen much the same way. Any new technology which represents a massive improvement in communication is going to radically change society in unpredictable ways. Needless to say, rapid and irreversible change is monstrous to live through especially if you’ve historically enjoyed the advantages of a previous system.

>The Enlightenment didn’t envision ML-assisted data-guided state-actor-resourced propaganda efforts.

So the solution is to fight those things (with e.g. laws and education), not bring back taboos. How many times must we re-learn the lessons of the past? Censorship is not the path forward and even if you disagree, surely you can understand that, at an absolute minimum, we can't let random noisy members of the internet, or certain specific monopolies make the descision on what ideas can't be thought or expressed.

I didn't say you have to protect them. I did say you might want to not spread ideas you disagree with.

It's one thing to debate with friends at a bar. It's another to retweet something to your 6,000 followers and adding "lol dumb". At least some of those followers will disregard your comment and just absorb the message.

Just like my maths professor in high school would say. I'd show you how most of you do this wrong, but then you're just going to remember the wrong way. Let me just show you how to do it right.

Then there's the argument that any signal of approval (share, comment, retweet, engage) tells algorithmic timelines that this message gets much engagement and sharing it to a broader audience.

A key tenet of human cognition is that we agree more with things we hear more often. You can convince people of pretty much anything through sheer bruteforce of Being Everywhere. Doesn't matter if those who share agree or disagree, just that they shared.

The sad thing is that this strategy doesn't even work. It's analogous to trying to fix prices in an economy. All that does is create black markets. You end up with bubbles, preference falsification and preference cascades of increasing severity due to the illiquidity.

>I did say you might want to not spread ideas you disagree with.

Well, I can imagine one would do this in abscence of any proper argument against said ideas. Maybe you should revisit whether these ideas have some merit to them or not?

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