OmarShehata

I think this is the natural process, but how you implement it doesn't matter. A lot of GitHub repos use "unlabelled issue" === "a discussion thread". The benefit is that instead of having to search two separate systems, you can just search one (if you can have an aggregate search over both then it really doesn't matter), these two implementations are isomorphic

this isn't a "it depends on what computation happens in this specific case" question, this is a "how does human cognition work".

Every website you visit has the payload delivered over the network before any JS is parsed. It has to, there's no other way. Same with intuition followed by rational thought

The first thing that happened in your mind when you read that sentence is (1) a bad feeling. That then triggered (2) a rational, conscious thought that interpreted that bad feeling: "this feels bad because it's not true, here are the reasons why it is not true.

There is ALWAYS an "emotional/intuitive" response that precedes the rational, conscious thought. There's a ton of research on this (see system 1 vs system 2 thinking etc).

There is no way to stop the emotional "thought" from happening before the "rational thought". What you can do is build a loop that self reflects to understand why that emotion was triggered (sometimes, instead of "this feels bad because it's wrong", it's "this feels bad because it points to an inconvenient truth" or "I am hungry and everything I am reading feels bad")

> The last thing we need is a formal framework of how to have organic discussions.

this is no different from best practices for programming though. People take a rule that generally works well, but a manager who doesn't understand it tries to enforce it blindly ("more unit tests!!") and it stops working

computer engineering & social engineering share a lot of the same failure modes (which is good news, if you are very good at debugging computers, but find people & politics confusing, you can unlock the latter once you see in what ways your insight in one domain can transfer to the other)

I don't think that's necessarily true, I think it's about curation, not volume. The largest open source projects in the world have enormous inbound volume but extremely high quality discussion because of curation (I'm thinking about maintenance of Wikipedia, Open Street Map, and Godot).

This is also true on twitter & blue sky. Looking at the general feed is a completely different world from looking at specific networks.

memes are not "on the side of reality". memes are on the side of whatever resonates. What resonates is what aligns to your model of reality (which is shaped by the ideology you're inside).

There's no clear distinction between propaganda, advertising, and what you call "meme-ing". Companies can and do create campaigns that look organic, that do takeoff as people feel they are organic (and then they become actually real as people take them further than what the company is pushing)

For example: Barbenheimer was a meme that got people to watch two movies in one weekend (not a typical behavior for most people). Was that an organic meme, or a marketing campaign?

(If anyone is curious, I keep trying to write a good intro to this rabbithole, see my writeup on the New York Times explaining how a psyop works, which itself very significant for them to be spelling it out like this: https://defenderofthebasic.substack.com/p/new-york-times-is-... )

important notes from the essay, this not unique to twitter:

> And if you think this only happens on one social network, you’re already caught in the wrong attention loop.

> The most effective influence doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t censor loudly, or boost aggressively. It shapes perception quietly — one algorithmic nudge at a time.

> The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising.

this is obviously not a clear line. No money is exchanged when I promote my own product through my own channels, nor when I promote my friends products, whether I disclose it as promotion, or disguise it as my genuine unaffiliated opinion. Sometimes it really is a genuine opinion! Even worse: sometimes a genuine opinion becomes an incentivized one later on as someone's audience grows

the good news is there is a solution that doesn't require playing these cat & mouse games and top down authority deciding what is allowed speech: you want better ways to reach the people who want your product.

Ads are a bad solution to a genuine problem in society. They will persist as long as the problem exists. People who sell things need ways to find buyers. Solve the root problem of discernment rather than punishing everyone indiscriminately

this is the pattern:

- humans find useful concept X - they describe it with label Y - it's genuinely useful, it spreads - It gets too big, Y is misunderstood and corrupted - New group of humans rediscovers concept X, gives it label Z

This is the story of humanity. The good news is we're kind of (mostly) stumbling through a upwards spiral. Current religion would be unrecognizable to the people in ancient times. It was never meant to be something frozen in stone. Folklore and things changing as they're retold was a feature, not a bug.

There's a great write up on this [1], but TL;DR, religion is cultural technology. It succeeded in doing exactly what it tried to do at the time (get people to stop killing each other in tiny tribes and allow mass decentralized human coordination to build civilization & empires where humans could be safe from the elements of nature)

[1] https://defenderofthebasic.substack.com/p/a-beginners-guide-...

you're both correct. All humans have a hardware component, an ideology acts as an attractor. Humans finding connection with other humans like them is one of the strongest pulls for a human mind. It has great power to amplify & grow. This can go in a direction of thriving and growth, and "win win" with their environment, or it can go in a direction of hate and aggression

> Current results have shown that our model can accurately predict the brain states up to 5.04s with the previous 21.6s. Furthermore, even though the prediction error accumulates for the prediction of a longer time period, the gen-erated fMRI brain states reflect the architecture of functional connectome

the interesting part is the ramifications of propaganda on the justice system. This is a very concrete example of how you can interfere with the rule of law if you can sway public opinion enough on an issue (this is true regardless of whether you believe the zeitgeist on luigi is organic or not). It's a dynamic more of us should be aware of. The public generally has more agency than we realize.

Very cool! I've been playing around with exporting my twitter archive & visualizing it/finding semantic clusters/changes in my beliefs over time etc. There's a couple initiatives of people making their personal data publicly accessible/building tools on top of it:

[1] https://www.community-archive.org/ [2] https://www.openhumans.org/

> but how many positive from improved health insurance policies? Probably thousands

how did you come to this conclusion? what if it actually gets _worse_? What if the media attention blows over, the good or neutral actors end up eating the blame, some savvy corporations/politicians with skilled PR end up using the public anger to enrich themselves & make things worse for the public, and people still don't understand why the system isn't working?

I haven't seen any good information on what actually is the root cause and what are the solutions that will fix everything. I don't think this is a matter of greedy people blocking easy/obvious solutions.

I think the important point that isn't yet well accepted in our culture is that maturity doesn't happen automatically with age. There are extremely competent, mature, and smart 14 year olds, and there are 29 year olds who haven't emotionally matured yet.

Education is slowly shifting towards "mastery learning" (instead of just taking a test and moving on, you keep practicing a thing until you get better). This is clearly the superior approach and how people learn things anyway (this is how people pick up skills on the job). We will hopefully see a similar shift in maturity, and accept that someone people get very far in life without necessary skills, remove the shame, and help people level up

yes, we're creating websites that are gated by IQ tests. This isn't the way

captchas are broken, forever. There is no way to prevent bots without also preventing a bottom tier of human users (visually impaired people, old people, or just impatient people). Like this xkcd [1] comic suggests, we need to just focus on rewarding and punishing specific behavior, regardless of whether the agent is human or not

[1] https://xkcd.com/810/

> more education around basic models and how they work

yes, I think this is critical. There's a slate star codex article "Janus Simulators" that explains this very well, that I rewrote to make more accessible to people like my mom. It's not hard to explain this to people, you just need to let them interact with a base model, and explore its quirks. It's a game, people are good at learning systems that they can get immediate feedback from.

I'd love to see a more NLP look at this data, Google trends style. What topics of discourse come up regularly, what spikes during certain time periods? Can you summarize what economists are discussing? Can you find people talking about the same things but are not in each other's networks?

> can't make a map of all of twitter

no, but nothing can stop you & a bunch of people from exporting your tweet archive and visualizing that!

this is the event that the article is analyzing:

> Marie Gluesenkamp Perez won a congress position, running a campaign that is pro deregulation. This is confusing because deregulation is supposed to be a conservative thing, and conservative things are supposed to be right-wing things.

The claim is that this is a good thing, if the culture sees "conservative" as a valid tool for specific problems, and not a signifier of a political party

> Monsanto claimed it was “highly unlikely” that glyphosate-resistant weeds would become a problem. There were, of course, those who correctly predicted that such a thing was inevitable

I've started noticing that this happens all the time, across all fields. Experts disagree, the expert with the most positive outlook is the one whose opinion wins out, and we find ourselves in trouble years/decades later.

I've adopted a "treat every expert as a lawyer" mindset now that has helped illuminate some of this for me. I prefer to listen to podcasts where people in the field talk to each other, rather than someone presenting the information to the layperson. There's a lot of jargon but you can very easily get a sense of (1) what issues does everyone agree on (2) what issues are they bickering on, and what their reasons are

the missing context is that the Christian groups he was speaking to typically have low turn out/don't often come out to vote. He's asking them to please come out to vote, it's important this time. It's exactly the same rhetoric democrats use "this is the most important election, you really need to vote this time, this time it really matters"

There's an extremely simple answer to this: humans don't actually change their minds rationally. People arrive at most beliefs emotionally. The reason the people DO NOT change their mind when told that "the scores were fake" is because they felt good when told the scores showed that they were correct, and that reinforced their own belief about their skill.

When told "actually the scores were made up" this is new evidence but it doesn't change the underlying narrative (they already believed they were good, and that was emotionally reinforced). If you keep this in mind a lot of human behavior becomes much more predictable

what's the reason it doesn't work??

You are likely an outlier. Ad targeting is very good at predicting you IF you fall into a cohort that behaves the same as each other. There's only way to find out the answer to this anyway (export our ad targeting data, share it into an anonymous open source pool, and analyze it)

> The second example is just wishful thinking. I bet even if KJ had responded with the author's way, axial would have still blocked them after several exchanges.

Not true! I'm trying to collect "success stories" here because I've done this dozens of times, even with the most troll-like internet strangers. It's very consistent. Nobody believes that it generalizes. What I'm working on now is writing down these techniques so that people can empirically try it for themselves. I want people to challenge this, prove me wrong. Because the techniques get more robust with every challenge.

https://github.com/DefenderOfBasic/in-good-faith-handbook/is...

In short it's about helping people who are making genuinely useful products find the audience who genuinely needs them. "If you build it they will come" isn't true. People need to find out & understand when something they're looking for exists. It's true of small town businesses and global products.

I think it's worth taking a step back and considering what a better world looks like, solving this problem without ads. I can envision a "pull" model, where you always seek it out vs it being pushed on you. I think people buying things they don't want or need is not good. If someone can propose a way to make the "pull" model work, and we can try it out, I'd be all for that experiment. And I hope they'll write it about it so we as consumers learn and demand better of companies we use.

To be fair, I have the tier with ads. I'm fine seeing ads in the middle of the show. Or even every time I un-pause if they REALLY have to. But covering the pause screen itself is just inexcusable. It breaks functionality. There's no good reason the company should do this, even for profit. It's damaging, there's better ways to make profit.

TL;DR: having ads in the pause screen is bad UX. I can't pause and read things, or take a picture, or a screenshot, etc. It's bad for the consumer, AND bad for the company.

I want to see more criticism of ads from people who believe ads are good for society. I'm trying to fill this gap here.