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Comment by simpaticoder | Hacker News Reader

One of the most curious aspects of the internet is how it creates the illusion of providing insight into public opinion. There is a strong desire to understand not only what is happening in the world but also how people are responding to it. In the absence of more reliable indicators, we tend to rely on whatever signals the internet offers. Even when, as internet- and media-saavy technologists, we know very well how personal behavior is distorted by anonymity, the desire for attention and clout, and the lack of accountability. Why do we all (and I include myself) so easily and often forget this simple truth, and fall into the trap of believing the world population consists mostly of the ignorant and malicious people that haunt public comment sections?

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I used to think social media algorithms created a distorted view of public opinion on the Internet.

Now I know that even without engagement-maximizing algorithms or anonymity, most content on the Internet is still from self-selecting outliers. You don't walk down the street and listen to whoever shouts at you the loudest to gauge public opinion, so why care about Internet commenters (including me or you) when statistically normal people are "lurkers" who read and move on?

> Why do we all (and I include myself) so easily and often forget this simple truth, and fall into the trap of believing the world population consists mostly of the ignorant and malicious people that haunt public comment sections?

Because we've had millions of years to evolve our social instincts, and not even a single generation to adapt to the current state of public comment sections? In real life, where there aren't the same sampling biases, it makes perfect sense to believe the perspectives that are repeated by peers (as honest indicators of public opinion, if not at face value).

Also because there are major profit incentives for social media companies to make people think they're important fora for public discourse.

I think for-profit social media should probably be viewed as adversarial attackers. Their incentives are not aligned with what we need for healthy relationships and discussions. But even if you remove the profit incentive, it's still a new environment that we lack natural immunity to.

> think for-profit social media should probably be viewed as adversarial attackers

They are. Their incentives are almost diametrically opposed to those of sane, rational, balanced, content individuals.-

> sane, rational, balanced individuals

Where do you find these unicorns?

The unicorn's natural habitat is grasslands

https://news.ycombinator.com

I kinda get what you did there. Seconded.-

4chan? (!)

> I think for-profit social media should probably be viewed as adversarial attackers. define social media.

(Australia is trying ...

... We'll see where that goes.-

> In the absence of more reliable indicators

This is half the answer, though we'd also need those indicators to be plentiful and compelling.

> we know very well how personal behavior is distorted

This points to the other half: humans are irrational by default. We tend to believe what we "experience" - see, hear, etc. - even if we know it's a lie. Have you seen those videos of people in VR glasses panicking as if they're about to die because they've just fallen off a virtual cliff?

Consider also the Illusory Consensus Effect: mere repetition of information increases the estimates of group members that other group members believe or already know that information. Logically redundant, rhetorically effective.

We're apes with a souped up prefrontal cortex - critical thinking is expensive so applied selectively (see Tversky and Kahneman, System 1 vs System 2 thinking).

If only there was some kind of major indicator of overall public sentiment, conducted nationally, say every four years, which might allow one to draw conclusions about the portion of the population who is either ignorant or malicious. Surely the data would show the vast majority of my countrymen are rational, thoughtful people.

Great point. The internet is both a skewed reflection of us AND it influences us. Similar to the well-known reflexivity of legacy media but much greater scale and shorter time-frame. To bolster your point even further, I'd say that no human can bifurcate their life, their thoughts, their values, as "real" versus "online". It's just too hard, so they inevitably converge - giving lie to the constant refrain that it's "just trolling" or "just online bullying" etc.

It seems the internet has profound structural issues that undermine the forces that traditionally retarded and punished ignorance and malice. If it's true that society will inexorably evolve in the direction of the internet, and if we are all helpless to stop, or even slow, this evolution, then we are well and truly fucked.

sorry but what forces "traditionally retarded and punished ignorance and malice"? very wordy but not much substance to what you write

There is much more personally impactful shame and alienation associated with being a loud idiot and/or jerk IRL.

You know who's won every single selection in modern history? "None of the above." Even in the 2020 election where millions of mystery people suddenly appeared, only 155 million people voted with a voting age population of some 256 million. Some of those 101 million (the delta between voters and 'abstainers') couldn't vote, but most could.

And that, to me, indicates rather widespread rationality. Because elections are a facade. Do you want to vote for somebody who struggles to complete a single coherent sentence and has a grand vision of 'I'm quite fond of power', or for a narcissistic entertainer? Either of which who will agree on most things that people themselves disagree with, like injecting ourselves into endless conflicts around the world because the MIC needs that dough. No thanks. I'm quite happy with my 'none of the above.'

So the conclusion I'd draw is that there's two rather radical sides constantly flinging poo at each other and pretending this moment is the most important moment ever, always, while everybody else looks on from behind the glass amused at a bunch of monkeys covered in poo which, come to think of it, also works as a fine metaphor for internet discussions.

I care about consequences, not about feeling smarter than other people. I care about policies, not candidates. In particular I believe that policies like “Defund the NSF” are bad, actually.

That's a great example. NSF funding (as of 2023) is < $10 billion. So the money spent shipping weapons to Ukraine could have funded it for decades. The money spent on Iraq or Afghanistan could have funded it for centuries. But in modern politics we simply accept that politicians will endlessly blow money like this, and we then content ourselves with fighting over the table scraps that are left over for whatever our pet interests happen to be, while framing those scraps as representing the most important existential crises to have ever existed.

Don't you see how comically dysfunctional this is? If you took the amount of money we spend and actually optimized it for outcomes, the possibilities are unimaginable. But we simply are incapable of electing the sort of people who could do this, because succeeding in politics is mostly just legal corruption (and illegal, but hey that's what pardons are meant for!) on a massive scale where everybody wants their bellies buttered to the point that suddenly government receipts of $5+ trillion dollars, $14k+ for every single man/woman/child, is literally not enough to maintain the basic operation of government. All the while our 'public servants' somehow get filthy rich in office. It's just lol.

> Even in the 2020 election where millions of mystery people suddenly appeared

Registered voters voted. Sad to see this ignorance here on HN.

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