kopo

Cure is simple.

Get rid of the dumb counts (views,clicks,upvotes,likes etc etc) next to every thought/comment/image/video.

These are highly arbitration/inaccurate signals of quality. They influence thought and behavior. And then we waste our time reacting to those thoughts and behaviours.

Algorithms that need these metrics for ranking, advertising etc can still function. They just don't have be carelessly, blindly, robotically displayed to users.

Misguided people are usually surrounded by misguided people. The counts just make things worse.

Probably the same, but why do panderers need a broadcasting platform?

Also how presidents get elected. The spokesppl/talkingheads/oped columnists/twitterati/news reader class all do the same thing - https://taibbi.substack.com/p/introduction-the-fairway

Everybody is currently conditioned to think they have to stand up on a stage and give a TED talk/I Have a Dream speech -> drum up enough support and you are on your way right?

Wrong. Because everyone else is playing the same game. It's an arms race for peoples attention. And mass attention is highly scattered and diffused over all kinds of things in the spectrum of useful to bullshit.

That needs to change first.

Divide whatever your number is by 1.4 billion. Labeling and judging people is always tempting in the face of complexity, but it is also always a choice you make.

And difficult newspapers! And difficult news!

Our journalist class has somehow got into this ELI5 routine, where they feel obligated to turn every complex subject into something a fifth grader can debate about.

People like to keep saying the elite will reach godhood thanks to the increasing pace of biological/technical progress (that they will reap the most). But the opposite might well happen. The more data that pours in the more obvious it may become they are all, like you say, just replaceable cogs.

You asked for suggestions that didn't involve outrage and I gave you some.

These are suggestion that have been around for a long time and even Jack Dorsey from Twitter and Tim Cook from Apple have bought it up recently.

Facebook's creates hundreds of unintended consequences. The suggestions I mentioned just addressed two specific issues - addiction and the spread of ignorance/fakenews/bad info (nuclear chain reactions require control rods same with viral info). Especially dangerous in countries where most of the population is too illeterate to counter it.

Look up Tristan Harris former Googler humanetech website and you will find many more human thought and behaviour effecting dark patterns that social media sites use that need to be addressed.

Ideally we need a bug tracker for social issues being generated in the same way we track software issues.

One example of a big problem without a fix that would be at the top of the list is having 14 year olds exposed to the most viral and extreme problems of 35 year olds day in and day out is leading to higher anxiety/depression in kids. The EU, Canada and UK have data out on this.

The suggestion for these kind of issues is, mandating such a "bug tracker" increases awareness. The regulations are being worked on.

Don't show people their like counts or delay it. Provide noprocast settings like HN. That's all they have to do.

Well this is Facebook. How much political content moves through their platform everyday?

Your comment makes sense if it is McDonalds or Nike or Wallmart. Their CEO's aren't being asked everyday by every govt on the planet what they are doing about disagreeable info.

The consumption data doesn't seem to be clear. Maybe I am mistaken but I would think ISP's should easily be able to provide a trend line of what the consumption rates look like.

Wagner and Dahl don't have as much influence on society as corporations do. So I don't really agree with that comparison.

My issue is mindless ambition/win at all costs/do whatever it takes produces "competence" too.

The more data that pours in, the more we will realizes that stuff needs to be filtered out from our definitions of competence. The costs are too great imho.

I am also sure the study will show Donald Trump, Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg run orgs with highly competent managers. But it is not competence in my book.

>> obligated to acknowledge opinion

lol thats a nice way of putting it. It's an interesting point about why we are all so attracted to opinion. It doesn't require much mental energy or something I suppose.

Plus in an info overloaded world where even the experts have doubts about a lot of things it allows us to butt into debates where we would never be allowed to enter in the real world.

I have been reading Marshall Rosenberg's Non-Violent Communication and according to that book - seeing people happy or seeing peoples interesting thoughts or seeing their appearance etc etc can all lead to comparative/judgemental thinking which leads to all kinds of unintended side effects. He references Dan Greenberg's book How To Make Yourself Miserable.

Yet to be seen if sites can somehow employ mechanics to reduce comparative/judgemental thinking...but its something they all intentionally/unintentionally fuel currently imho.

HN and Reddit arent that different from other social media sites.

All of them in my mind are "All You Can Eat" info buffet tables.

This is just the current approach we have of dealing with a new world overloaded by info. It will change as we learn more and more about how it effects people.

In the real world nobody healthy visits an "All You Can Eat" buffet everyday. Same thing will eventually happen with information.

Which is why ratings play a role.

If Somalia decides they love their goats too much and are not handing them over, their ratings get trashed.

Debt really translates to assets sitting somewhere. If Somalia defaults you might end up owning a couple goats but if US defaults maybe you get an Airfield.

World class athletes are highly disciplined and motivated (there is a difference between those two words btw). Yet you won't find a single one without a coach. Why? That's your homework.

>> in fact the opposite

What are you telling them to do? I have a psychiatrist friend who consults at the medical center, in a college town. She is getting called in so much she wants to move to a different town.

It's not simple to do.

First you need a whole lot of data to train the system which doesn't really exist (unlike the case of speech to text or one language to another(text to text)). You would need to set up a big data collection project.

Secondly there are a whole bunch of different things to track. Movement of multiple fingers, +palm, +entire hand, +facial expressions. Current state of the art would be tracking a single thing like a ball or a player for sports and that still requires a number of cameras and a couple people sitting behind the scenes fixing issues.

I think Microsoft's Kinect came close to achieving something akin to sign language recognition at a very basic level. But from what I remember reading they spent a whole lot of time and resources training their system just to get there.

Maybe 3-4 years away I'd say.

Executive speak is designed for minimal fallout. But it has other deeper value in maintaining power structures and internal org stability.

Any deviations and rumblings from within the hierarchy become very easy to identify if they don't use the same language.

That was one good read.

Scanning the comments, surprised no one has brought up religion.

Specifically why religions, all religions, need rituals. Not just narratives/imagery/a priest class etc.

Rituals, to the scientist or non believer look totally meaningless and crazy even, but to the believer it's a fundamental part of the dance that renews faith. Faith in what? Faith in the fact that tomorrow will be a better day.

Visit a cancer hospital and for a lot people that is still the best medicine on offer. I like this Ted Kaptchuk dude and it's good to see the work he has done.

Who cares?

They were busy snoring when it came to 9/11. Fake WMDs, never ending wars against goat herders, snowden, not to mention 13 Russians who apparently swung an election.

If someone is busy triggering mail bombers and lunatic shooters just by targeting and upvoting their posts on social media what's all this sci-fi stuff good for? The more complex the world gets the more pointless all this superficial gimmickry looks.

Just look at the budgets thrown at these agencies. Its frankly sickening.

Yup. Dotcom era all over again where everyone and their grandmother need to be building a website.

Very interesting. I have had this feeling watching political news/gamergate/comicgate/damore etc.

Too much energy gets expended trying to convince/shame/punish the other side. None of it imho has produced outcomes or increased understanding.

When dealing with unknown unknowns/ambiguity etc why not just split the groups, let them go do their thing on two separate islands, like running two parallel jobs based on contradictory assumptions and let the best job win.

How do we split without causing a mess is the big question? We maybe in an overly connected state atm or certain issues require disconnection and echo chambers.

Thought experiment (slightly ridiculous and loaded but use your imagination here) - there is a lot of talk about splitting up Google for example. What if Google is split on an issue like unconscious bias training. Those who support it produce one search engine and those who don't (damore camp) produce another. Don't we get better information over all?

Right now when I read a "this is how you need to think" article on CNN, I shake my head and go look at what Fox has to say. And when Fox is fawning over Trump I go the other way.

Social media and news media in their present form, increase the asshole in all of us. Why can't they do the opposite? It feels like there has to be a switch to flip it.

I thought so too, until while programming a wifi webcam I needed to sniff wifi traffic from my phone. God that was scary. I remember doing packet capture work 10-12 years back and knowing more or less what my machine was doing on the network.

These days I can't even begin to work that out. There is easily a 100x more traffic and every single time I ran a capture I would find a whole bunch of new hosts being contacted that have no business talking to my phone. And I just use my phone for email and messaging. Not a big app user.

My theory - too much information, out of sequence, without a good guide present to clear up misunderstandings.

I teach part time. Lot of the anxiety and depression I see in kids seems to be thanks to this constant info overload on the net. Reddit/Youtube/FB all contribute in different ways.

14 year olds busy reading about the problems 35 year olds are facing on the net, is like dropping off your second grader in a tenth grade classroom and asking them what they think about the problems on the board. The natural reaction is to feel overwhelmed. Everyday they get hit with someother issue, someone is depressed or outraging about.

The best solution I have heard is to allow internet access, not on a device but in group settings (class room/living room etc). This way when they do get hit by stuff above their pay grade, there is someone around to process the stuff with.

It's more complicated than that.

Matt Taibbi -

"As it turns out, there is a utility in keeping us divided. As people, the more separate we are, the more politically impotent we become. This is the second stage of the mass media deception originally described in Manufacturing Consent. First, we’re taught to stay within certain bounds, intellectually. Then, we’re all herded into separate demographic pens, located along different patches of real estate on the spectrum of permissible thought. Once safely captured, we’re trained to consume the news the way sports fans do. We root for our team, and hate all the rest. Hatred is the partner of ignorance, and we in the media have become experts in selling both."

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/introduction-the-fairway