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Comment by ashleyn | Hacker News Reader

I mean, George Carlin said this best. Garbage in, garbage out. Maybe something else sucks around here...like the public.

Before this decade, the Internet was by and large an aristocracy of liberal, competent tech workers discussing their career and their interests. Today, it's been democratised enough to allow your racist aunt to ramble on Facebook about how Obama is actually an alien born on Pluto, sent to America to destroy Christianity. The remaining escapes on the Internet devoid of this are vanishing.

We tend to worship democratising institutions without considering whether or not the people recieving these new powers are capable of handling them with the correct values, motivations, and competencies. The Internet has given too much to those who are not curious about the world or have a serious interest in improving it. Like anything else we lose hope on, it will never change until those using it change.

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> We tend to worship democratising institutions without considering whether or not the people recieving these new powers are capable of handling them with the correct values, motivations, and competencies.

Who exactly are the right people to be using technology? How do they decide what constitutes correct values, motivations and competencies? Your sentiment seems to carry a lot of hubris behind it. The world is just not that simple.

> The Internet has given too much to those who are not curious about the world or have a serious interest in improving it.

This sounds like a generic pretentious sentiment. What are you exactly trying to say? Because I'm pretty sure that widespread access to the internet has resulted in an overwhelming net good for the world, allowing people to learn more and do more than ever before.

the tech is rarely the issue at scale. When almost everyone uses something you run into the same problems you get from any crowd. traffic, deviancy and abuse of resources. humans are animals and we need to keep that in mind for when we expect large groups of them to act like anything but a herd

> humans are animals and we need to keep that in mind for when we expect large groups of them to act like anything but a herd

Then it is equally foolish to assume that humans are capable of shepherding each other. Either every human is an animal, or none of them are. Which animals get to decide how the rest of the animals use something in the world? It's not as easy as it seems. Finding "clever" ways of partitioning people is a recipe for disaster.

Well, humans are the only animal which is able to actually act against its animal nature. But this requires work, education, self-awareness. Acceptance and understanding of one’s cognitive biases. Not everyone on the internet is acting equally destructive. But possibly at this point in collective human evolution, people (on average) maybe are not ready for the internet.

> Well, humans are the only animal which is able to actually act against its animal nature.

Think about this some more, it doesn't actually make sense. There are aspects of humans we can differentiate between other species, but there exists no subset of behaviors amongst humans that are non-animalistic. It's a contradiction.

I don’t see what you mean. If certain patterns of behavior characterize 99,9 % of the animal species, and if humans are the only species which is able to deliberately act in a way which 99,9 % of the animal species can’t/won’t, then describing this as “non-animalistic” behavior is very practical to use for the topic at hand, and not a contradiction, in my opinion. Because this is what sets humans apart from all animal species.

>certain patterns of behavior characterize 99,9 % of the animal species

There is no such thing. Unless you mean very basic things like eating and sleeping, and that's not even certain.

Also, every species has its own idiosyncracies that no one else does. The idea that humans somehow 'arose' through evolution atop the masses of the mindless animal kingdom is a bit quaint.

"How do they decide what constitutes correct values"

Unless I'm misreading you, there is an element of nihilism in your comment. You seem to be suggesting that there are no correct values, or that the correct values can not be discovered. I'm sure you must be aware that in the West we've been having a conversation for the last 2,400 years regarding how to discover correct values and live one's life according to them. If your comment was meant to dismiss or side step the importance of that conversation then your comment can be read as anti-intellectual. But to whatever extent you accept the importance of that conversation, I imagine you'll be willing to admit that many people nowadays are mis-using the Internet, as the parent comment suggested.

>Before this decade, the Internet was by and large an aristocracy of liberal, competent tech workers discussing their career and their interests.

This doesn't match my experience at all.

This doesn't match my experience at all.

Ditto. I remember when the internet was apolitical. Not liberal, not conservative. That only became widespread in the last five or ten years.

Before this decade, the internet was mostly nerds working to solve problems involving math and science, not social studies and history. Then the nerds got rich and started caring less about technology, and more about “changing the world.”

Small “L” liberal means either “open to new behavior or values” or “seeking knowledge”. That’s not (or shouldn’t be) political.

There is no question more intensely political than the question of which values people think “shouldn’t be political”.

That reads more like a tautology than a genuine insight.

That's the most interesting, thought-provoking comment I've read on here for a long while. (I bother saying that, because it's been, amazingly, downvoted and accused of being closer to saying nothing than anything.)

The internet apolitical? When what where... Before DNS?

Since DNS is didn't go live until 1984, and didn't hit Windows until 1987, pretty much.

I was thinking pre-web. When most personal communication over the internet was via e-mail, usenet, and finger. I don't remember ever seeing politics on Gopher, but I could have just missed that.

Maybe not political debates per se, but I definitely remember many posters' political views being easy to decipher behind their USENET posts.

In the late 90s, parts of Usenet and IRC made modern Twitter look like a polite lunch date with your accountant.

> I was thinking pre-web. When most personal communication over the internet was via e-mail, usenet, and finger.

Even aside from overtly political newsgroups like talk.politics.misc, and talk.abortion, politics was all over Usenet.

I think the internet has been "political" for longer than that. The development of blogging systems like Movable Type and then Wordpress in the early millennium gave rise to some extremely popular and vigorous blogs like Little Green Footballs. Some of these got so much traffic that suddenly their proprietors could live off the money earned just by casually sharing their political views (thanks to some affiliate links here and there).

The big political change of more recent years, I would say, is political discussion overflowing expressly political fora and contaminating pretty much everywhere because of how social media functions. A band or author will share some entirely innocuous, non-political post on their social media pages, but the comment threads below them can easily descend into a shitshow of partisan quarreling.

We could blissfully ignore that Little Green Footballs / Daily Kos / etc. ever existed and go on with our lives. Enter Facebook / Twitter and their hunger for "engagement" and all of a sudden inflammatory political rants pop in everyone's news feed multiple times a day. Advertisers are happy, technocrats are happy, people are connected, what's not to love?

>I think the internet has been "political" for longer than that.

I would agree with that. Freedom of expression seemed to be a foundational value of the internet when I was growing up, but perhaps that was a less political idea back then. Nowadays, the top comment in this thread is lamenting that we have allowed people who don’t have ‘the correct values’ to participate in the internet.

I think the west has grown more political, to be honest.

Until the last few years, the choices in basically every developed country has been between 'red neoliberal' and 'blue neoliberal'. Predictably, voters were bored. Recently, there have started to be genuinely different options on the ballot sheet, on both ends of the spectrum.

That is the raise of Social Media

Internet == Good for Humanity

Social Media == Bad for Humanity

that is my opinion, since the raise of platforms like facebook and twitter that is when things IMO really started to descend. Of course I am open to the possibility that social media is not the cause and it would have happened regardless but...

I agree with this, with one exception.

> Like anything else we lose hope on, it will never change until those using it change.

To me, this part comes off as implicitly defeatist. I don't think "people" change, and while general education makes a difference, it isn't a solution we can rely on on its own (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic_of_Enlightenment).

But I think we can make a difference when shaping how people communicate on the internet. Facebook is - as I see it - made to make us interact in the most basic, emotional way, so the company can farm our dispositions. That doesn't make for healthy conversation.

If we shaped and popularized the means of being social on the internet in a more responsible way, we might see people acting in a less soulcrushing manner.

The trick, of course, is to make people like such a social platform.

It's not about conversation so much as the easy industrialisation of propaganda and election fixing.

FB and TW make it far too easy to set up bots and troll farms to influence public debate for relatively tiny amounts of money.

And FB has also been used to supply individually targeted political advertising - which makes it easy to swing an election or a referendum by influencing a few million, or even just a few hundred thousand, people - by lying to them.

This is part of a bigger problem in the Western democracies, where it's considered perfectly okay for billionaires to use media empires to influence voters with knowingly fake outright propaganda.

The conversation part is largely irrelevant. A lot of people will simply parrot talking points they're given by the media, so there is in fact no real conversation or debate happening.

Funny, the first thing I remember doing in 1991 when I got on the internet on an actual z-19 terminal hooked up to an Ultrix machine ... arguing with holocaust revisionists and young earth creationists on Usenet.

I'd say the internet population in those days was higher IQ as it required literacy rather than instagram accounts, but it was if anything significantly less 'liberal' than it is now. More libertarian, really. It was also not run by authoritarian nincompoops at Google and Facebook.

This is more or less the establishment view, held by those who shepherded in the current state of affairs.

>Before this decade, the Internet was by and large an aristocracy of liberal, competent tech workers discussing their career and their interests

This is a complete fantasy. The internet has always been a fermenting pot of stupidity and intellectual garbage.

>We tend to worship democratising institutions without considering whether or not the people recieving these new powers are capable of handling them with the correct values

I honestly can’t tell if this is a satire? What the hell are ‘the correct values’?

> correct values

Wow, just wow.

Could you expand a little on the notion of “correct values”?

reciprocity is a favorite

Pretty obvious stuff we can agree on, like "hate is wrong" and "facts are indisputable."

Pretty obvious stuff we can agree on, like "hate is wrong"

I hate mayonnaise. I guess that makes me “wrong.”

and "facts are indisputable."

1942: “The Germans are our enemies.” That was a fact.

1992: “The Germans are our friends.” That was a fact.

Facts change. Nothing in the universe is indisputable.

I am working in a toxic environment these days and for months now I have been throwing this maxim at everyone's face every occasion I get: "Facts don't matter, only opinion on those facts do."

> 1942: “The Germans are our enemies.” That was a fact.

It still is a fact. The statement is implicitly about the relationship with Germany at the time of the statement. It is not a claim that the relationship will stay the same for all time forward.

Context matters, indeed.

Not being able to know things with certainty is one thing, but I don't think your latter argument about truth being literally different in different times is what the parent is getting at.

We can get really, really certain about some things. If a superforecaster (or anyone for that matter) gives 95% certainty on an event occuring and he or she has frequently made similar predictions with 95% accuracy, the event is likely to occur. It's still uncertain, but not by very much.

"Donald Trump is president". It's uncertain, certainly, but I still feel comfortable calling it a fact. Are you talking about misuse of 'facts are unquestionable' to apply to statements that aren't as clear?

"In 1942, the Germans were our enemy."

"In 1992, the Germans were our friends."

Facts don't change. Poorly-worded, imprecise, incomplete statements can be misunderstood, though.

This is a linguistic ploy, not an argument.

> 1942: “The Germans are our enemies.” That was a fact.

And it will not cease being a fact that, in 1942, Germany and whoever were enemies. Nor that they became friends later. It's possible that they will be enemies again in the future. That wouldn't render the statement about 1992 non-factual.

I'm not even going to bother with the mayonnaise, since that's just founded on a willful misinterpretation of the original comment.

That’s an incredibly naive and narrow view. In most of life’s circumstances “facts” can’t even fully be established, and are better referred to as “strong beliefs”. And the definition of “hate” depends on perspective as well as varies over time. Moreover, there are circumstances where hate is definitely not “wrong”.

I disagree with this. I think you can find facts in most parts of life. What has changed is how we use those facts to try and build a narrative, by chosing the facts that support the story we want to tell and ignore the facts that don’t.

Anti-vaxers are a good example of this. They’ve read that vaccines are dangerous, which is actually a fact, so they chose to not vaccinate their children. But they are ignoring another vaccination fact in the process. The fact that not-vaccinating children is more dangerous than vaccinating them. As a result we now live in a world where westerners are once again dying from the measles even though they really shouldn’t be.

Politicians are especially great at misusing facts to build their agendas. Possibly because they’d be too agreeing if they weren’t and they simply don’t know how to work together across party lines.

I once saw a climate change meme, asking if you’d cross a bridge which 99.9% of the worlds leading engineers said was unsafe. Every day we see more and more people cross that damn bridge. :p

I also agree with you though. Because things are this way, it would often be more reasonable to talk about “strong beliefs” rather than “facts”, exactly because people are chosing to ignore the facts.

It was also a "fact", in the times of Galileo, that Earth is in the center of the universe and the Sun rotates around it. But that might be too ancient, so how about another: before the 80's there was "scientific consensus" that ulcers are caused by all sorts of things other than bacteria. Dude who discovered they were, in fact, caused by bacteria, was nearly kicked out of his field.

History is rife with "facts" that weren't actually, you know, real facts at the time, even though there was "scientific consensus".

Note that I'm not an anti-vaxxer, and I'm not a climate change denier. I also don't imbue "scientific consensus" with magical properties, seeing how often it was dead wrong.

The people who discovered H. Pylori causes ulcers received the Nobel Prize for Medicine, so that's not the best example to be quoting.

The point was that it was considered a 'fact' that ulcers weren't caused by bacteria.

There's been a breakdown in trust.

People who accept vaccination as good, do so because they trust the scientific and political institutions which have developed and tested those vaccinations. A relatively small number of people have actually done the scientific work to prove the effectiveness of vaccination themselves.

People who do not believe that vaccinations are effective/an overall good do not have trust in this scientific and political institutions. Perhaps because the system has failed them economically, educationally or otherwise.

We have all been part of a massive real world experiment that shows a pretty obvious correlation between the introduction of vaccines and the reduction (and even elimination) of associated diseases.

Saying that a relatively small number of people have done the work to prove the effectiveness of vaccination is really disingenuous.

(Also, there's a pretty big difference between doubting an n=50 sociological study and deciding not to believe the very public historical record of global disease patterns.)

Do you trust the statistics that show how effective vaccines are and that the downsides are small?

Great! Me too! I wasn't involved directly in that work, but I trust that it hasn't been manipulated.

This is what I mean, I still trust these institutions (in part because I'm part of the technical/scientific community, and understand how it works). Many people appear to have lost trust in these institutions.

Do you realize that many "scientists" are paid to generate and publish research that supports a specific outcome, for political purposes? You should do your own research on climate change and come to your own conclusions. Blindly trusting "experts" is a very dangerous game.

Are 97% of scientists paid to generate and publish research that supports global warming?

Blindly criticizing experts and putting the word on quotation marks is a very dangerous game.

There’s nothing obvious about this. Hate is entirely in the eye of the beholder, and is no different from the idea of “offensive”. People are free to, and routinely do, read hate into all sorts of things where it’s not at all obvious whether it was intended.

You also won’t be able to prove that hate it always wrong. Is it OK to hate Nazis? Is it OK to hate people that have harmed you? Is it OK to hate people that want to harm you? Is it OK to hate people that hate you? There is no obvious place at all to draw the line on that.

Finally, all facts are disputable. There are entire disciplines devoted to disputing facts. Science, philosophy and logic all revolve are hypothesising, disputing and falsifying facts. In the centuries that humans have been pondering logic, the combined efforts of everybody who has ever lived have yet to produce a single objective truth.

Asserting that people should hold the ‘correct values’ before being entitled to express themselves is simply asserting that your own orthodoxy should be universally enforced. This idea comes directly from Orwell in the form of ‘wrongthink’.

A fact, iirc, is a statement made which is purported to be about the real world. Given this, both of the statements "the moon is made out of green cheese" and "the moon is made out of things other than green cheese" are both statements of fact, and that they are factual statements is indeed indisputable. That they are true or false is entirely disputable, as veracity exists on a different spectrum than facts.

It's important to be clear about this, because some people seem to think that "it's a fact, therefore it's true". Facts aren't indisputably true, they are indisputably facts. True and false is a different scale.

> A fact, iirc, is a statement made which is purported to be about the real world.

No, you recall incorrectly; that's a rough definition of a fact claim.

A fact is a true fact claim.

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