Why Good Ideas Die Quietly and Bad Ideas Go Viral
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
The internet’s shift toward tribal, memetic behavior isn’t just cultural, it’s deeply structural and driven by how platforms make money from engagement.
Feeds optimized for engagement and ad revenue naturally favor ideas that are fast, emotional, and identity-driven. The more transmissible the idea, the greater its reach. Slower, non-viral ideas don’t stand a chance in that environment.
To me, the architecture of targeting and personalization isn’t just mirroring tribalism, it’s reinforcing and accelerating it.
Maybe the future of meaningful discourse online isn’t about better moderation or more facts, it’s about redesigning the incentives entirely.
Until we change what the system rewards, unfortunately, we’ll keep getting more of what spreads, not what matters.
I don't actually see the internet as very tribal at all compared to meatspace; in fact, I see it as one of the, if not the most, anti-tribalist force to have ever existed as a force in the general population. I just think it's hard to see sometimes through all the discourse about how many parts of the internet are built to manipulate us, and how starkly obvious and disturbing mob mentality is when you see it on a daily basis. But that's not, and never was, the majority of the behavior and interactions you're bound to run into unless what you like is fighting with people on social media.
But even I, a bastard as cynical as anyone, can see how we managed and continue to manage to form relationships across nominally tribal boundaries in spite of not making anyone money.
Of course the internet is memetic; but then again, so is all human culture I've ever witnessed. I think that's a neutral thing at worst.
Unfortunately, I don't see a great way to reverse this dynamic. Thoughtful, meaningful content tends to contradict the tenets of mass media. I think we just gotta carve out the spaces for ourselves that we want and accept the rest.
To use a silly analogy, consider billbooards. Billboard companies may be useful for their role in information distribution. The public pays nothing for this "service". But billboards are not free. Advertisers pay to use them. The information displayed on billboards is generally commercial in nature. The public pays for roads, not the billboard companies. The public does not drive on these roads to see billboards, the roads have other, more important utility. The billboard companies piggyback on a public resource: roadways.
The www and the internet in general has utility other than as a medium or vector for collecting data surreptitiously and disseminating advertising. Silicon Valley's so-called "tech" company intermediaries offer "services" that make the internet "easier to use" and are marketed as "free". But like billboards, the intermediaries' computer systems are not free. Advertisers pay for these ad services systems. The public pays for the internet to which they connect and use as a medium//vector. The intermediaries piggyback on a public resource: the internet.
Perhaps the public has forgotten the utility of the internet without advertising. Trillion dollar "billboard companies" have made the public forget about the public resource that they are paying for. Imagine if, pre-internet, every road was lined from start to finish with billboards and billboard companies tracked drivers everywhere they travelled.
The roads work fine without billboards. The internet works fine without advertising. But the online advertising services industry, the trillion dollar "billboard companies", i.e., Silicon Valley, disagrees.
The very clear finding is that the issue isn’t the algorithm its in the information production systems on the left+center vs right.
On the right, crucially - sense is made by first having a narrative, getting it amplified by major voices, and then seeking out facts to support it. Counter views do exist, but they dont get amplified.
On the Left+center we have your typical media and information economy which we think everyone is a part of. Ie you get punished for having the facts wrong or being inaccurate.
The right is about looking like they are smart, but primarily about selling narratives.
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There IS also a problem with the algorithms, in that it creates a fitness function that highly emotional and engaging content survives better than boring and long form content.
Or more precisely, highly emotional and engaging content spreads more.
But since reach, time on site, etc, are linked with advertising revenue they are essentially conflated with economic viability.
The exact linkage though, is a change in the content consumption mix of humans.
Humans have only N hours of content they will consume in a day, and some % of that time will be allocated to high cognitive load, kinda-boring content.
Your market will be smaller, but there is a sliver of a market that does exist.
It’s just that the effort to payout here, is not as effective as making content that gets more views.
Yes, it describes the same process, just with extra steps, but each of these steps is a different place which can be approached to alleviate the issue of engagement vs accuracy.
> The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from favourable circumstances it escapes persecution and is allowed to survive until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it.
I'm curious to know whether he'd still agree with that in the age of "fake news".
However, when you're in the middle of a revolution you don't really want to be there.
Basically, probably the next generation will be able to tell how bad things really were and if by their time things are truly better.
It might be true that the current cycle of anti-intellectualism will continue beyond our lifetimes, but we’ve recovered from worse.
While most scientists generally favor the natural origin theory, an alternative theory with a 21% chance is not something that should be dismissed or suppressed.
Would you say it's been suppressed?
But also when the establishment is correct, it still gets (incorrectly) exposed by independent sources.
There's a nontrivial part of today's population that is purely edgy and contrarian as a rule, without a solid rational foundation to their worldview.
The attractiveness of this world view has a lot to do with the quality of the rules and the rule peddlers.
Controversial opinion scoped solely to this one topic: who gives a shit?
In general I agree that governments shouldn't be in the business of cover-ups or suppressing the truth (and in this case I don't think we'll ever know the "real" truth). But what's the difference here? Covid happened, however it happened, and we all had to deal with it.
Bringing it up now feels politicians trying to distract from more pressing problems that they don't have any answers for.
Oddly, I find the lab leak discussion proves the exact opposite point. No truth has been found in the matter, hence even your use of words like "most experts", "likely", and "hypothesis." If anything, the insistence that it is a lab leak is proof that evidence isn't needed for some people to make a grand conclusion.
Just look at the performative (not informative) website [0] the current administration created to spread this theory. It focuses on things like lockdowns, social distancing, and mask mandates, which obviously have nothing to do with the lab leak theory.
When you view this website, which side does do you think is trying to create a narrative? It even seems to oppress information that doesn't support their view. Seems like pure propaganda to me.
[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/lab-leak-true-origins-of-covid-19...
The amount of circumstantial evidence is overwhelming and there’s clearly motive for cover up in the governments and organizations since they were involved in funding the research in Wuhan which sent three lab workers to the hospital before the outbreak was acknowledged.
The US has no motive to cover it up, especially since the likes of Trump have been calling it the "China Virus" since day 1. We just don't know, and we especially didn't know at the start of Covid. Then, it was truly a conspiracy theory, so we shouldn't be surprised it was treated as such.
What trips people up about Covid is that we were, and still are, discovering things about it. It was a novel disease. People take changes in guidelines and popular opinion to mean the elites are lying to us or that there's some grand conspiracy. But no - they're changing their minds because they were wrong before, because their understanding of the virus and how to handle it were constantly evolving. We were throwing shit at the wall and finding out in real time if it worked. That's not how we treat Polio or Measles because we already know how those work.
The is now public evidence that Fauci acknowledge it was likely early on in private emails and then set out to campaign against it. In front of Congress he is criticized of perjury for lying that his agency funded gain of function researching. Fauci tried to argue it was not quite gain of function but similar even though everyone knows it was. He public also show that he moved all related conversations to private emails, in violation of the records act, to avoid scrutiny. He convinced trump to reverse an Obama era rule on funding gain of function research.
In the end, Obama pardoned fauci but he did not let ecohealth alliance nor its leader off the hook. They can no longer receive funding. Its leader was also the one who wrote in the lancet that it was a natural event.
There’s lots more evidence in public record now. But clearly it was an embarrassment for all involved including the USA.
Currently it's acting in a way where you can read this message. There's a lot of stuff that needs to be true in order for you to read what I write (e.g. computers working, internet working, electricity flowing, etc.).
Plus, Locke seems to have generally existed outside the concept of being paid for eyeballs. I am not sure much of his philosophy survived the rise of capitalism, which is perhaps why he still remains such a strong voice—we are simply aware on some level of what liberal idealism has lost, and we want it back.
Personally, I think "truth" is actually a pretty weak concept and I have none of the attachments that enlightenment thinkers had to it. Even in good faith confidence about how other folks view concepts that are very real to us can be hard to come by. Am I sure that there the continent of Africa is not a conspiracy theory? Yes, I'm pretty sure. Well, what about the characterization of XYZ conflict? Or about the social value of idk role models with raising children? That's where newsrooms lose me—the terms are just too vague, the connotations too difficult to hold editors accountable for, for "truth" to be a real concern.
In my view, Mills (and Holmes) did not imagine someone winning in the market place of the ideas, because they found an infinite money glitch.
Your information goods you produce, are losing in the market place of ideas, not because of their quality, but because
1) You are blocked from selling them into a market of customers on the right. 2) they are too expensive compared to the alternatives available.
Take the intelligent design movement and how it was platformed by Fox News, as “schools should teach the controversy about evolution”. Implying that evolution isn’t “solid science”, and that ID was a potential answer for this issue.
Or take how fox platformed cranks and bad science on environmental issues, allowing R senators and congress people to point to it, and stop pro-environment actions and bills.
The posture of science at the time was to not engage with cranks, because “dont feed the trolls”.
Shocked by the outcomes, scientists went on Fox, hoping to engage with the audience and explain their points - only to be peppered with gotchas, rhetorical tricks and arguments that made for good TV.
Crucially, the underlying sentiment was to ridicule experts and destroy faith in the “liberal” institutions that were crushing conservative views and cultural ability.
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These are examples to illustrate that the people who are playing the market place of ideas have financialized it. They are not in it for democracy, they are not in it, to engage in actual commerce of ideas
They are in it to break it. The job of members on the side of accuracy and science and evidence, is to understand it, realize the errors in their assumption, and to take advantage of the arbitrage opportunity that inefficient behavior must create.
The cost of production of your facts and ideas, makes you more expensive and less useful, than the content being produced and subsidized on the right.
Be cheaper, be more useful, break the embargo, be financially viable, and/or institute regulation that prevents the creation of idea monopolists.
Either Participants that do not have to compete on the merits of their ideas, but on their ability to subsidize their media efforts, must be made uncompetitive in the market place of ideas.
OR, we must accept that there is an unavoidable fail state at the intersection of human neurology and Laissez faire information economies, and deal with that.
data != information != facts != truth != knowledge
Question is, what are you trying to say with that, and how does it relate to the quote?
But just because a bunch of people agreed on it, doesn't mean it's "absolute truth", like how doctors for a long time didn't want to wash their hand, because they didn't believe in germ theory. Countless of examples where we've ("scientists" and/or humans) all agreed on something, which later turned out not to be true.
And believing that truth is just "consensus between people" would lead to people never trying to go against that, even if their truth seems more truthy than the "established" truth.
You're assuming that everyone will agree on the truth just because it's the "truth", but why do you think we no longer believe that earth is the center of world?
There will always people who questions the truth and did research and study about it, discovers new observations of the subject and replace the existing if it convinced the majority.
It's question that lead us closer to the truth (occasionally it does the opposite). That's why we made new discoveries, and that's why you are here questioning about the truthfulness of truth.
I would call this "consensus" or "mainstream knowledge", or something like that.
Truth exists regardless of whether people agree on it. I suppose about some things we cannot ever claim we know "the truth", though in common speech we agree to call widely held beliefs as the truth, for simplicity's sake.
When you directly witness something happening with a few others, you can't disagree about what you saw, so that is high truth (assuming no intentional mispresentation). Of course sometimes even here you may not all have seen the same exact thing at the same exact time.
Video of events tends to be up there as well. Of course I mean raw, unedited video and not edited clip-montages of stuff interspersed with commentary, opinions, etc. Even raw video is not guaranteed to be high or complete truth if it's omitting other things that were part of an event.
When we get into things like testimony, opinions, second-hand accounts, anecdotes, and commentary, then we're in the world of low truth (and sometimes its complete absence) and a high chance of deception. Hence the need for heuristics, trust, narrative detection, asking who benefits, etc. Which may not arrive at any truth other than the direction someone is wanting you to go.
Science is interesting because it's reports are a form of testimony, but specifically extending an invitation to be reproduced so it can be directly witnessed again. This alone makes it more trustworthy than things like "here's the testimony of a dead person we can't even talk to anymore" or "everyone seems to accept X so X must be true" - and that last one is dangerous today because many people use social media as a proxy for "everyone" but it's very easily manipulated.
We technically can, but we don't. And _that_ is the problem. There is an unending stream of people blaming social media, Big Tech, phones (and apparently even 'the internet') for all our woes and even though there is certainly some blame to be put on the amoral profit-seeking companies, the real problem is the nature of humans.
Each of us is a walking pile of zerodays and ancient legacy biological code, just waiting to be exploited. The only thing that is protecting us is a fairly effective but thin and fragile protective layer of cultural overrides and rationality.
Barring genetic engineering those zerodays are going to be with us for a while. Instead of (or in addition to) trying to play whack-a-mole with the swiftly evolving technological environment and the companies leveraging it through regulation and public outcry, we should go all in on cultivating that protective layer.
Many people I know are not addicted to their phones and many are able to determine what 'facts' are. The key is to make active choices in avoiding low quality shit and put in the effort to act rationally. But that starts with being taught how important that is and realizing that lacking it is a very dangerous deficiency in yourself.
Blaming others and the outside world for being addicted to entertainment or being misinformed makes things worse. We should be screaming from all rooftops and in all classrooms that it is us. We need to change.
This particular line struck me given that I recently listened after listening to the Lex Fridman podcast with Cenk Uygur [0]
Uygur made the following point:
"More than 80% of the US voting population supports paid parental leave yet Congress won't vote on it/pass it.
Why?
B/c Congress has become captured by corporatism and it's not in the best interests of corporations to have paid parental leave"
Earlier, there is this quote:
> Why can’t we manage to solve these big, obvious collective-action problems? Why, in other words, can’t we have nice things?
I wonder why people ask these questions, almost rhetorically, when the answer is that well organized groups have made conscious decisions and taken real action to modify government/laws etc to do this.
e.g. if one group could do this, why don't more groups do this?
(on a related note, the talk by James D’Angelo, “The Ghost Bill & The Cardboard Box” [1] about how Congress became more tied to corporations is fascinating)
0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJtPROVsePk (Lex Fridman)
1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qz27n1tNNMg (Ghost bill)
For years I’ve been calling these antimemes “natural barriers” or “lost truth” (lost in that it’s destined to be lost). I’ve bought the book and hope it goes into further depth because I’ve become very confident that this idea is an entry point into a thought train that ends up uncovering a metric shit ton of important ideas. From antimemetics we get a fundamental problem of all brain development, the subconscious in all its iterations and forms, the basis of religion, and the underlying meaning of all forms of storytelling. It’s a fascinating story that I’ve been trying to put together into one package for years now. It’ll be bittersweet if I find out someone did it better than me.
Edit: one way I disagree with the author is that I don’t think memes are bad at all, and the reason why is because I don’t think the barrier between antimemes and memes is as sturdy as you might think. The process of storytelling and art is the process of encoding antimemes as memes, and the reason why the meme culture seems so violent and cynical these days is because our ability to engage with manifest meme content that have latent antimeme content (to use Freudian terms) was undermined by our older generation, who never properly grappled with antimemes and the implication of their existence to begin with, and therefore normalized the process of engaging with manifest meme content without acknowledging the existence of the latent antimeme content it was formed from.
You know how people are a product of their culture? Have you ever read a book from someone whose culture is so overpowering and yet so limiting? Thank god I never moved to San Francisco.
I’m certainly not reading a book by someone who’s discovered a secret arcane truth underlying communication. I’m reading a book by someone who’s so deep in their safe space secret chat rooms that they’ve never had their ideas challenged or elaborated on once.
I don't even know what's there to discuss, if that's how you have already agreed to see communication, then it's self evident that it doesn't produce anything good, or virtuous, or if it does at best coincidentally. Evolution and rabid competition, in any market, nature, information spaces doesn't have some Pollyannaish direction, isn't on some path to a truth or what have you. Memes aren't good, they're fit by definition. In a way this is just a really strange Anglo-American thing because there's this ideology of being both committed to civility and virtue but also unconstrained free markets and it doesn't really make much sense.
This utopianism always had to come apart because there's no commitment to reason, truth, virtue inherent to "mimetic reproduction" and if you're willing to talk about it that way you should already know that to be the case.
This is what it comes down to, in my experience. Even many people who see themselves as rational arbiters of information will fall into the trap of aligning with people who seem to have the vibe they’re looking for, rather than examining the facts on their own.
Lately I’m also interested in how people develop parasocial trusting relationships with podcasters, streamers, bloggers, or Twitter users that they really like and admire. I see it frequently in people who get attached to podcasters, I assume because it’s easy to grow attached to someone when you listen to them talk at you for hours every week. I even get in trouble (or downvoted, in HN context) when I point out that fan favorites like Andrew Huberman are known to peddle a lot of misinformation and misrepresent studies. The concept is unthinkable to Huberman fans, but it’s well-known to informed people outside of the bubble. Step into other domains and the same phenomenon occurs with Joe Rogan, or members of the current government. Some people get really attached to personalities and align with them, ignoring or shouting down any information that disagrees with their beloved personalities.
I don't think this is the default mode for most people. It wouldn't even make much sense.
Some professionals, in some contexts, some of the time can act as rational arbiters of information. But not most of the time, nor in most contexts. That way only leads to these cultish sites like LessWrong, full to the brim of self-appointed rationalists holding the freakiest, most irrational beliefs (one of them being that they are "less wrong").
Your example of LessWrong is perfect because the “rationalist” community is, ironically, home to a lot of irrational beliefs deeply held. I think their desire to feel like they’re going back to first principles and entertaining alternate theories leaves them especially vulnerable to people who know how to write prose that fits the rationalist mold.
That’s why you see the “rationalists” getting involved with people like Moldbug, Curtis Yarvin, and other reactionaries.
The abundant dissemination of information tends to average society. Note that local cultural differences have been slowly being erased.
You travel now, and it's not as alien as it was 30 years ago, even languages are borrowing more from each other (why does Europe has so many languages? It was hard to talk to people a couple valleys away, not anymore).
So, given that human intelligence seems to be normally distributed (we can argue about the measurements, but they all distribute normally), this averaging process takes us all toward mediocrity.
Even taking algorithmic feedback into account, those also are trying to maximize engagement, and ultimately, that's also an average.
Also worth noting that group chats lends themselves to conspiracies. Real conspiracies that end up changing politics, and conspiracy theories fomented in the group and about the group.
This is because they are a means of small-group coordination and concealment.
There is something antimemetic about this article in general, and in a bad way. As Cheever said, “you can write about boredome, but you can’t make it boring.” Gideon is translating the world into an excellent undergrad English essay, but he is not telling a compelling story, as many memes do.
People project something into the word, the concept itself seems to have no wings.
If only we had GLP-1 agonists for our minds too and not just our bodies.
In lieu of that, all we've got is the same as always: nurture your mind by cultivating a good media diet, a healthy skepticism that doesn't drift into reactionary contrarianism, and an openness to new information; especially new evidence that contradicts things you believe.
...Which is basically like trying to solve the obesity crisis by telling people to diet and exercise. It would be nice if we had a more effective tool or technique to help a larger percentage of people achieve it.
I constantly think about The Republic and Glaucon demanding pastries, fine food, etc and Socrates telling him that he can invent such a society, but it will be a society with a fever. I think capitalism, which is distinct, I think, from free markets, produces a society with a fever and in the grip of that fever everything which can be exploited will be.
The author is describing a widely discussed trend, and using everything but the correct names for the two groups: wing-nuts and woke-nuts.
Two sides of the same coin.
The inter-networked hand-computer era has all but killed attempts at autonomous thought, and even the idea that pushing oneself toward intellectual autonomy is a good thing to do...
Whether that a religion espouses an alternative worldview in order for its leaders to justify actions that would normally not be justifiable is a big part of how we got into this anti-pluralist mess to begin with.
What good is that when you have to live with a tiger?
If at some point humans had articulated this into "an idea", they would have seen it as a good idea. Which it would have been, since it's unrelated to wolves attacking humans. It's not that humans said "hey, let's go pet a wolf pup, I'm sure their parents won't mind!".
But for who? That makes it inherently subjective. For your obvious bad idea, there are a bunch of contexts where that is a good idea, even though it might be hard to imagine from your own perspective.
Your example is bad for people who live in SF (most likely), but imagine there was a rival town that really hates SF, and wants them to be eaten by tigers. Then the idea of having one tiger per apartment makes a lot of sense, it would almost certainly lead to lots of people being eaten by tigers.
But this is silly. It's obviously a bad idea.
Here's another obviously bad idea: "vaccines are bad and cause autism". You could argue it was a good idea for the fraudster who started this notion, because it gained him fame, but nobody thinks in general about ideas like this. It's obviously false and detrimental to mankind, and therefore a bad idea.
The Heaven's Gate cult also had an obviously bad idea. Mass suicide didn't teleport them to the mothership. They killed themselves for nothing. Had they lived, maybe some of them could have been rehabilitated and found happiness in things that weren't falsehoods. Or not.
But that's a fruitless line of thought in this context.
It doesn't negate the fact there are bad ideas. Heaven's Gate mass suicide was a bad idea (and its justification was patently wrong: no soul was uploaded into the mothership). Bringing feral tigers into your apartment is another bad idea. They are only "subjective" in the most theoretical, I'm-having-an-internet-argument sense; in practice they are objectively bad ideas.
Some ideas -- maybe most -- are neither good nor bad. But again, this doesn't negate that some ideas are objectively bad or good.
Hardcore moral relativism (or is it "ideas relativism"?) is such a boring position to hold. I suspect it's also a dishonest position, in that deep down very few people actually hold it.
From your POV and mine yes.
From their POV no. Clearly that's why they did it.
I agree what they did was probably a bad calculation and incorrect interpretation of the world given what I and you know about the world.
So from our POV it was a bad idea.
And from their POV it was a good idea and that's why they did it.
If they can reflect on it now they would likely call it a bad again.
Again subjective based on what they know about the world now.
No. You're confusing what someone mistakenly believes with the quality of the idea.
In this case, the POV doesn't change that this was a bad idea. Someone can think at the time something was a good idea, but this doesn't make it so, especially if it was demonstrably a bad idea. Few cases are clearcut, but this was.
The Heaven's Gate cultists thought their souls would get uploaded, that's why they killed themselves. Their souls weren't uploaded; therefore by their own logic committing suicide turned out to be a bad idea. They just aren't here anymore to reconsider, which demonstrates it was worse than a bad idea: it was a terminally bad idea.
Another example that POV doesn't necessarily change the quality of an idea: a toddler finding and handling their parent's loaded gun is objectively a bad idea (as is the parents leaving loaded guns within reach of toddlers, if they did it on purpose out of carelessness). The toddler may not know, from their POV, that this is dangerous; but this doesn't make it a good idea.
Some ideas can change with the POV, but you're mistaken in believing every idea does.
Moral orientations fall neatly on two spectra. One is empathy to narcissism. The other is practicality, which can be counterintuitive, vs emotion, which has no concept of consequences beyond the present moment.
Both are "subjective" in the sense that you can't usually argue people from one to the other.
The rest is execution and PR.
There's some social conditioning which teaches people that empathy is good, and rather more that suggests practicality is valued and emotional regulation should be a thing.
But in the real world - and especially in the US - narcissism is far more valued in practice, and emotionality is far more profitable.
Which is why it's a culture of opportunists, corporate criminals, scammers, and manipulators.
Meanwhile, in a very real, literal, sense Wall St is just Heaven's Gate with quarterly reports. The outcome - mass suicide - shows every sign of being identical in the medium term.
The machinery is far more abstracted and indirect, which makes it harder to see when you're inside it. But there's only a difference of scale between a lone nutjob scamming a handful of followers to death and a collection of systems and institutions that are objectively likely to leave most of the planet uninhabitable by the end of the century.
I don't think I can buy into this argument. If nothing else, Heaven's Gate did NOT inoculate other people from joining cults.
But it's a patently bad idea anyway, "this can kill people but it's good because it will teach other people not to die".
Capitalism is neck-deep in bad ideas: “buy THIS product, it will add years to your life expectancy!”
To the people selling the product it’s a good idea even if it’s a load of garbage—a quick buck to be made; to the person buying it, terrible idea in fact. :)
Little white lies are objectively okay.
They are subjectively ok. Some people believe lying is always bad.
I think the "true idea" (or let's call it "reasonable idea") when fully spelled out is "sometimes a white lie will be beneficial, will cause less harm, will inspire confidence in the receiver; and conversely, the harsh truth may harm them or be counterproductive". It's not the white lie itself that is the "good idea that is untrue"; the good idea is the reasoning behind the white lie, which is true.
Simply because someone believes something does not move the phenomenon to the subjective realm.
The Earth is not flat.
Some may argue a case for why they believe lying is always bad and would never engage in it. Yet experience proves those most vociferously against little white lies are often lying to themselves on a variety of topics. "Honey, does this make me look fat" is a no-win situation for these individuals.
From your POV yes. From their POV no.
I'm sorry, you cannot use this argument. It's not even in the same category.
Whether telling a white lie is ok is as subjective as it gets. You can pick better examples if you want to make the case that some ideas are objectively good or bad; this one is not it.
In game theory and mechanism design, there exist dominant strategies. This is an objective truth, and exercising the dominant strategy is objectively better than not.
The earth orbits the sun. This is an objective idea. Fighting against the notion is objectively a bad idea.
Elephants shouldn't come in my house. I value it not destroying things in my home, etc.
You shouldn't deliberately reuse GUIDs as an IDs for things that are different.
Relativism is certainly something that exists, but it shouldn't be universally applied that all ideas are of equal value in all situations.
Socially, sure, use relativism when listening to ideas before coming to a consensus. That doesn't mean all ideas work, only that all ideas are given the same treatment. But bad ideas exist, as do good ideas.
This is a subjective statement.
> I value it not destroying things in my home.
This is an objective statement. But other people are free to assign their own subjective value to it. Some people would would like you to suffer from your possessions destroyed e.g. by a trampling elephant. The previous statement was also an objective statement but it doesn't mean you have to acquiesce to it.
> But bad ideas exist, as do good ideas.
Sure, but which of ideas are "bad" and which are "good" depends on the value system of the thing/person doing the appraisal. E.g. deliberately reusing GUIDs for different requests may allow bypass of authorization checks — which is a good thing for an attacker, but not so good for the system's owner.
From your POV people play to dominate and it's objective for you. But that's not the case for everyone. Some play to just play.
You are welcome to test the opposite hypothesis, please send postcards from after the jump.
For example, legalizing sports gambling. It's a good idea in that it makes obscene amounts of money. It's a bad idea in that it exploits a known pathway to addiction, moving money from being spent productively to an exclusively extractive endeavor. Not to mention the other secondary effects of how sports are presented to benefit the sports gambling apps.
Generally it's a net loss except for the company that operates the apps.
This can be applied across a lot of "products" in the tech sphere. app-based payday loans, AI "art" that exploits a common denominator of critical thinking and reduces the quality of art across the board.
Sure the live action Lilo and Stitch made tons of money, but the color grading is dogshit, they removed several important pieces of cultural commentary that was central to the plot, etc all to cash in on children who literally don't know any better.
It's literally more profitable to push slop than it is to put any effort into creating anything. So if "good idea" means it makes money, what incentive is there to create anything above the low "slop" bar? Why do we have to see everything degrade for the sake of profit?
That's what a bad idea going viral is. It doesn't have to be good to get attention. Kids running through people's fences gets attention.
[EDIT] Several commenters rightly noted that heavy em-dash usage is normal for the New Yorker (and common thanks to OS auto-replacement), so my “LLM giveaway” quip was off-base. Leaving this up for context—thanks for the corrections.
I’m convinced most folks noticing this now just weren’t aware of the punctuation before they heard about it in the AI paranoia context.
I’m also convinced a good chunk of Reddit comments are AI spam. But, I mean, we have to imagine anyone running an AI campaign knows to avoid the em-dashes by now.
So it’s just as likely that by spotting those features in a post you’ve found an Apple user as it is that the poster is an LLM.
I had to stop using em dashes in my own writing because it triggers people who never really thought about them prior to reading about their association with LLMs.