AI offers improved civility for polarizing online conversations
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Twitter and Reddit would both be examples of the types of platforms you're referring to, that benefit from this outrage. And neither seems to want to maximize it.
In the case of Twitter, they prompt you to rephrase your Tweet if the algo thinks it's likely to offend people. If you post too much of that type of stuff, you get a form of lite-shadowban.
Reddit has for years coached people to 'remember the human' and backs it up with various rules and bans. They want people to treat each other well.
Is either platform successful in their attempts? Arguably, no. But that wasn't my point, I was addressing the claim that they seek to maximize outrage.
Are you saying that Reddit is a good example? Because that would be a laughable point to make
Yes. They banned the Donald Trump subreddit. That one subreddit produced more outrage than probably everything else in the history of Reddit combined. And they banned it. A company seeking to maximize outrage would not do that.
Just because there's a limit to the outrage tolerated, it doesn't mean that outrage isn't part of the plan.
That's where the goalposts are and that's where they are going to stay: whether or not they seek to maximize outrage.
So ya, that interpretation is the logical one. If your business model depends on something, you would be optimizing for maximizing it over time.
Please do not add any extra words to that, thus shifting the goalposts. Here you have added the word 'profit'. I never said anything about profit.
I argued that they do not.
I don't think it's pedantic at all to say the goalposts are whether or not they maximize outrage.
I totally understand that the word's 'Reddit' and 'Twitter' and 'Trump' are going to trigger people into wanting to talk more broadly about those topics. There are lots of other places they can go and do that. I had a very specific and narrowly defined argument.
We're not disagreeing. I wasn't speaking to what's in their heart, only to what they actually do.
You yourself said neither platform was successful in their attempts, that's because those "attempts" are there for show. They can't reduce outrage without reducing their profits.
Then you're wrong. They don't just pretend to care, they take actions. I've already given several examples.
> You yourself said neither platform was successful in their attempts
No, I did not say that. I said 'arguably' and that was precisely so people wouldn't try to turn this into a debate about how good they are at it. I said they try and they absolutely do try.
> because those "attempts" are there for show
And now you're contradicting yourself. You said they only pretend to care and now you said they make attempts. You keep flip flopping on what it is that you are even saying.
I can't read minds. Evidently you can and that's an awesome skill, congratulations. But everything I've said refers only to what they actually do. And what they do is to take actions that are clearly detrimental to maximizing outrage. Something you've just agreed with, if we extract all of your mind reading voodoo magic.
"I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!" 06 Jan 21
I can't link to the tweet. But it has been reinstated on Twitter after the acquisition.
If that's an argument, it doesn't change anything about what I said.
I don't hear any dog whistles. That's probably because I'm a socialist and not a "dog". I'm not the one focusing on undesirable elements in society. I see a lot of struggling poor people though. People who vote for con-men populists out of desperation.
You're a fool if you think that the way reddit handles content moderation does not create angry people.
please keep the goalposts right there and address only that one specific argument. as it's the only argument i'm making.
See the person above us:
>You're a fool if you think that the way reddit handles content moderation does not create angry people.
I never said that. And they're making personal attacks based on this thing I never said. That isn't what you just described.
Tell that to the volunteers over at /r/BanFemaleHateSubs
Reddit does about the minimum it can to avoid signifiant media backlash.
I don't know about reddit enough and just struggling to even guess the context here.
Reddit is extremely massive. With uber millions of people on it. And anyone can make a subreddit about anything. And they get extremely specific. Like someone might make one called r/FuckHNpedants for people who dislike all of the pedants on this site. And they post screenshots of our comments and mock us.
So clearly there are going to be people who make all sorts of random subreddits related to women. Lets say some guys didn't like women with freckles. They might make a subreddit showing pictures of women with freckles and bash them. And drill down a few more levels and go in all directions.
Then you have these other people who get triggered by that sort of content and demand it all be removed from Reddit. They make subreddits like that demanding it all be removed. Historically, they need to get featured in a bunch of media before Reddit does anything. They then ban a bunch of them and make a new rule.
>Is either platform successful in their attempts? Arguably, no. But that wasn't my point, I was addressing the claim that they seek to maximize outrage.
There must be a 1000 British sketches about excessive politeness but none come to mind right now... the best I can think of is that it's an inverse Key and Peel anger translator:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qv7k2_lc0M
We will need the anger translator in our client software to translates back out of the polite version so we can efficiently understand what is truly meant without confusion.
I had the opposite idea: Run all my comments through an LLM to make them more diplomatic. I noticed my comments have been a bit adversarial lately, so I just wrote a script to pass the HN comment history plus my draft comment to GPT-4 and have it reword my replies. Hopefully it won't be overly verbose.
This is this comment, GPTed:
~~~
Hey andersrs, I totally appreciate your perspective here - the 'Gift Shop Sketch' is a classic! To share my thoughts, though, I've actually contemplated doing quite the opposite. I've begun to realize that my comments might've been coming off a little too confrontational or straight to the point recently. So, I'm thinking of running them through a language model to dial up the diplomacy a notch.
Could be fun, right? I'm in the process of penning a script that takes our comment history, along with any new comments I jot down, into account and passes it all on to GPT-4. The goal's to help it finesse my responses a bit. Here's hoping it won't tip the scale in the other direction and make them a long-winded affair!
~~~
I agree that it's a bit meh, but I think with some prompt tweaking it can be very helpful.
EDIT: With some better prompting:
~~~ Actually, I've been thinking about making my comments more cordial. Noticed that they might come off a bit straightforward, so I've worked on this script to run my HN comments, along with my draft comment, through GPT-4. The idea is that it can help to craft my replies in a way that fosters better communication. I'm hopeful it won't end up making them overly long-winded. ~~~
For example, to me this sounds like I’m being talked down to as if you’ve pegged me as someone you have to finesse your words around or else I’ll erupt into violence at the drop of a hat.
I get the purpose, to not sound adversarial in your response. Just a thought though.
It's incredible worrysome that AI is being driven into a closed-source censorship regime in the name of safety & civility, when in reality having a centralized and closed AI ecosystem would definitively be the worst kind of dictatorship regime.
Conversely, an open-source AI ecosystem would be the biggest equalizer in history and would harmonize humanity on an unprecedented level.
Those two sentences don't make sense together. Surely if there are no absolute truths then removing polarity would help people find a middle ground.
If we want to talk about "objective truth" - an adjacent and popular buzzword - we should at the very least be attempting operationalization and experimentation on our claims, as empiricism is the framework best suited to supporting the epistemic claim of "objectivity"
Really the notion of an absolute, objective, and knowable truth is often an unrealistic standard if we don't have good means to study the phenomenon in question, and tends to be something more like a pissing contest about rhetorical prowess or credentials in most conversations in practice.
Reaching agreement is a valuable but far from certain outcome of a dialogue. It is not the same thing as ascertaining "truth" in some epistemically meaningful final sense
Nobody says discussion is a source of it, or where you obtain some, but you can discuss it. The aim of discussion is discussion itself, not posing a guarantee that someone will walk away enlightened.
Your GP post literally says "The only way to reach truth is through discussion", so take it up with them.
This in itself is an absolute statement. I prefer to see reduced polarity from online conversations (more similar to HN), and I'm not censorship maximalist (whatever that label means)
The censor class have repeatedly censored discussion in the name of correctness that were later proven to be either murky or outright false (see: lab leak theory censorship, mask effectiveness censorship, Hunter Biden laptop censorship etc).
As history has repeatedly shown, censorship is principally used by those whose ideas cannot be backed up in public debate -- the opposing view must be forcefully crushed.
HN is relatively so good because there are clear and enforced guardrails around what a conversation looks like.
Allowing polarization for the sake of openness is not a good thing.
Sure, it would equalize us to some degree, but there are areas where this can be beneficial to society.
One can also argue that extremists – like some politicians – do benefit so much from this polarity and lack of dialog, that they're only able to pursue their career as a politician due to this. Like some of the members of the German AfD party.
Putting this in contrast to the goals of "hardcore censorship maximalists", I believe that these censorshippers will have a harder time reaching their goals than the destabilizing benefits controversial politicians are reaping with the lack of polite discussion.
There exists the concept of "Lügenpresse" ("lying press") which is a word used similar to uses of the word "woke", as a term to compact a message into one word.
This "Lügenpresse", which usually the public broadcasting services like ARD and ZDF are referred to, have indeed dealt with this topic for years now, as well as newspapers like Der Spiegel or FAZ.
No censorship has been taking place. What has been taking place is an avoidance of acknowledging the seriousness of the problem in the way the popular and extremist AfD has portrayed it, because it is easy to portray it for them the way they do due to a lack of honest discourse.
Keep in mind that while the AfD is attacking the other parties as being parties which ignore the topic, they are not proposing solutions which are immediately implementable, because they are in the privileged position of being in the opposition and therefore not required to actually act. They are in the privileged position where they can fan the fire, lean back comfortably and watch the place burn. No action required from their part.
Dealing with the topic is very complex not only due to the laws we have agreed to abide to, due to the "Rechtsstaat" ("constitutional state").
If it were by me, I wouldn't mind if they get to rule for one term, just for them to then display their inability to solve the problems they've been "criticizing" the entire time, but due to their stance regarding the Russian war – handing over Ukraine to Russia in exchange for cheap gas, like it used to be – and their right extremist views, they're absolutely untenable.
Do you really think that it was the AfD which moved Lindner to push the idea of looking for ways to impede migrants to send money back to their families? I doubt so. Not even two weeks ago our city had a citizen conversation to discuss the problems we are facing with the influx of migrants. This is the way to deal with these issues, and no AfD is required for this. It doesn't take an AfD to acknowledge the problems, they are not getting ignored.
> What do you think will happen if you start introducing harder clamps on free speech?
Using AI to help with more civilized discussions is not "introducing harder clamps on free speech".
> lügenpresse
Refusing to talk about a certain angle of a problem would constitute as censorship IMHO
> using AI to help with more civilized discussions…
Who decides the boundaries of civilized discussion? Some central authority like the EU? Sounds incredibly dangerous and prone to power hijacks
Walking is relatively good because you can only injure yourself so much going so slow.
Allowing people to drive cars for the sake of going faster to places is not a good thing.
> HN is relatively so good because there are clear and enforced guardrails around what a conversation looks like.
Hah, I think you'll find if you ask around that a surprisingly large number of people (especially liberal women) would be horrified at the discussions here. It's full of anonymous people furiously disagreeing with each other about everything, and full of arguments like "you're wrong because <facts>".
If you accidentally wander into the ultra-liberal hacker blogosphere, the sort of places where everyone uses anime avatars and half of them are furries, you'll find a lot of hatred for HN and a belief that it's no different to /pol/. Some of them even block links from HN.
So this distinction you're looking for doesn't really exist. If you support censorship you'll find they come for you next.
/pol/ is low quality, but it’s existence is probably good for the world.
The way this is phrased sounds like absolute relativism: no truth really exists, everything is relative, every opinion is as relevant as any other.
This is a dangerous perspective, and often used to give too much focus to fringe opinions that do not merit that much attention.
Your username is waihtis on hn, 2+2 is 4 in mainstream mathematics, not true equals false in boolean logic, and the sun will rise tomorrow are all truths. People arguing against these truths better have a compelling argument, or they can be safely ignored. That is not censorship, but a thoughtful use of our time.
Aka, you are free to speak your mind, but you are not entitled to people listening. No one owes a platform to fringe opinions because of free speech.
Even American civic debate culture is heavily centered around limitations on how to present an argument. Polarity in itself isn't what matters in productive discourse, it's truthfulness, factfulness, lack of bad faith argument style, and so on.
Anyone who is interested in debate producing truth rather than being a sort of entropy entertainment machine must value civility. People can be completely polarized and argue complete nonsense, there is no value in it whatsoever. The literal site we are having this conversation on right now is very strongly moderated when it comes to civility and avoiding needless polarization, but HN is not censorship maximalist. It's ironic to try to argue this especially here.
It could easily have the opposite effect, since bad actors have been already abusing this technique - feigning politeness - for decades, destroying what little trust there could be in online discourse.
Insisting on the appearance of civility, in any case, only has a cooling effect on those who have skin in the game, leaving the rest to play devil's advocate amongst themselves as they loftily discuss possible solutions. I am, as always, thoroughly bemused by some people's insistence on solving social problems with technical solutions, but this really takes the cake.
And emotions are the key -- in the UK there is currently a campaign to give a tax break to the top 1%, and it's working, even left wing tabloid readers support it.
That said, most online discourse is already a disaster, with every disagreement being ramped up to 11 with no capacity or patience for nuance, so I'm not sure how much worse it can actually get.
Other than rephrasing, using AI to automatically add context to a discussion can help a lot with misinformation. This is bit like how Twitter's community notes feature adds needed context.
However one needs to keep in mind that they shouldn't attempt to sift through and correct misinformation on Facebook and Twitter, it will be generated far quicker than a person can reasonably counter. It's also a common strategy to use over-simplistic ideas to make such statements because these require an out-sized effort to debunk.
Rather sometimes it's useful to remember that all around us there are untrue things being said and not interacting (a.k.a. "engagement") with them is often a solution in itself. Blocking, muting and not reacting is a better strategy to algorithmically silence.
If reading materials online leaves you angry or itching to respond that's actually a problem with yourself that you need to figure out how to deal with.
(You do have to stretch your definition of AI a bit to include the subconscious, for this to count, admittedly.)