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Comment by cbozeman | Hacker News Reader

Its the last part of #4 that we have to prevent.

> but avoiding a complete loss of control

We need the complete loss of control. Corporations control entirely too much of American, and really, worldwide, life as it is. We can't give this one to them. Its too important. The ability to freely communicate ideas, even in vulgar, poorly considered ways, is too important and too fundamental to humanity to be allowed to be controlled.

To quote Picard, "The line must be drawn here! This far, no further!"

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I was once like you, but. Doesn't it seem to you like something is fundamentally worse about politics now than it was 20 years ago? Isn't it true that people are more disconnected now than they have been in the past 50 years and institutions like clubs and political organizations reduced to merely a place to send money. Obviously the causes of this are varied (for one thing social media is way newer than 20 years), but doesn't it seem likely to you that social media and maybe particularly recommender systems are part of the problem. Society seems like a much more fragile thing than I'd imagined 5 years ago. I'm not ready to throw out all the gatekeepers, they've been part of what kept this boat floating up to now

Social media opened people's eyes to just how many different points of views there are on any given issue in the world. In the 90s or 00's, there was only 1-2 consensus views pushed by media.

Obviously its going to be a bumpy ride as the whole of society suddenly has to learn to cope with so many views, learn the critical thinking it takes to grapple with false information, learn who is trustworthy and who is not etc. but in the long run we will be much much better off for it. This is merely what society wide growth looks like - its not going to be a straight line up. Pulling the plug on that is deeply, deeply wrong no matter how scary it seems.

Some of the other issues like disconnection are amplified by existing institutions. In the 60s or 70s, a single working person could provide for an entire family. Now, most households have both parents working to provide barely the same standard of living or lower. When the vast majority of your time is directed into work by economic necessity, of course there is little time left for socializing or anything else. Don't believe the bullshit that it is somehow social media's fault. The trend of disconnection goes longer, and it has just as much to do (or much more IMO) with no free time, no money, stress and insular urban planning.

The institutions are dying because they are ineffective or do not serve the public and have been for far too long. How is it that we had almost a year to prepare for a plan to distribute vaccines but we found out there is none now? How is is that corporations lobby for and routinely pass laws that hurt people? How is it that the health insurance industry still exists and causes millions of deaths when most other countries have lower costs AND better outcomes with socialized healthcare? How is that the central banks are now printing so much money that it will devalue all peoples personal savings by 10-20% over the years without really explaining thats what they are doing, without any approval? How can you keep desperately clinging to some illusion that institutions safeguard society when every institution is failing so badly?

Social media is just the evil boogieman media loves to blame for every modern problem, when in fact it only surfaces the problems that have always existed but been completely ignored by traditional media. Heck even the problem of people being easily fooled by fake news is a reflection of how education completely fails to teach critical thinking. The institutions have failed us all for FAR too long - they cannot be reformed. Burn them down and build new ones.

Your answer was far better than mine.

Thank you for this post.

> Obviously its going to be a bumpy ride as the whole of society suddenly has to learn to cope with so many views, learn the critical thinking it takes to grapple with false information, learn who is trustworthy and who is not etc. but in the long run we will be much much better off for it. This is merely what society wide growth looks like - its not going to be a straight line up. Pulling the plug on that is deeply, deeply wrong no matter how scary it seems.

Why, what makes you think that nurturing more viewpoints leads better outcomes? You've just agreed with me that recent experience tends to say it doesn't. Why do you think that part of the adaptation to this new world we find ourselves in might not be a bit more control. I think exposure to views is fine, but it seems likely to me that social media doesn't just expose it converts. It gives people the impression that their niche viewpoint is widely supported and our brains are hardwired to go with consensus so when presented with one they hop on, but because it fragments that consensus we're left with hundreds of fractions each lapping up a nice densely connected graph of agreement.

On institutional failure. I agree that institutions have failed us. It's hard to look around and argue, but not all institutions and not all the way. The vaccine is getting out. The US is in top handful of countries in terms of distribution and well ahead in terms of total doses administered. While the death of the single provider household is partially to blame Bowling Alone a book about the decline in social capital in the US credits a lot of the fault with TV with some interesting natural experiments to back it up (it came out in 2000 so social media wasn't really a thing yet). Burning institutions to the ground basically never happens and is incredibly destructive when it does. Like great leap forward levels of destructive. I for one am not ready for that to happen.

Well it does lead to better outcomes for me and lots of people I know who are super happy things like Twitter exist. If you use Twitter to follow cool people and learn stuff, its incredible how much you can learn and much your life can change. If you use it as a normie and get sucked into the endless political drama, it sucks.

Thanks to WSB, I learned how to make tons of money and a lot of interesting stuff about how markets, businesses and the world really work. Stuff you could never, ever learn anywhere else unless you really worked at wall street. Thanks to Twitter I learned to aim higher and that weird people like me often do great things and can be happy. Also lots of weird niche information that is never found anywhere else.

When I look at the way normal people use social media, there is one common thread that they just don't f**ing understand - STOP USING IT to read about politics. Endlessly debating or reading about politics online does not affect any change in the world whatsoever. Its a pointless addiction that makes you unhappy, much like smoking. People have forgotten how much more there is to media besides freaking politics. The younger generation already understands this - its only millennials who have forgotten there is media beyond politics, aging at the outgroup and all manner of bullshit to make you believe the world is ending. Its just a ploy for eyeballs, nothing more.

I think older people will eventually learn the same stuff I did and be better off for it. I don't believe in paternalism one bit. I was raised by overprotective parents and it simply does not work. You have to learn to fend for yourself, including how to think for yourself in this world, the sooner the better. The younger generation already grew up in this environment and understands all of that intuitively, they don't need any rules to protect them from being brainwashed by the internets!!11!!

Also it personally just sucks to have opportunities taken away because some people can't handle them. Anything with high reward is inherently high risk. It sucks that some people just don't get that, but that line of thinking is why opportunities on every axis systematically disappear from the middle class. Can't invest in early stage companies unless you're an accredited investor with $1M+, can't use social media because some people can't handle it, maybe we should ban driving too because some people crash their cars, ban podcasts because some people get radicalized by listening to the wrong ones. The end of that road is permanent social immobility and a very boring life.

> Doesn't it seem to you like something is fundamentally worse about politics now than it was 20 years ago?

Yeah, but this has nothing to do with social media in my estimation. It has everything to do with the elites of the world, but in particular, America, capturing most of the wealth that gets generated.

You can't have a middle class without an enormous amount of people making a healthy sum of money. In an ever-increasing desire to capture more of that wealth, there's were we ended up. Naturally the elites that are smart enough to realize this don't care, because they won't have to bear the consequences of these actions. They'll be dead and gone by the time it degenerates into a real problem, or they just expect to move to another nation, set up shop there, and repeat the cycle.

This is where a lot of people lose the plot. Its not a political problem - its made to look that way because that keeps scrutiny off the fact that its a financial problem. 47% of Americans living in poverty. Half the citizens of the richest nation in the world, live in poverty. That's laughable.

And if everyone's busy being gainfully employed, living a mostly fulfilling life, they don't have time to LARP as a MAGA Shaman. They're busy working, grilling some hamburgers and hotdogs and ribs in the backyard, drinking a cold beer while the kids play in the pool, and the reason I can tell you that's what they're doing, is because that's what me and mine do most weekends. I don't have time to go to D.C. and act like a jackass... when I'm not busy working, I'm busy with my hobby of building furniture, and when I'm not busy doing that, I'm in the gym, and when I'm not busy doing that, I'm off doing other shit.

But all that stuff is only possible if you've got a middle class salary. And the middle class has been asked to pay more than they can reasonably fork over, for entirely too long. Hard to take seriously the compliant of a multi-millionaire about the state of her tax bill of $4.8 million on her $11 million yearly salary, because scale matters. She can live in a $1m a year apartment in NYC, send her kids to private school that costs $40,000/yr, each, and still have, literally, millions left over for every thing else.

Meanwhile, the husband and wife making $60,000 a year as a nurse and $80,000 a year as an engineer end up with around $90,000 after taxes, if they're lucky. $7,500 a month. Two decent cars - $1000/mo. $2000/mo for a modest house in a decent part of town. Gotta throw a little something into savings, retirement, investment, etc., so knock out another $500. $1500 if they're really smart. Now we're down to $3000 and we haven't gotten to cell phones, Internet, car insurance, etc.

It adds up, and fast.

Maybe I'm just a little more jaded than you are... maybe I'm just old, and with age comes a lot of clarity about just how the world works. I'm angry, but I'm angry for the kids, not me. They're going to really bear the brunt of this, and it isn't just "unfair", its unconscionable.

> social media is way newer than 20 years

Is it?

Facebook was founded in 2004; Myspace in 2003; Friendster in 2003; Livejournal in 1999; Blogger in 1999. All of those are social media. It's only the recommendation algorithms with engagement-optimizing feedback loops that are newer. It should not surprise anybody that these have become runaway AIs.

I think that is just the normal 'getting older' syndrome. We all just grew up and for some reason life isn't as nice as it was when we were kids and didn't read the news. We now imagine the world has turned dark and evil, but in reality we just all have jobs and the news now matters.

That seems possible, but literally half of all presidential impeachments have targeted trump Trump. Bowling Alone came out when I was a kid, but I don't have any reason to think that it's conclusion that there has been a statistically measurable decline in the social life of Americans is wrong or stopped. Interesting one of the more likely candidates for the cause it comes up with was TV. There are also statistics backing up the notion that politics has become more polarized relatively recently [1]. And like while new things are always happening the storming of the capital was definitely not something that's happened before. I think this is just a blip on generally upward journey and I could be convinced it has nothing to do with social media or the internet, but the blip is definitely a thing

1. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2014/06/12/political-po...

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