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>I hope that we can grow beyond changing ourselves to fit the algorithm

I personally think you are in for a very rude awakening. This is exactly what people are trying not to do with Machine Learning. It is always, almost, about profiling you, about finding out who you are in order to offer you what you already know, to limit your horizon, to "tailor" your "experience" and the span of possibilities.

As a very technical fellow told me: "when you read three political news in a row we set a badge, you are now politically minded."

This, sadly, doesn't fit your yearning for us growing "beyond changing ourselves to fit the algorithm."

My prediction is that it will get worst before it gets any better at all.

Yes I think you are right. Just today for example, many people seemed encouraged when Zuckerberg said facebook would have AI to effectively and automatically block hate speech in 5-10 years. And while it's hard to be, "oh no think of the poor hate speech!" that tech is actually very scary when you start thinking about how much it can be abused.

The first thing we'd probably do with cuttlefish suits anyways is stick ads all over them. Then the company that makes them would get acquired

>oh no think of the poor hate speech

This is an easy target. Whenever you get that argument you go all: "it's a bit unsettling that you find censor-happy human-out-of-the-loop algorimhms good, but I thank you for you honesty."

Then you recall that you are a programmer: "you know what, I should definitely program an algorithm that censors all positive talk about censor-happy human-out-of-the-loop algorithms. Thanks for the idea."

Blind spots are bad news for situational awareness though.

The corollary is 30 ton tractor trailer changing lanes on the highway, and concluding that there's no traffic because it would prefer not to see it.

Censoring the rear view mirrors is a bad idea no matter how much you hate what you see in them.

Since the hot mess that was 2016 on Facebook went down, I've been pondering this a lot.

Facebook was an effective rear view mirror, for a whole lot of us. The more savvy among us could see the storm clouds gathering on the horizon literally almost since the beginning , but certainly by late 2014/early 2015 it was plainly obvious that psyops were afoot, though even to a lot of plugged in hackernews type people the full-blown industrial scale of it all wasn't immediately obvious.

That's whats so insidious. It's the model. It's the first person perspective that facebook locks you into. It looks like reality, and it contains people you know, but it is not real.

You don't really know who wrote what, who liked what, etc. There's no global view of facebook for a user. I think that's the problem.

The first person view that you're locked into with facebook, makes it trivial to manufacture the appearance of group consensus when no such thing exists in the real world (if you have access to the backend).

The problem really is facebook, not the concept of social media all together. The problem is also that Facebook knew what it was doing. They were building a political doomsday machine from the get-go, they knew that's what they were doing, and they designed specifically to that goal for a decade with practically limitless funding.

There's a science fiction novel inside of your comment that I would like to read.

Is this a suggestion or light sarcasm?

Perhaps was my comment too hypothetical? :]

100% serious suggestion! :)

>cuttlefish suits

Thankfully, this sort of thing is exactly what the Internet was designed for ..

>And while it's hard to be, "oh no think of the poor hate speech!" that tech is actually very scary when you start thinking about how much it can be abused.

Of course it will be abused, and it will be abused from the outset. The powers that be already define hate speech vs dissent, propaganda vs news, terrorists vs. freedom fighters, scientism vs science, et cetera.

Big Tech and Western governments together control of the flow of information. Previously, the blue-flavored regime held that control and abused it terribly. Now, the red-flavored regime has it, and people are finally noticing. God help us if people far, far worse gain that control in the future and start defining what is unacceptable speech.

Which makes me think... ...would someone be willing to develop a content recommendation engine that filters out all the bullshit on the web? Especially valuable would be one that is also immune to "filter bubble" effects.

Stumble upon was kinda great for that.

>> that filters out all the bullshit on the web?

The problem is that your definition of bullshit might be different than mine, so any filter you come up with will have issues.

>"your definition of bullshit might be different than mine" Yes of course, but maybe for such a tool we could agree first on a definition of bullshit and try to stick to it?

It is impossible to be immune to filter bubble effects. The only way to be immune is to not filter at all (can't be in a filter bubble if you don't have a filter), but you can't do that. Even keeping up entirely with lil' ol' HN would tax you, and I don't know how many zeros to put in the 0.0000001% but HN is not very much of "the internet".

If you think you've got yourself into a situation where you're immune to the filter bubble, that just means you've created one so comfortable that you never get prodded by anything.

I think you have to be exposed to the bullshit. I explicitly follow people on Twitter I strongly disagree with; that sometimes outright outrage and disgust me. I don’t interact with them, but I read what they’re saying and what people in their filter bubble say back to them. That’s my best solution to trying to escape too small a filter bubble of my own.

I do the same, and it started accidentally. I followed someone on twitter who I thought was someone else, and they are hard alt right. After getting some updates from them in my email, I realized my mistake, and went on twitter to unfollow them, and got to reading their feed was was atrocious from my viewpoint, but I saw that it was good to know how the "enemy" was thinking, what their thought process and logic trains are. So I kept following them.

At first I stopped in from time to time to get my outrage on (I never interact with them, just read) and to feel smug that I am intellectually superior to them and their followers.

But then I realized that if way back, at the very beginning of your thought process you start from a false premise, everything else can follow reasonable and logical methods. It's almost like chaos theory, small differences in the starting position can have vastly outsized differences at the end.

I've used this experience to go back and look at my "starting" positions. And I've horrified myself too. So on the whole it's been an enlightening experience.

So now I can say that I am firmly on my way to understanding them now (and myself too) even though I diagram with them vehemently.

I don't use Facebook much, but if I did, I would want to be able to tell the algorithm "take 50% of what you want to show me based on my preferences and show me the exact opposite"

Also, China is moving in the exact opposite direction with the Perfect Citizen system by trying to change people's behavior with the help of algorithms.

Senator Grassley also said yesterday at the very end of the Zuckerberg hearing that he hopes someone with Zuck's influence and other such platforms would do something to "reduce the cynicism people have towards Congress."

That sounded pretty scary. I get that the mainstream media (and more recently Facebook propaganda, but this is definitely a much older issue) is partly to blame for polarizing America, but asking companies to actively try to influence how people think about their governments sounds like the wrong direction to take to me. I also don't think it's any better than say Fox News trying to polarize people.

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/meetings/facebook-social-me...

>but asking companies to actively try to influence how people think about their governments

This is what many don't understand, or don't want to understand, this is why some big players are pissed at Facebook, very very pissed.

She was supposed to win, they had to help her win.

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/56638#efmAAGAA2...

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/19070

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/15092

---

From:sheryl@fb.com To: john.podesta@gmail.com Date: 2016-01-02 22:07 Subject: RE: Happy New Year

I am thrilled at the progress Hillary is making.

[...]

2015 was challenging, but we ended in a good place thanks to your help and support.

Look forward to working with you to elect the first woman President of the United States.

Have a great New Year.

-John

Is that the proof? How weak.

For me the realization that politicians just accept and use facebook for their own means instead of being opposed to it was a really bitter realization.

I was hoping that when they started realizing the potential, they'd feel threatened and require it to cease working that way. Instead they all run PR campaigns on social media, and they probably collect data on their voters too if they can. It's just too disgusting to bear. Not just the US either, this is happening all across Europe.

>it still feels weird to see ordinary people

For me this is where these YT tropes get interesting. When you get past the thumbnails of the mega channels with multiple full time employees who are obviously doing something very baity and strategic, you’re left with the ordinary channels who mimic these tropes likely without deep consideration or even consciousness.

It’s just more of a will to survive kind of thing, and thus an entire ecosystem shapes its own desires by way of unknowingly optimizing for an algorithm which itself is based on honing in on community trends.

that sounds a lot like a feedback loop.

Capitalism provides the feedback loop. The Internet enables it.

Can we not design a better fitness function?

> The Like Button is a classic example of bounding because it reduces your thoughts and feelings about a piece of content to a thumbs up

People do write replies, but I feel the conversation is much terse these days. I enjoy HN because in general the crowd here is more mature and willing to invest in an informative thoughtout reply instead of just witty one-liners for karma (which I'm glad people here downvote).

But yeah, I wonder what if we took away the "likes". We had an internet and community without them before.

PS Thanks for the book recommendation.

> People do write replies, but I feel the conversation is much terse these days.

I'm not sure how recent that phenomenon actually is. I think it's more that the social tools where people congregate made it easier and even incentivize responses.

A larger number of people with less to say will respond because these systems are designed to cultivate response.

Quality over quantity. Seek ten views that let you engage with another human being rather than however many views which will never let you really make contact

Yeah but how many views do you need to put food on the table?

Zero?

To complete the parent's advice: "...and have a job that doesn't depend on whoring for views".

Apparently now every job that is not directly manufacturing optimizes for "engagement" of the customer base... or "marketability".

You can ignore prime top level directives only for so long.

It's not like manufacturing companies don't need marketing. Any commercial entity needs to do those same things.

> The Like Button is a classic example of bounding because it reduces your thoughts and feelings about a piece of content to a thumbs up

This is an interesting thought. It does simplify expression, but in sum I don't think it's that much different than life before the like button.

We press the like button all the time in real life. Giving thumbs up, a quick nod of the head, or clapping.

From that standpoint, the like button is just the digital manifestation of how we showed engagement with "content".

Where I see we run into problems is that a "like" has different meanings depending on the person and context. Unfortunately algorithms aren't able to fully understand these nuances yet, so we end up with the same stream of youtube videos in our feed or the same 5 songs in our pandora playlist. Which means on the backend we're stuck with a certain set of "almost-but-not-quite-right" labels in a system which will then make "almost-but-not-quite-right" decisions.

Folks at the edges may get incorrectly lumped into the wrong group and, in milder cases, receive content they aren't interested in, in extreme cases, be flagged as a "potential terrorist".

It's tough. I do think my life is generally better off with intelligent algos removing friction, aiding in discovery, and anticipating my needs. But to do so, those same algos need an almost infinite amount of info about me to be able to infer context and nuance.

> > The Like Button is a classic example of bounding because it reduces your thoughts and feelings about a piece of content to a thumbs up

> We press the like button all the time in real life. Giving thumbs up, a quick nod of the head, or clapping.

Oh no, I don't think real life expressions can be summed or approximated into a binary thumbs up vs no thumbs up (there's no thumbs down). For example, we express a lot more by how eagerly we raise our hands while giving a thumbs up, or how our eyes approve (or disapprove) while giving the quick nod, or how hard (or sarcastically mild) we clap.

I think there is always an amount of uncertainty in real life expression that gets lost the moment we transform them into certain form.

Agree! A lot of nuance can be lost in when converting to digital.

My point is more about the way people use the like button has corresponding actions in "real life".

A thumbs up can be used to convey a variety of emotions. Happiness, irony, and other meanings depending on culture.

However on FB, the like button has an implied set of narrow usage. You use it to acknowledge, approve, like things. It's not as useful as in real-life because you can't as easily interpret context or add accompanying signals like a furrowed brow or a smile.

The usage set is more narrow/different and I think most people recognize that when they give a thumbs up on FB vs. when they do so in real life.

Nice comment, I have upvoted it.

Alight, listen you! Quit horsing around, this is a very serious discussion.