The Deliberate Awfulness of Social Media
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
I have no problem.
The press needs to take more responsibility for this as they are the primary enablers of Twitter.
Tweets are presented all the time in articles as expression of legitimate opinion, and often used as the basis for some kind of rally bad straw-man argument the author wants to make.
I think Twitter will wane but it won't go away as those who make their business making noise, either celebs or those who report on them, will just keep going with it.
It may become purely PR providence though - I can see regular people giving up the notion of actively tweeting entirely.
I find Twitter useful by following accounts which tailor to my taste in information consumption. They typically broadcast very useful information, and stay clear of politics and especially stay clear of politicizing for brownie points.
Now, I can see Twitter being a very annoying place if all you are following are accounts which are looking to "engage" their audience and get retweets and mentions, etc., and try to be cool, set tone, influence, and throw signals --all of these mostly add noise.
Sounds like hell
it is said that you should never meet your heroes (or I suppose your favorite celebs). Hell is a place where you are exposed to your heroes' casual thoughts.
maybe it would just be hell for me; but a personality change so extreme that I ended up with favorite companies afterwards does sound like the plot to a dystopian novel.
What is it about tweets that would mean they're not legitimate expressions of opinion? People write them, and publish them, and it'd be a bit unreasonable to assume they have some motive other that stating their opinion, so I don't really understand why you think tweets are something else.
You could go out on the street; but finding and then having someone say something on camera is -very- different to finding and showing a tweet. I feel pretty confident in saying that a lot of people tweet stuff they’d never say live in front of a camera.
Hence the argued bad practice of presenting tweets on news shows as well thought through and relevant opinions.
Why would they be irrelevant? It is opinion that people think. It migh be wrong, but they still vote on that, choose schools on that, make decisions and judgements about real life people around them etc.
"People are clamouring for more of X in Y" and then they show three tweets.
When really maybe nobody cares. Or maybe they care in the other direction entirely.
Secondly, even if they're real, how do you know that they're representative of anything? Twitter is global. US politics, for example, could be followed by Afghan kids. Why would US news care about likes from people half a world away?
Thirdly, there's a lot of dumb people around. There's several reasons old media is tightly curated, and not all of them are related to making money or to censorship. A good chunk of it is to not show (just) garbage.
Huge chunk of "old media" is garbage too, just with little bit better grammar. One thing that curation of old media was bubble too. It made people convinced that "nobody think that" while quite a lot of people actually think that. I don't mean outright censorship here, but the range of arguments and opinions being expressed was much smaller.
To some extend, I understand how ideologies can be dangerous and how their promotion in media threatens us. But you don't seem to object on the "this person is promoting ideology that leads to less freedom" grounds. You seem to object on the "these people should not matter" grounds.
Lastly, it US cared more about what Afghan kids like, US would be less cool about killing them and about destabilizing whole regions of world.
You can still get that while citing twitter, but you can also get those 1:1000 opinions that were impossible to find before, and make them look unreasonably common.
Mother said "if you can't say something nice don't say anything" maybe we need to move to "if you can't say things that are novel and well found then leave it be"?
It's not about the legitimacy of the tweet or even factualness.
When journalists want to create a fake narrative, what they do is say "people are saying this" and then show a few tweets to support them. Even though almost nobody really may be thinking in those term.
For example, there's a lot of social justice clamour over things like award shows lately. The thing is, people don't care that-that much. They may a little, they might have some nuanced ideas one way or another, but the 'journalist' reporting will say: "People are really upset about so-and-so's comments" - and then show a few tweets of either random people or celebs.
Individual tweets are not remotely representative of anything, and yet they are used as 'representative' data points all the time.
Not only do journos do this in purpose (i.e. willfully misrepresenting) but I think they are actually influenced by the Twitterverse. I really do think that many in the press think that Twitter is real or representative.
If you're reading things that say "Three people tweeted about this therefore it's fact" then sure, you're reading something that's nonsense. Articles need more than that to demonstrate there's a groundswell of opinion around something. But Twitter is no different to any vox populi source in that regard - in the things I read I don't think tweets are added to articles to prove anything; they're there for color and emotional connection. Without referencing the real world in their work reporters would write very bland and inhuman articles that would be horrible to read for most of their audience.
I think I'd rather read a properly researched article with those tweets than one without them. If the article isn't properly researched then no amount of tweets is going to rescue it.
Is it, though?
Does every journalist really "create controversies where there are none?"
Is every news story really an attempt to "divide society to get you hooked on news?"
Do you also believe meteorologists gin up their weather forecasts with storms for better ratings?
Don't confuse cynicism with intellectual rigor, please. The world - even media and social media - are more nuanced than that.
Yes.
>Is every news story really an attempt to "divide society to get you hooked on news?"
Maybe not every, but yes. Not only to get you hooked on news, also to advance certain political ideas which depend on the journalist/medium.
>Do you also believe meteorologists gin up their weather forecasts with storms for better ratings?
I do. I'm not saying they make up storms, but they could very well make things look more grave than they are so people listen to them.
It's like saying all bankers are greedy, all politicians are corrupt, all doctors are stooges for big pharma, all police are psychopaths, etc. Maximal cynicism and minimal insight... it gets tedious after a while.
What do you think when you read an article in a newspaper saying "an anonymous source at the state department who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation"? News organizations know how to make something out of nothing in print as well as online - so you're better off focusing on the identity of the speaker than the medium
They are generally giving out specific facts.
Yes, of course those things are generally about manipulations of some kind, but there are protocols involved, and those 'anon facts' generally have to be true. In these situations, the news organizations credibility is on the line. The more credible the entity, the more likely they've done their checking/double checking to corroborate etc..
Many legit stories break this way.
Again, yes, it's all about narrative ... but there's generally more meat to the narrative in those cases.
Tweets by individuals who are authoritative on something are also a different thing. If an actress says 'I faced harassment from several studio execs' - then this has some credibility as a statement.
But this is altogether different from the straw-man 'people are saying' types of stories which are very common. A daily occurrence.
The 'materially useful' tweets are a small thing.
2. A person can have at most one spot on a sidewalk, but multiple Twitter accounts.
3. People can organize an outpouring of opinion I Twitter. "Let's all tweet this at the same time" you can't organize happening to be on a sidewalk when the journo comes looking.
4. There is a certain personality type that joins Twitter. This is not the case to the same extent for sidewalks.
5. Tweet speed among Twitter users is more different (less than one to hundreds per day) than time spent walking sidewalks.
6. People on sidewalks are ASKED their opinion. People on Twitter speak without being asked. The people who aren't talking about a subject will have less strong views.
7. People on the sidewalk are in the same country as the journalist.
When a journalist looking to craft a story quotes someone they've encountered personally, they had the pick of at most maybe 1000 people they spoke to that day. Likely far fewer - they have a story to finish and limited time. So while their quote will support the narrative they want to push, there's a limit to how far they can distort reality; if a view is rarer than 1/100, they likely won't find the quote they wanted.
Being able to sift 100 million people for the position they want changes that. We're used to assuming anything quoted by a journalist is, if not perfectly representative, then close to representative - a view that, while maybe not the majority, is held by something like that 1/100 or better. Twitter changes that.
I tried using it, like most people, but when you work a job that doesn’t involve trolling the internet for news, it’s really hard to use twitter in any meaningful manner.
You’ll post something and a few days later you’ll have time to post a reply. Or you’ll follow a few interest points and miss everything they post because you don’t visit every hour and it’ll drown in the feed if you don’t.
I honestly think all the regular people on twitter are either unemployed or spending so much work time on social media that they ought to be fired.
I like social media by the way, but I don’t think it has a lot of value when it’s done primarily with strangers. I mean, my friends use Facebook groups and events to organize stuff and it’s really, really good at that. We use discord/WhatsApp chats to keep in touch on day to day chitchat - which would be better in person but we live in different cities/have children etc. So that sort of social media is great.
But talking with strangers? I mean, I’m home in bed with the flu right now, and we’re having this conversation, except I can’t be sure you’ll ever read what I post or if you’ll find it interesting or reply, and even if we do get to have a talk, we’ll likely never have another one. So it doesn’t hold a lot of real value aside from wasting time, and that’s kind of what twitter is all of the time.
Or you’ll follow a few interest points and miss everything they post because you don’t visit every hour and it’ll drown in the feed if you don’t.
I honestly think all the regular people on twitter are either unemployed or spending so much work time on social media that they ought to be fired.
I follow 60 accounts and maybe 10-15 of them are very active. They tend to be either high profile people in my community meaning they comment or share resources quite often. Or they are developers and share progress on their projects. Both types I find value in.
For me I think the best thing is to simply unsubscribe to someone whenever you start finding that their tweets bring 25% value rather than 75%. I do the same with Youtube, I give them some leeway but once I find myself not really watching their videos I just unsubscribe.
I understand it in context of professionals using it as their free sales/promotion channel (Trump, Cardashians or whoever is in vogue these days). There it makes perfect sense, not that I would like to anyhow participate or care about their opinions.
I use BBC Android app to read some news when having few minutes break ie in public transport. Over last years they started to put these tweets of random folks in the articles (so no Trump tweets iframe in the article about his latest tweets, but rather some random folks expressing their opinions about Brexit, olympics or anything else). Those articles really feel much worse because of this - I go to BBC for some serious journalism, not this.
It really feels like they try not only persuade me by stating facts in the article, but appeal to my potential 'sheepish' personality trait of accepting popular opinions of others, rather than making opinions from the facts on my own. My main issue - whatever narrative you want to push as a journalist (and they often do), you just look for tweets that you like in the sea of all possible opinions. Just give me the facts, and let me do the thinking and opinion making, please
If we’re talking personality types I think it has more to do with people who are motivated by acceptance. I get that part of it, and I understand why the social media gurus and journalists are there, it’s basically their linked-in. (Which is basically management porn).
What I don’t get is why regular people join. I mean, I’m a manager, I play the “look-at-me” game on linked-in, in fact it’s part of my damn job to sell our stories to other managers - but I wouldn’t expect my neighbor to want to read about our approach to behavioral design and I’ve frankly never used it in any manner that wasn’t job-related either.
I think this is the superior way to use twitter. Just stay away of all the politics and meme bots.
I work with a school and they Tweet out stuff bout what is happening at the school, photos of student activities, etc which parents love. They tweet out thanks to organisations that they are working with or who have come to visit. People working there follow the Twitter accounts of education specialists, regulators, other schools, education department officials etc. All useful stuff.
We do have digital platforms for sharing stuff like that, but they are operated by the schools and the data is encrypted, access locked to the correct parties and the data is t kept forever. That way, you can actually also share meaningful information directly linked to your child.
Parents are asked whether to select whether photos can be used for
1. Inside for school displays 2. For training purposes 3. In school newsletters 4. On the school website 5. For publicity purposes, including Twitter, press releases.
I too am a parent, if the school want to say 'well done to the football team for winnning the London championships', and have a photo of the team with the trophy that's fine by me. Some parents agree, some disagree. Some disagree until their kids tell them that they would like to be in the photo.
Names aren't used on the Twitter account.
It's much more interesting for highly specific news. I've got some accounts I follow for local news, some for gamedev news, people doing interesting tech, art, jokes, and a few "commentators" who are excellent enough to be worth reading on their own. It can be great for kibitzing on live TV events too.
Mind you, these days I post very little original stuff too. The internet is just too much of a live-fire zone.
I tried following HN styled things on twitter but it just never worked out for me.
Twitter is completely fine and usable even if you only check it every few days, or only during your morning commute. Some people I know use Twitter maybe one day a month on average. I have no idea why you think you need to see everything on/constantly be on Twitter to use it.
Yet you are on hacker news. After some reflection I've realized that hacker news and reddit are just as bad for me as facebook is to others. I am reading unfiltered opinions from all people and I don't think that is particularly valuable or healthy.
Boom. Instant manufactured outrage.
Her job was basically to screenshot outrage reaction from random people on tweeter and sending that to government officials in a newsletter. The idea was for them to feel how the populace was reacting to current events..
The ultimate echo room!
I may say I've been living under quite a rock for I hadn't thought of it as mentioned here in this paragraph:
" The book’s most fascinating and disturbing chapter is about how the Internet, the primary vector of information about climate change, is increasingly a vector of the problem itself. The world’s data centers already have roughly the same carbon footprint as the global aviation industry, even as people continue to speak of “the cloud” as though it were a barely corporeal entity. As temperatures rise, our information technologies will function less efficiently—increased heat and humidity will hamper the flow of wireless transmissions and satellite communications—and a vicious cycle will commence. (Bridle makes a similar point about cryptocurrency, that supposedly revolutionary and transformative technology: if its rate of growth continues, by next year Bitcoin alone will account for the same level of carbon output as the entire United States.) Even more depressing is the contention that climate change could actually wind up making us stupider: he cites research showing that human cognitive ability decreases significantly with higher atmospheric concentration of carbon. “Carbon dioxide clouds the mind: it directly degrades our ability to think clearly, and we are walling it into our places of education and pumping it into the atmosphere,” he writes. “The crisis of global warming is a crisis of the mind, a crisis of thought, a crisis in our ability to think another way to be. Soon, we shall not be able to think at all.”"
I am genuinely in an odd state of distress at this point. While I continue to function normally in society and keep living as though it is something so far away in the future, a special place in a deep corner of my mind still seems to nudge every once in a while when I am alone and drive me to borderline insanity.
Nice vacation? All I think is footprint I'm making and how I'm destroying that very beautiful nature I wanted to visit.
Start enterprise? I'll just add another CO2 to provide people with service they don't really need to survive.
Like this new gadget? I can't buy it, I don't need it and again, just another item in vicious cycle or consumption.
But what can I do. I want my enjoyment of those stuff back. I want to be motivated to create and experience, yet I can't as I see the other side of that. I want to enjoy good stuff, but I can't.
Although some of those things don't necessarily make life better anyway. Sometimes I'm happier having a break at home vs. trying to plan a vacation, and new gadgets often just mean more work in your life to maintain them. Not to mention the extra work you have to do to afford it all, that you could instead have as free time.
But in the end, I think individual change on a large scale requires government legislation, and government legislation requires worldwide agreement, because no-one wants to be disadvantaged against everyone else. Tragedy of the commons. But we do what we can.
I try to live simply, it always gave me great pleasure, or at least less stress to own little. But I moved away from this a bit recently as I have family and also I feel like I should be less dependent on surrounding (ie. have good tools, have some backup items etc.).
If sustainability is important, we'll have to rethink our actions.
Imposing constraints inevitably reduces choices, but there remains plenty of options: * local vacation (this is a tough one, I realise) * enterprises that are sustainable: either marginal negative emissions (e.g. durable goods) or carbon neutral (perhaps via credits) * sustainable activities: hiking, sailing, stand up comedy * start cycling * reduce meat consumption
Admittedly I do poorly at adopting sustainable choices merely for the sake of sustainability.
How do you function as an engineer in a world with too much stuff. The most useful thing I can do is not to add to the pile of useless gizmo we covered the world with.
A bit over the top I know, but this is seriously impacting my work as I can't find any pride in what I do.
A very good graphic novel if you are interested in the subject and want to have an overview in the issue (and happen to speak french)[1].
While this is true, it does need to be put into perspective. People's appetite for computing isn't likely to go away. A thousand people sharing a compute resource in the cloud might be more efficient than those same thousand people each having to do those same computations on bigger beefier machines in their homes. One of the reasons laptops can be so small nowadays is that they're doing less locally; that's explicitly part of the strategy e.g. for Chromebooks, or for Adobe's Creative Cloud. Also, our connectedness through those data centers sometimes saves energy by allowing people to work from home instead of commuting.
So yes, there is a problem with the energy cost of computing, but using data-center consumption as a proxy for that is a bit like using increased wind/solar energy production as a proxy for excess overall energy use. The problem is on the demand side. The suppliers are often doing the best they can, and an increase in a particular supply segment might sometimes be a good sign.
Of course, I'm biased, because my day job involves making the storage part of data centers work more efficiently.
I don't think this is the right target to blame. The much deeper reason is people ARE stupid, while think they are clever and correct. You, me, all the others included. And at the same time, the education once applied to us, failed. Simply put, it's not a technology problem, it's a sociology problem.
Around the year 2002, when I was connected to the Internet for the first time, I thought it was a magic place where you can discuss with people on a topic until the truth emerges and learned, then everybody come to a conclusion and live happily ever after.
That thought was the very first few which been destroyed. Because I instead found people are more likely to turn discussion into a "clan war" and mob each other instead. And that was long before Twitter or even Google is a thing.
Here is a book that many people may already read, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind: https://www.amazon.com/Crowd-Study-Popular-Mind/dp/143410055...
that's my takeaway of Jaron's points in his Tavis Smiley interview. (The transcript seems to not be there anymore)
part 1 https://wgby.org/episode/57812 part 2 https://wgby.org/episode/57813
edit:payback has the transcript (click to show)
https://web.archive.org/web/20180206043916/http://www.pbs.or...
https://web.archive.org/web/20180214180024/http://www.pbs.or...
The only semi-surprise was the move to mobile devices opening the internet up to people who are almost too stupid to live. Not just tribal, not just willing to fight for their version of reality, but dumb as rocks. There used to at least be a filter (which steadily widened) of needing to know how to use a computer and get online. That is just gone now, and we’re in the true agora.
It is not fun, and all of which is to say it is as you say, a sociology problem. BJT it exists in this form because of powerful and ubiquitous technology. It’s also true that the underlying sociological problem has been ruthlessly capitalized on by people who realized we warring primates could be readily exploited for attention and therefore, revenue. It was always going to be messy, but instead of people trying to fight against then current, some of the richest, most powerful and brightest people are actively trying to sweep people away for money.
Nobody looking at a BBS could anticipate why BBSes would eventually vanish, while Instagram is truly here to stay.
Commodore and DEC went under, but Apple and Microsoft will probably bury us both.
Facebook, via both its main site and also WhatsApp and Instagram, seems to be solidifying its position.
Google's already there.
Twitter: hard to say, they're the ones most likely to go under in my opinion.
Because of the advertising revenue, or something eles?
For contrast, I just figure BBS died due to eternal September on the hardware scaling side - the rate at which people became computers users increased much faster than the rate at which people became sysadmins and moderators.
So, the internet became unmoderated, un-administered.
This is a big part of the problem IMO. General loss of moral values. I'm not religious at all, and criticize religions all the time, but one has to admit that when Christianity was the driving force in the western world, there were at least some values that were kind of universally accepted. Yes, there was lots of hypocrisy, and people acted against said values routinely, but at the very least most would feel bad about it or fear for their public image, and try to not be needlessly extreme at breaking them.
Now, Christianity has been replaced by ruthless capitalism, and people don't even have to pretend that they care about anything else than making piles of money. And if a company is criticized for using manipulative or exploitative techniques to make more money, regular people will even jump to defend it. I see it everyday on the Internet (e.g. forums for free games with monetizing techniques that border on inducing gambling addiction). They have accepted making money as the supreme value.
These capitalist morals that place money in the center of everything must die and be replaced by something else, or we are headed for dystopia.
Point being that Christianity is not some bastion of past hope and glory but is a mutable set of morals that have radically changed in their 2000+ years of exsistance.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgence#Late_Medieval_Usage
Francisco de Quevedo, some 400 years ago: https://lyricstranslate.com/en/poderoso-caballero-es-don-din...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition
Perhaps the point of Jesus dying on the cross was to try to give some push back in the world against how truly horrifying things were two millennia ago, but it wasn't that long ago that personal duels were socially acceptable in the US and even more recently lynchings of people of color were a thing.
I'm not convinced that there is actually some lost golden age of wonderful morality somewhere in our past. I'm highly skeptical of such claims.
Also notice, I'm not saying people are stupid so don't blame the business model.
I rather going to say: Go blame the business model, and while you at it, don't forget to also notify people that maybe they should be more wiser when posting stuff.
If your social media experience is "awful" I think that's a reflection of you rather than something inherent in the system. My social media experience is pretty positive, because that's what I engage with and respond to.
So then you are in the much more difficult place of deciding how they are characterizing the feed and how that lines up with what they are putting into it and so on.
Social media is full of hot air and a lot of people producing nothing. Who cares. Most of the tweets on twitter are written by a tiny minority of people who like to hate or judge rather than act.
Quit social media and leave that crowd to waste their time whilst you build something that actually improves the world.
Or, failing that, chat on Hacker News ;-P
Seriously though, I'm thankful that the quality of this forum is so high. When I see YouTube comment threads, I sometimes forget that Internet forums can be worthwhile, if they're done right and attract the right folks.
I wouldn’t count HN as “social media” per se, anymore than Stack Overflow or a topical discussion forum.
Over time though, moderate preachers were singled out, and in some cases killed, because they didn’t take a stand. This created a chilling effect.
Coupled with incendiary and emotional images (“look at these pictures, look at what they’ve done to our children! You are either with us or with them.”), and no push back or ability to prevent such polarization, extremism grew stronger.
This is the gist of what I remember, it’s been years and many other crises since then.
However I am struck, as to how social media is creating those same dynamics - but now for everything from gender, race, religion, politics, nationality, to brand loyalty and maybe even gaming.
The best solution I saw for dealing with social media was dropping off it altogether.
It's happening!
1) Exit social media and save yourself. This is the best option
2) With unending patience, choose an individual and just interact with them at a human level till both sides achieve understanding ( no matter how distasteful or difficult the process ). This does not scale
3) Begin to invest in PR, think tanks, media firms, groups and so on to craft a message to sway large groups of people at one go. This scales and what most people are resorting to, and what is creating the problem in the first place.
If everyone did it, it would "scale" pretty well.
>think before sharing
>recycle
>wear seat belts
>be considerate
>stretch
>drink water regularly
>brush regularly
None of this scales, and none of it will ever scale, because humanity is designed to not follow that.
Human beings are an aggregate of all sorts of behavior, ranging from complimentary to those in active pursuit of mutual annihilation.
Any system/solution which expects uniformity in behavior or choice, is dead on arrival.
Unfortunately that leaves solutions that target biology and neural processing/heuristics.
Our businesses and science is actively about hacking brains and influencing choices.
Meanwhile, in this moderate preacher and congregation allegory, the congregation has not left the building, because there is no leader to explain to them why they need to shut the trolls out of their life, so they are sitting ducks to become radicalized.
This is what grandparent was saying afaict - moderating voices leaving the conversation capitulate the space to the radicals.
The moderating voices are tired of explaining to people that the earth is not flat, so they are leaving. So the flat earthers can take to the pulpit.
FWIW my strategy is to build a better church down the road. I don't know if I can make it more appealing than the megachurch dominated by trolls, but I think a lot of people are looking for something different.
Social media just makes those divides more readily apparent because people now have instant access to those they harshly disagree with. There's also a large amount of issues stemming from rational ignorance due to the sheer amount of data people are being bombarded with, and it's easy to often slip things past people's various filters depending on how you target them and their education levels.
My fear is all the leaders of the US and Europe who remember the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century are dead. And the power of divisive tribal politics is too tempting to the new generation.
YES, these behaviors must arise in any group of thinking beings.
No, this is not like what happened before.
The Internet and social media dramatically accelerate the creation of new groups and the rate of polarization.
On the forums I am on, I have seen tiny social cracks become ongoing flame wars in the span of a few months. These are fringe opinions, with strong emotional components, become battle lines.
But worst of all, it is that the underlying issue loses all hope of ever being discussed peacefully or maturely.
A valid fringe issue, which would eventually have its day in the Sun, is now a point to test identity
These became issues, when earlier it was solved by the slower pace of conversation and discussion. Things are getting inflamed due to the medium. IT carries little nuance or context, and it amplifies the most acerbic and attention grabbing messages.
It makes things worse in a way human beings and cable companies alone could not.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/09/19/differences-of-opinio...
I work in the public sector, as a manager who is on a board that designs suggestions for our national digitization strategies. I know how to play the game now, but the most eye opening thing to me when I was starting out was how people disagree at those levels of society.
If you want to say that you think something is a bad idea, you sugarcoat it to hell and back, focusing first on complimenting your counterpart on where you think they are successful. Then you politely present your view and the facts that support it.
In public it’s different, here you’ll sometimes get heated for the audience, but you’ll still be beat friends once the cameras stop rolling.
The reason behind this is that the world evolves around compromise.
These days you’re seeing more and more people who don’t understand how necessary compromise is, but hopefully we’ll kick them out before we destroy our democracy.
> hopefully we’ll kick them out
I’d prefer that they learn. “Kick the bastards out” just leads to a cycle of interns building your product.
This is how outright self-serving lies become part of consensus.
This works the way you described because those people have little personal stake at policies they pursue while people loosing/gaining housing, getting probation or prison time, being able/unable to pay for layer/healthcare or otherwise touched by those policies don't participate.
I can’t remeber how many hearings we’ve done on changes that got nothing but crackpot replies because no regular folks want to spend time participating in the society they live in anymore.
Only in one area do people actually take action, schools. If we close down a school, for various reasons but typically efficiency (money), parents will open a new private school in its place. I’m Danish so the laws are a little complicated, but basically a private school gets as much funding as a public school and that means we save no money by closing a public school that gets replaced by a private one.
So our school system is extremely democratic, because you can’t make changes without the parents. Now, our school system isn’t the only system that works like this, most of them do really. But almost every other system is run mainly by professional bureaucrats who make the plans, because they are never opposed by anyone, because nobody participate.
I mean, crackpots participation has probably gone up over the years, but real involvement from real people with realist plans are almost nonexistent. I consider crackpots people too by the way, but you can’t power a city with special unicorn rays or by having a voulanteer threadmill. Which are the only two responses we got to a recent hearing on which power plant to build.
Want actual influence or real change? Then get involved.
The elites are in the best position to come up with time and energy to participate in things. They are also the most likely to have the knowledge needed to participate effectively.
I participated in some online forums while openly homeless. Classism is a thing and it's quite hard to combat that. When the non-elites try to participate in such processes and don't know how and won't be given the same respect they are expected to give to their "betters" etc, it can easily wind up being a waste of time for them.
Similar to the idea of "never attribute to malice that which is best explained by stupidity," a lot of people simply don't have solutions. Period. Regardless of their social class, background, etc. If no one knows a better answer, more people participating doesn't necessarily improve the outcome.
I'm off the street. I'm tired of being poor. I'm working on improving my life. While homeless, I kind of had the luxury of being outside the system and relatively free to piss on it at will and criticize it liberally.
I'm currently wrestling with the question of whether or not my supposed high morals can actually survive intact if I get connected and get money and power and influence.
I don't know the answer to that. I have been badly used and mistreated by needy people while my life was in the toilet because I was apparently the only hope they had of getting their needs met. I'm quite angry about that.
Maybe the answer is my supposed high morals really just make me a chump and that's it. Maybe choosing to not be a chump and choosing to line my own damn pockets at long last means me and my bleeding heart tendencies have to part company.
Which is some attempt at saying "Maybe participating in The System is what makes you a bad person." Possibly not a very effective means of voicing what I'm trying to get at.
I mean, I’m sure you didn’t mean these things exactly like I interpret them now, and I am taking what you said extremely literal.
I’m sure you had a miserable time, but how do you suggest we change that for other people, when your own solution seem to be chosing whether or not to be a good person. I mean, do you really think being a terrible person gives you advantages in life?
Maybe in some areas it does, and maybe for some periods of time, but it usually catches up to you.
You are being incredibly dismissive and going out of your way to turn my comment into something black and white when it isn't. You aren't taking what I said extremely literally. You are wildly twisting what I said.
This is not good faith engagement and I don't see any point in trying to clarify anything. I will note you are focused overly much on the things I said about me, which is a common outcome and problematic form of engagement that actively makes it harder for anyone who is not part of the "in crowd" to participate. You seem to have completely glossed over and ignored anything I said about, for example, most people simply not knowing better answers.
Practically, lets say you are someone badly affected by that policy and attempt to participate. Your attempt to accurately describe how exactly it affects you, will make you seen as rude and inappropriate. You are trouble and will be treated as such.
Another part: "In public it’s different, here you’ll sometimes get heated for the audience, but you’ll still be beat friends once the cameras stop rolling."
Practically, if you attempt to participate, you will be show some spectacle of disagreement and conflict. Which is just show for audience, after which everyone will be back to euphemisms, sugar coating and nothing will change. Because it was show and none of it matters.
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Locals who did not wanted local schools closed There were protests of locals in various American cities. They participated. Backroom deals won.
If you want real change, then you can’t just complain for a few days after something shitty happens. You gotta get out there and work for change.
The school is a good example. If our parents protested instead of using the system to open private schools then the schools would probably have been closed. The parents would’ve been angry, but they probably wouldn’t have voted that differently.
Instead they actually build a school within the rules, something which isn’t easy and can’t be done in a few days, and as a result they got their change. The change came at a cost of course, schools aren’t closed for the fun of it, so maybe the elderly get their houses cleaned less as a result, but they still made the change and they wouldn’t have if they hadn’t read the rules and done the hard work.
It’s easy to protest, but it’s also extremely easy to ignore, and often rightly so, because complaining offers no alternatives.
I’m not saying protests can’t change things though, but you need a majority to protest for a long while.
Situation you described had elite playing show in public and saying and doing something different in private where it matters. They demand to hear nice sugarcoated version of reality where their policies are praised and not criticized.
Had you described situation where everyone listens and people can criticize elite, then I would agree that cal discussion is way to go.
Also, this sounds like a situation with low conflict and risks. Private school wont be paid by parents money, their expenses can go slightly bit up but not much more. That is entirely different then closing public school in area where people cant affort private one and state wont pay.
And that's why algorithmic order has won over chronological order in feeds.
Mark Zuckerberg said in his first public statement when the news of Facebook privacy issues broke out that it was absolutely impossible and ridiculous for anyone to think Facebook could ever had any stake at all in the election. Less than a year later, his tone has changed significantly as he had more time to learn of what's really going on inside the platform that he created and has been running it as the CEO himself, with thousands of employees working under him.
I think this tells the tale of our AI future. As the system reaches a level so complex that it's very likely no single individual, not even the creator of the AI network himself, will understand how everything really works. How can we prevent an engine, that has gotten too big for its own good, to collapse when we are incapable of even servicing it?
The truth is NOBODY knows anything anymore because we are all drowning in the sea of information. There is too much of it and it's like a bag of wires all tangled up. The more we learn the more we realize that we know nothing. Our path to enlightenment is completely blocked by the same knowledge that we have accumulated. It's like the modern Alzheimer disease in which the accumulated beta-amyloid protein has blocked all of our neural pathways. The question is, is there even a way to unlearn what we have learned?
That was a fun line to read in a serious article.
>A former Facebook executive has criticised the social network for ripping society apart during a question and answer session.
A friend of mine sent me a link recently with some stuff that Taleb's currently working on.
The internet, the collection of data storage and transmission instantaneously anywhere on the planet, is not a problem. The problem is that humans are hard-wired for small social groups, not mobs. What we need is some new sense of morality and common wisdom around what's an appropriate piece of technology to make and use and what isn't.
It's very, very reminiscent of how hard drugs was first introduced to transport and commercialization. At first it was open season, with lots of pain and loss of life as a result. Then there was a ton of over-reaction. Hopefully the pendulum is swinging back the other way, towards liberalization and education.
As a libertarian, it's tempting to rant at government for making so many drugs criminal 100-120 years ago, but it might have been the best of a bunch of bad choices at the time. Likewise, busting up Big Tech could end up being a bad idea in the long-term and the best thing we can do right now to return some sanity to public discourse. I'll leave that to others to decide. But something needs to be done. Something drastic, I'm afraid.
It's interesting to look at the history of warfare and how it relates to population density. In general, as farming got more and more advanced, large-scale warfare really took off.
The difference was that people were limited geographically. So tribal chiefs (and later dictator/kings/lords) were able to geographically isolate and deal with unrest.
This has fallen apart several times. The French Revolution comes to mind. The Chinese "People's Courts". In each case you had tens of thousands or more in a self-reinforcing feedback loop driving one another emotionally. These things do not end well.
So if it's a choice between strong, totalitarian governments, the emotional mob-rule we're currently developing, and some controls on tech? Count me as a vote for some controls on tech. From here it looks like all three are happening simultaneously anyway. Better to choose your poison than get all three.
With my university educated 25 - 35-year-old social circle, I can easily generate boring conversation about Trump, climate change denialism, right wing activism, situation in Palestine or how facebook is cancer to regular people.
15 years ago my 15-year-old social circle would discuss climate change, US election system, nature of capitalism, future of internet and how to approach war in philosophic sense. Notice the difference? Those discussions were not too intelligent, but at least the subject matter was actually challenging.
This piece seems symptomatic of the disease. The writer appears potentially capable brain user. But fails on several occasions to actually use that brain. And it seems like the culprit is again over concentration on the stupidity of the stupid people. Feels like wasted effort and the left leaning boogie mans he does offer as culprit don't seem to be at all believable.
Where are the people looking to engage the smartest person they know of? (HN is quite solid, but also very coding specific.) Has there ever been a time when that was an actual thing? How could I do that?
In some parts of the world, all individuals have an opinion, a right to express their opinions, and a right to disagree with others' opinions.
What we see on online social networks is a mirror of the inequalities in rights and wealth amongst people.