In day to day real life, you don't notice 95% of the time, and when you do, you avoid that person in your life going forward.
Online, the 5% insane are over-represented, and a constant presence in any social media interaction beyond a few eyeballs.
Separating separating fact from fiction is a skill and people don’t all end up making the same number of mistakes. Similarly, people who enjoy trolling flat earth ideas are going to enjoy tweaking people with other bizarre ideas.
It's actually pretty common for extremely intelligent, methodical scientists in one field to have somewhat bananas thoughts/opinions in unrelated fields.
If I was going to pick my most controversial idea it would be something like, humanity was like a ring species going back thousands of years with people somewhat regularly crossing the Baring Sea without realizing anything particularly unusual was going on. That’s a somewhat wacky idea because diseases didn’t make the jump etc. But it’s wildly more reasonable than ancient aliens.
So as long as we are talking crazy rather than simply incorrect, crazy isn’t evenly distributed.
I 100% agree with the overall idea that we aren't able to deal well with the consequences of what we've created with social media.
It makes me think though of all those people out there who don’t have a cushy life like many of us and suffer daily. I’m sure they’re in a bad mood a lot of the time, and the internet is their main form of entertainment.
This poisons the entire well. I don't think the issue is that ~5% of the population is insane. I think the issue is social media has every reason in the world to find that 5% and give them the largest megaphone possible, up to and including TikTok's model of outright paying them for their insanity. The fact that the agent mediating all this intimacy as put by the author is inclined to do this, to shove the insane person in front of as many people as possible because they will readily cause reactions and further engagement with their product, makes it impossible to ignore them, nor to ignore the subsequent consequences of them being shoved in front of so many other people.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: social media cannot be a profit-driven industry. It simply cannot. The incentives for what makes a good, healthy, useful social media apparatus and the incentives that make it profitable to industry are two circles, with MAYBE 2% overlap in the middle on a good day.
this is only true for social media that promotes particular content, which means it is not true for signal, telegram, whatsapp, wechat and many others that just share messages as the users intended.
case in point, in this wikipedia article wechat is clearly categorized as social media, even though it's messaging component is no different than whatsapp, telegram or signal, which are "maybe" social media.
in summary, some people call them social media, and some don't.
Enough of these utilities engage in this attention-grabbing funnel tactic that the effects of their algorithms far exceed the boundaries of their own products, and reinforce each other as well.
the distinction is where the steering comes from. on facebook the steering is affected by the algorithm, which decided what messages you see, while on telegram it is not.
on facebook, twitter, youtube etc, i can be confronted with extreme content that i didn't ask for.
on telegram, whatsapp, wechat, etc, i only get content that i explicitly asked for.
we can argue how much surveillance is acceptable or necessary. but that is a different topic.
the purpose of moderation is to avoid discussions being sidetracked by extreme messages or bad faith replies or other noise, so we can focus on the topic at hand.
but whatever happens in these groups does not affect the discussion in the groups i am joining, so their moderation is quite irrelevant to me and provides me no benefit.
this is different on public forums like hackernews where i can access all content and expect to have a civil discussion everywhere. hence moderation here is necessary and welcome.
but if telegram were to come in and try to police speech in my private group then i'd be very upset and look for a different service with more privacy.
what you are effectively advocating for is that such private groups should not be allowed to exist because there is no way to control what is being shared in those groups.
yes, we want to stop these things, but blaming the tools for allowing them to happen is the wrong approach. either we allow private conversations or we don't. if we don't, then noone can have private conversations anywhere. that is not something you should want.
And don't internet forums broadly speaking also have problems even if they don't have feeds engineered for engagement? For example 4chan is just chronological sorting.
I can't speak for Mastodon as I've never used it, but I was an avid user for a long time of many forums and boards on many topics back in the old Internet. And while we certainly had our share of flamewars about shit related to the topics, nobody was ever building a following invoking the tenets of White Supremacy on any of them?
> And don't internet forums broadly speaking also have problems even if they don't have feeds engineered for engagement? For example 4chan is just chronological sorting.
I mean, 4chan is a large board that doesn't have feeds, sure, but it does have different boards for different things. Most of them are benign nonsense and weeb culture stuff. What most people think is 4chan is actually 4chan's /b/ subforum. And while voting systems certainly increase engagement, I don't think they're required at all, especially when the larger community has already defined a culture of... well, whatever you'd like to call 4chan. It's certainly interesting whatever word you want to use.
Ok, but that may be just because they were over at Stormfront, which seems to have existed since 1996.
Although I guess not having to share a platform and having undesired interactions with some groups is preferable.
Completely agree with what you're saying
I think this post is almost there: what does not scale is humanity, our current constitution of largely selfish, immature adults operating as our leaders. In order for our civilization to scale, we need more real adults, and not these immature adult-babies running things.
That just leaves the attention seekers, and people with a burning agenda.
Saying that, what would make a good national politician and leader is probably quite a rare combination of traits.
Good understanding of politics (natch), law, history, economics and statistics (as well as possibly industry, marketing, PR, the money markets), and have a degree of personal charisma.
If the healthy ongoing survival of democracy needs that, we'd better get better at producing these people. England (sorry Scotland, but there is a bit of a gap there) and the US try to solve this with their OXBRIDGE and Ivy League Universities - but recently the results have not been so good. Maybe the upcoming younger generation can surprise us all?
It ends up like the clip on futurama, where Jack Johnson vs John jackson both end up talking about the 3c titanium tax going too far, or not too far enough.
Someone will inevitable nitpick my particular choice of word, but "insane" is the general non-clinical description of the category.
Points to high value in making your kids work a bad retail job in high school to build some character & experience this first hand early.
It also points that banning access to social networks is a right call until kids get to a (mental/educational) stage where they can judge these things in a similar manner.
My friend shrugged, turned to me, and said, "Welcome to retail".
I've related that to a few people over the years. It's a useful lesson to keep in mind. Much better to recognise this for what it is than attempt to fix, fight, or rationalise it.
This is a morally and emotionally sophisticated position, and though I agree with it, it's a bitter pill.
The mass-surveillance / access denial approach is a different tactic. One that has some advantages, but also very clear disadvantages and inequities.
Start thinking about insanity and you'll get pulled down the sinkhole of "what is sane?", "am I insane?", "would I know if I wasn't?"
IMHO, the takeaway point isn't "insane" or "sane". It's more like "Do I have a theory of mind for the person(s) I'm interacing with?" and "How do I have compassion for people who are suffering in ways that I don't understand?"
YMMV.