Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

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One interesting book in this context is Neiwart's "Alt America". [1] Neiwart is a journalist who spent decades tracking the armed US fringe, including the "patriot" militias, sovereign citizen movements, conspiracists, and white supremacist groups.

It's his view that the alt right didn't come out of nowhere. Instead, the low-friction communication of the Internet allowed these formerly scattered, always-falling-apart groups to connect and recruit in ways that were previously impossible.

I also don't think it's a coincidence that the rise of the alt-right happened when social media companies in some sense took friction negative. In the world of websites and blogs, you at least had to actively seek the next site, the next writer, the next article. It wasn't much work, but it was at least a little.

Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter were eager to give you an endless stream of content, so as to maximize User Active Minutes metrics. So their algorithms would pull up anything that they thought you'd be interested in. The theory being that any engagement must be good, which implies that total obsession would be best.

In retrospect, that theory seems to have some flaws.

If you'd like to join me in speculating a bit, let's take an imaginary look at ten years from now.

Good news! AI has advanced enough that it is now possible for you to have a customized bot that handles all of the crappy and mundane parts of life: scheduling travel, getting groceries, making sure the house is clean, and so on. The bot learns about you and is able to anticipate your needs.

And because we have this tech, we also have bots that will play your emotions like a finely-tuned fiddle. Think Elvis never died? Afraid that lizard-people in the government are controlling your thoughts? Well, now there's a bot that will find others like you and deliver to you a continuous stream of information confirming your beliefs -- and warning you of the dangers lurking out there.

Now guess which of these bots makes more money for its creators, the one scheduling airline flights or the one keeping you emotionally-connected with 400 people just like you and making sure that all of you are living a dramatic life on the edge where you're fighting the bad guys?

So it seems the theory here is that strong AI whose primary objective is to make money is ultimately self destructive?

Definitely. It's the kind of manipulative dystopia that might have been designed by timeshare salesmen and propagandists. But the weird part to me is that conscious design seems basically unnecessary. It's dystopia metastasized.

I've interviewed the occasional person looking to leave Facebook, and one of the surprising things to me is how small everybody's job is. They're all optimizing micro-metrics for micro-gains, with very little thought as to the systemic impact. Those micro-metrics in turn roll up to plausible-sounding things like revenue, DAU, time on site, and engagement. Yay engagement! How could that be bad?

But I've never heard anybody from Facebook, employee or exec, say, "Gosh, could we be acting like tobacco company execs or slot machine designers?" They don't even seem to understand addiction as a topic, let alone a concern. It's very much as Upton Sinclair said: "“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

I think it's because we don't understand systems as well as we should. This article (http://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/article207841309.ht...) is a decent intro to what modeling shows about engagement and polarization. The paper it refers to (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.06009.pdf) goes way deeper.

This is basically the state of Twitter today.

Clay Shirky pointed out a while ago that the power of the Internet to connect previously isolated individuals with common interests can have the downside of making that common interest seem more normal to those people.

E.g. if I'm the only Nazi I know, there's no one to buck me up and so maybe I consider that there's something wrong with my beliefs. But add a convenient subreddit, facebook page, etc. and I get to think that there are lots of us. (We conveniently forget about the denominator.)

This phenomenon is great for society when it comes to sufferers of rare diseases, the lonely, closeted gay kid in a small town, and cult film lovers. Not so great when it comes to racists etc.

It cuts both ways though, you can't have your cake and eat it too. A counter example: if I'm the only guy I know that thinks Jim Crow laws are bad and there's nobody around to buck me up, so maybe I consider that there's something wrong with my beliefs.

If you police speech for some people and not others you will create problems, either you think that people are inherently good (therefore everbody should be able to speak until they reveal otherwise) or some kind of top down censorship should be in place to keep things "civil", now the problem is who gets to decide what "civil" is.

So its better and easier and more robust to just let people say what they want to say (even if bad) and just allow people to filter out what they don't want.

It does cut both ways, but that doesn't justify your "let people say what they want no matter how awful it is" conclusion.

At the margins it's certainly hard to tell sort-of-bad content from not-so-bad content. But that doesn't mean we can't find pretty clear examples. Banning child pornography, for example, doesn't seem to have harmed freedom of speech much.

You also ignore that what speech we allow influences what people will say at all. For example, if we allow violent threats and harassment (which are both definitely speech), this will be used to silence voices. And in the American context, it's pretty clear which voices get silenced. Which voices have been silenced for decades and decades.

So in practice, somebody will always be silenced on some topics. The question is more who gets silenced, and what kind of environment for discussion we want to create.

I don't think that child pornography falls under speech at all, and I don't see the connection. Child pornography sole purpose is to serve prurient interests.

Sorry I don't mean to say that speech should be a free for all, threats will not be tolerated, nor would harassment, but we already have longstanding laws and procedures to deal with those things, they are nothing new.

"it's pretty clear which voices get silenced. Which voices have been silenced for decades and decades"

I don't think it's clear at all, nobody is currently being silenced, however I can see the pattern of existing laws and policies around harassment and threats being misused to silence political opponents. This is a very bad development, and mostly recent phenomenon. I think as far as thats concerned we have crossed the rubicon so to speak, and the polarization will only accelerate.

"So in practice, somebody will always be silenced on some topics."

I don't agree. Even child pornography can be discussed however children have no agency and can't consent to their images being used in such a way. So it can never be legalized. There are many subjects that cannot be discussed (racial issues, social issues) that are considered by the left to be unmentionable even though points expressed are perfectly respectful and salient.

You should read a little more history.

The US has a long track record of violence, threat of violence, and social power being used to suppress women and black people, for example. The #MeToo campaign happened recently not because women weren't being sexually exploited in the past, but because their power has finally grown enough that some of them can start to speak with less fear of consequence.

Studies show that this power imbalance continues online. Accounts with female and/or black get a lot more crap. Crap that acts to suppress not just the people receiving it, but anybody who sees it happen and thinks they might become a target of it.

So if you're running a platform, you have a pretty clear choice. Somebody's getting silenced. The question is whether you let the people who want to silence others run rampant, or whether you protect the voices they're trying to suppress.

And I'd add that the left talks about racial and social issues quite a bit, so I think your characterization there is at best misleading.

We mostly agree, see my last paragraph.

Further, "collecting" a group of scattered folks with common interests can be good even if their common interest isn't. E.g. I know that there are "cutting" and self-harm websites, and of course the practice of self-harm is awful, but those websites may be a way to reach people and help them.

As to what to regulate, I think that the anti-Holocaust denial laws in Europe make a more fraught case than anti-child pornography. Child pornography generally hurts kids even if it's not circulated.

Denying the Holocaust is stupid and offensive and upsetting to many, but it doesn't harm the speaker or the listener in the same way. I don't know, one way or another, whether these laws have led to "slippery slopes".

Personally, I wonder if it's had the opposite effect to some degree. Namely, because it's so easy to find people with views you find reprehensible, you think those views are more common than they actually are and that everything's getting worse as a result. Groups and individuals who'd never usually encounter each other are now seeing their enemies more than ever...

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