I think Joel was right.
Lets say users of your product, due to your product, operate at `0.5 C`.
Is changing the product so they operate at a higher `0.75 C` or back to `C` "paternalistic"?
Why?
I can see the argument for moving `C` to `1.5 C` as paternalistic. But when you're already actively affecting `C` in one way, why do we moralize about moving it the other way? What makes down OK, but up BAD?
Yes, some people are wrong and some are right. With government, there are basic freedoms that allow people to be wrong, and not to be incarcerated or unduly burdened by government policing thought.
But society? Facebook? Even government messaging ala "The Ad Council"? Yes, absolutely, to hell with disinformation, trolls, and toxic platforms.
Much to the Chagrin of many on HN, Facebook is, and has been a fairly open platform to people of all convictions, backgrounds, and political stripes. Even if it has been unsteady handed at times. This, as well as their sorting algorithm may well be contributing to the collapse of institutional trust and cultural balkanization of the western world.
To a progressive liberal or political moderate who directly benefitted from the economic and technological booms we've experience over the last 30 years this is upsetting, because the global order (and its associated stability) from-which they've benefited, which brought us to where we are is disintegrating around us.
To me, hand-wringing about Facebook's relatively hands-off approach the political dialogues on their platform is just resentment about the loss of a prescribed cultural narrative and familiar cultural coalitions, the collapse of-which has given every stakeholder in their nation's future an opportunity to speak up for their own convictions and interests, in hopes that theirs will be the dominant narrative of the new political landscape.
I wish these dialogues and factional aggregations were occurring on a more federated network. But so far as centralized platforms go, I can't think of any company more fit (that's not a compliment, but a lament) than Facebook to host them.
That sounds lovely.
Fake news (the actual kind), name-calling, absurd conspiracy-theorizing, memes that remove all nuance from complex issues, botnets that amplify anti-science/anti-intellectual nonsense ... aren't political dialogue, they're the breakdown of it.
I understand the disdain for all of this, but this has been the state of American media for the vast majority of its history. Ben Franklin et al would find the anomalous post-Cold War period of journalistic "neutrality" to be unrecognizable. Fake news, name calling, absurd theorizing have been society's way of communicating about issues since the dawn of the printing press — or in other words, "political dialogue".
America's role as international security guarantor, its trade policies, and its government's role in domestic affairs was never really up for debate, and it only really changed stepwise in a stochastic manner, responding to situations and incentives day-by-day with no conscious consideration to the role of America or its state on a broader scale.
What we're seeing now, is large portions of the population coming to realize that that existing bipartian components of the political consensus - which I believe to be a legacy of the cold war, no longer serves their cultural or economic interests.
This process is naturally fractious, chaotic, sometimes violent, and full of dirty tricks, because politics isn't just about flavor of the month policies anymore. We're in the process of reinventing who we collectively are, and what we want to be. As a result, we're running across real, fundamentally irreconcilable political and moral differences that have been buried for decades, as well as confronting the failures and controversies of our past.
Many of those fundamental agreements settle neatly along class, racial, and professional boundaries. Others, not so much.
Science denial and anti-intellectualism is the natural result, because much of science communication has become a carrier mechanism for policy prescriptions predicated upon society operating under a specific ideological consensus, when in fact someone of a different political persuasion might objectively consume the scientific data and come to a different policy conclusion based on the same data.
For the less educated, who encounter proposals from scientists they consider to be politically unworkable, and which might rightfully be considered manipulatively framed, it is easier to reject entire specialized fields of research out of hand than to investigate further and attempt to conceive of alternative proposals because they lack the tools to engage with the information effectively to begin with.
All of this is messy, but it constotutes a real political dialogue on the part of society.
Normal society encourages civility by offering the inclusion into a needed physically-near social group. Digital society deincentises civility by offering a multitude of alternative groups.
They psychologically manipulate people into depressions, on purpose.
Facebook is not "just" an extension of open society. Facebook is a specific powerful corporation that makes immoral decisions to emotionally control their users.
https://www.google.com/search?q=facebook+paper+emotionally+m...
The East India Company was responsible, at least in part, for tens of millions of deaths in various famines, and to equate the two fails both by being ridiculous (Facebook is not a private empire with an empire), and trivializes the actual damage done by that institution.
https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-id...
A staunch defender of the EITC would claim they were "just" engaging in mercantilism and facilitating the exchange of goods, and the war and deaths were just unfortunate side-effects. Facebook is "just" engaging in connecting people and facilitating the exchange of information, and stoking violence and racial conflict are just unfortunate side-effects.
We can say that things are bad, while at the same time admitting that in the past, people did far worse things. It's a new, different, less-bad-but-still-bad, thing. It's OK.
How DARE you compare some unfortunate incidents of the EIC to the human misery that existed before the Brits arrived, you're being ridiculous!! "
People have always been able to use motivated reasoning to explain away the terrible externalizes of their choices when there's a shitload of money on the line.
FB has been a tool to aid genocide, they've contributed to incivility in societies throughout the world while they're cashing checks but don't want to appear "paternalistic" of course so it's fine.
They're responsible for 64% of extremist group joins. Is trying to change that number to 0% paternalistic?
I assume I'm currently not responsible for any extremist group joins. Am I being paternalistic by not pushing people toward joining extremist groups? Is it only paternalistic if you first find yourself responsible for some extremist group joins, and then try to lower that number?
There is of course the well documented problem of moderation - it inevitably turns into an issue of a subset of the users vs the moderators. Facebook gets by pretending to be neutral "platform providers", but they actively optimize for their benefit. They are about as neutral as a bathtub salesperson on water heaters.
This whole idea that they don't have control only has the ability to stand based on the indifference of its users. I can only hope it eventually falls and the next grand experiment in mass social interaction is a lot more gentle for society.
The idea of designing human interaction and government policy with the knowledge of how humans react is not shocking or new. Heck, the "Pandemic Playbook" from the CDC continuously references group behavior when discussing how to communicate facts to the public. For example: If you tell people to stay home on day 1, the public may doubt or tune out your advice. So what do you do on days 1-3 so that on Day 4, government advice is heeded? Get private companies on board, ramp up voluntary advice for some time, before letting the big news fall.
If you'd like to learn more, check out Nudge by Cass Sunstein [1]. And another book by the same man, specifically covering the ethics of governments using the technique. [2]
Most of the suggestions they considered were fairly modest product design choices that probably would improve user experience. To call these choices paternalistic is a stretch.
Also, the platform is already paternalistic - it polices nudity, pornography and a range of other legal content.
For 1. If somebody on the street comes up to you and says "hey I'm going to come beat up your family." At a bare minimum, the cops are being called and it is somewhat taken seriously. On the internet though, it is a reality for many people (especially women) that there are no consequences for such horrible language and communication. Also, people make different decisions in real life when it comes to certain types of language. I don't just go around swearing like in real life, but people are way more offensive on the internet. There are physical realities that don't map to the internet, that causes different communication patterns on the internet.
For 2. When it comes to spreading disinformation through idiots sharing links to each other, the effect is much more pronounced than when a conspiracy theorists goes out to a street corner and starts shouting ideas at people or has a million signs. Its clear in the latter case they might have a few screws loose, however in the former, everybody's "opinion" seems equal, but we can't use our other senses to vet them and b/c communication is slow/unclear on the internet, we also can't have a protracted conversation to figure out what their ideas are and where they come from (something you can easily do in person). This then causes really bad ideas to spread because people have lots of connections on facebook and there is no good way of vetting people or ideas.
The idea to not be "paternalistic" only makes sense if you think that communication in person is equivalent in every way to in person communication, which is fundamentally untrue. The only reason they don't do this is b/c they don't know how to solve this problem for N countries generically and don't want to be held liable for a policy that makes sense in country A, but not in B and causes potential legal issues.