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Comment by sdrinf | Hacker News Reader

| Under Moloch, everyone is irresistibly incentivized to ignore the things that unite us in favor of forever picking at the things that divide us in exactly the way that is most likely to make them more divisive.

In social networks the leverage point in eliminating toxoplasma from your life are the bridge people: people who are being rewarded for taking offense in your in-group, and therefore select for the worst possible behavior of the outgroup. These people act as stressors, specifically triggering ideations of worst-case-scenarios. The fix here is removing these people from your feeds/circles of influence.

I wrote more of efficient defense systems in the age of attention at https://sdrinf.com/age-of-attention .

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So the solution is to make the bubble impregnable? The medicine sounds worse than the disease to me.

Thing is, there are bad ideas spreading out there, and you should learn of their existence less they grow out of control with nobody knowing/caring.

Conflict is a regulating tool in human species (and not only for our species). Wishing it away is an utopia that like all others will end up dystopian if put into practice.

I think the compromise for me is "uninvested bridge people." I want to learn about bad ideas, but I want to learn about them from people who don't themselves care overmuch about outcomes one way or the other. That way I'm at a lesser risk of being radicalized and can choose whether to care and to what degree.

I think you’re looking for old-school journalism? You might be interested in the list of people who signed “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate”, some notable journalists among them: https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/

Your attention is a scarce resource. A basic point here, is that rage eats your attention for breakfast, and by cost of opportunity, bubbles you into your tribe. By cutting out rage & related weeds, you can actually expose yourself to a significantly larger, and more diverse set of viewpoints.

Conflict as a regulation tool might have worked for our evolutionary ancestors, where resolution can be swiftly found and incentives re-aligned; however, if you reward conflict, the modern machine can generate an endless supply of it, on the tap. The correct solution is to shift the incentives, and reward with your attention the kind of stuff you want to see growing.

I think first of all, conflict rewards itself, no? The conflict has a winner. What you are talking about (and the original article) is about fabricated fake conflicts. Well these ones have winners as well - the ones who fabricate them at least. And if you are on the receiving end of these outrages you are kind of forced to win it. And in doing so you might crush those who overextended their rage doing society a service.

Lots more could be said, but to keep it short I believe we can't simply ignore it.

OR you could have communities policing the tone and approach for disagreements, and then you can have a wide variety of viewpoints represented like in HN

>So the solution is to make the bubble impregnable?

I'd say just the opposite. We think of the filter bubble as being only shown ideas we agree with. But an important part of the filter bubble phenomenon is only showing us the worst examples of ideas we disagree with. It's this second part GP is suggesting we can most easily stop tolerating on a personal level. The former is a bias of the algorithms and would take some kind of collective reform, unfollowing contacts who highlight the worst of your shared ideological opponents rather than the best is an action anyone can take.

> So the solution is to make the bubble impregnable?

Turn the bubble from Jerry Springer into NPR.

What kinds of people does Jerry select for? "GAY KLANSMEN WHO LOVE THEIR HOMOPHOBIC BOYFRIENDS TOO MUCH! IOWAN ZOUAVES FOR WAR IN THE MIDDLE EAST, AND THE MANCUNIANS WHO ENABLE THEM!" The worst of the worst. The circus freaks of the Other Side. The ones voted most likely to throw a chair at someone, even though that was a different daytime TV host.

What kinds of people does NPR select for? The more reasonable ones. The ones who can talk and express ideas without flying into a frothy rage at the very notion of someone disagreeing with them or not agreeing with them quickly enough or not having been in agreement with them a month before they started talking. The ones who can debate.

Everyone has filters. Use yours to filter out the angry idiots who add nothing.

In my country we have a saying that roughly translates to: "stupid, yes, but many!"

Jerry Springer watchers vote and not only that.

There should be a distinction here between awareness of bad ideas, and engagement with those who just spew whatever indignant crap they get.

Blacklisting the slime spewers frees up that time/attention for more useful information and engagement.

Great observation. Thank you! I suspect I have acted in this role before and will now modify behaviour post-haste.

Good comment which makes sense other than one word you used.

> toxoplasma

I don't think that word means what you think it means. It doesn't mean "toxicity" if that's what you're going for. It is a misspelling of Toxoplasmosis and refers to a specific thing that has no mapping whatsoever onto how you are using it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis

It makes sense in context of the article.

Toxoplasma gondii is the parasite that causes toxoplasmosis. In the article, Scott makes the analogy of toxoplasma gondii to rage memes: toxoplasma circulates between cats and rats, the way a rage meme circulates back and forth between two opposing factions. (It's way down in section five of the article.)

They seem to be opposing forces (cats and rats, your side and the other side), but to the parasite, their opposition is what makes them both such effective hosts.

You want to eliminate the rage meme (toxoplasma) from your brain.

Toxoplasmosis causes generosity and trust in creatures it infects.

Not rage.

>In social networks the leverage point in eliminating toxoplasma from your life are the bridge people

How do you explain this sentence? I don't think the article is written for cats and rats.

It's an analogy. Toxoplasma is a parasite that works by playing two sides against each others. A rage meme is a parasite that work by pitting two sides against each other.

> How do you explain this sentence? I don't think the article is written for cats and rats.

Metalepsis. When you see "toxoplasma", read "rage memes".

Though it mostly addresses only part of this dynamic, Alvin Toffler's Future Shock 50 years on is illuminating, most especially the latter chapters.

Can you give a rough idea of what ideas the latter chapters get into?

After four sections devoted to demonstrating the premise of increasing change and describing its dimensions and (with highly variable accuracy) suggesting future trends, section 5 looks at limits of adaptability (physical and psychological impacts on the individual), and section 6 on survival strategies (personal and social coping mechanisms, education, and backlash). The psychological and sociological aspects have impressed me most.

The book as a whole is somewhat uneven, though it was ambitious and parts seem highly relevant still.

Meta, replying here because there's no PMs:

I'd like a "follow" feature, so I can see what certain people (like you) are doing. Implemented like a personal newsfeed. Just now occurs to me that RSS feeds for HN profiles would be cool.

Last time I checked, your reddit experiment was too much work to upkeep. You were also trying one of the newer hosters, "morpheus"?, but I didn't grok their UX.

There's an HN RSS feed engine which supports user feeds:

https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/

Reddit and Mastodon (https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius) also support RSS.

Though mostly I don't think I'm posting much of substance presently.

Look for a gitlab static site ... eventually.

As long as we're wishing, I wish we had a way to know when someone had replied to us.

On balance lack of that is ultimately a feature IMO. Even the most subtle of notifications becoms a klaxon, and very few are subtle.

HN has a great deal of social engineering, most precisely the opposite of many of the ventures it has launched.

A bit late but this aggravates me. I dont mind being unable to down vote in the least, in fact I think if downvoting had a timer it may help people cool down.

But for replies, I feel as though refreshing a page to see if anyone has replied to me, just feels narcissistic. As such I rarely if ever get to reply to something, since I almost never re-read comments on an article, much less my own for the infinitesimally small chance of a reply.

I think an option to have notifications to direct replies (not nested, but could be an option as well), would be pretty cool, as I've spoken before here about the drive-by commenting HN seems to cultivate (but I mean it works, right?).

Ya.

I dearly miss the offline mail readers from the dial up BBS days. TLDR: most of the features (eg whitelists, blacklists, fetch behavior), were client side. I have a deep hunch that moving all these features to server side, aka social networks, contributed to our current mess.

The recent rehash (front paged) about newsgroups (NNTP protocol) made me wish I had more gumption and just did something about it.

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