Social media and discussion - A Musky odour - The Bear and Badger

davyK

Diluted Dante wrote:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/27/tennessee-school-board-bans-pulitzer-prize-winning-holocaust-novel-maus In other news......

Even if we take that on face value, the language in question is 'god damn'. Americans are fucking insane.

They are afraid of it. So they are using anything no matter how idiotic to shut it out. Any kid reading that is going to start asking really difficult questions. And I could see the race subject being centre of it.

The dichotomy of a section of the right that is anti-abortion but pro capital punishment. Pro gun and anti-swearing. I'm now over generalising but I'd wager the same camp are creationist fundamentalist and dare I say it - racist - or least pro-separation of races. It's easy to see why Maus would be so troubling to them, and not for the reasons quoted in that article.

Maus is one of 2 graphic novels I have read. The other is Watchmen. Maus is a stunning piece of work.

Yossarian

GurtTractor wrote:

Yes your first paragraph is exactly part of what I've been saying, and it directly relates to all the factors you mention in the second. I'd appreciate it if someone would actually engage with the premise as it's just a wee bit important and interesting to think about..

I’m still a bit lost here. Could I ask you to state your premise, please?

poprock

I think Gurt’s saying that all reporting is through one lens or another and wants us to … I don’t know? Talk about it? I’m not sure there’s anything to say other than “Yes it is. Well done for noticing.”

GurtTractor

My contention as already stated is that because there is no objective unbiased truth efforts to police media based on percieved misinformation/disinformation are deeply flawed, if not in the short term then certainly in the long. My question -

Is there a good method for determining what qualifies as harmful misinformation/disinformation, either from a media organisation or something you can think of yourself? And could such a method be practically usable to responsibly police online content?

was intended to get you thinking about that, but also genuine because if there is a decent heuristic it would make sense for us and media publishers to at least know about it. The question is entirely relevant and you should consider it important if you are pro deplatforming and censorship to really any degree. To be clear I support both only in a strictly limited sense where causal links to immediate and real harm can be clearly demonstrated.

My contention above was the reasoning for previously stating and then determining that no group has a monopoly on talking and spreading possibly dangerous shite.

poprock wrote:

I dunno. I think your original point, based on your quote from the Substack team, was that in the presence of more and more opinion-based reporting trust in the traditionally ethical ‘fourth estate’ is eroded. Basically you’re acknowledging that people get more cynical when exposed to more nonsense.

No, you've completely missed both mine and the piece's points. The Substack piece was at it's core about taking a stance on not taking a stance, politically, on how they intend to moderate what content people post using the platform. The reasoning being that to do otherwise only serves to erode trust and increase polarisation, and is counter to the principles of free expression which they hold dear.

Yoss dismissed it because of his view that "It’s some standard psychological observations which are then spun into both-sides bollocks when, particularly in the States, there’s a clear source of pernicious and damaging misinformation coming from one side in particular.". I believe this line of reasoning to be fairly specious, as above and previously mentioned, as I think it simultaneously misses and demonstrates the broader thrust of the piece which is that kind of thinking and discussion only serves to further polarise people and deepens distrust -

In a pernicious cycle, these dynamics in turn give each group license to point to the excesses of the other as further justification for mistrust and misbehavior. It’s always the other side who is deranged and dishonest and dangerous. It’s the other side who shuts down criticism because they know they can’t win the argument. It’s they who have no concern for the truth. Them, them, them; not us, us, us. Through this pattern, each group becomes ever more incensed by the misdeeds of the other and blind to their own. The center does not hold.

It's important to note that Yoss started the framing of this as do with far right/Republican/etc mis/disinformation campaigns, and that the piece was essentially just another 'both-sides' argument. That's certainly not in the spirit of why I brought it up, and I don't think that is the case for the authors either. That you immediately lept on it as being in support of a 'right-wing' narrative is a decent demonstration of exactly what the piece was calling out -

In the online Thunderdome, it is imperative that you are not seen to engage with ideas from the wrong group; on the contrary, you are expected to marshall whatever power is at your disposal – be it cultural, political, or technological – to silence their arguments.

I'm quite sure that people or groups that would be considered utterly reprehensible by any kind and reasonable human being would absolutely use this article to argue against repression of their content, but this doesn't mean that the whole idea should be thrown out just because people you don't like might use it. That would be doing yourself and others an intellectual disservice.

I would also like to seperate this from being a purely US centric topic, as it affects all nations.

Does that make it any clearer to you?

Yossarian

Right, but I simply point you back to my earlier response that for centuries we had publishers and editors who decided what was and wasn’t disinformation and what was and wasn’t worthy of publication and that mostly worked fine. You’re making out like this is some kind of intractable problem when it is a problem that was largely solved before social media and the wider internet came along, but those solutions apparently don’t count here for some reason which I’m still not entirely clear on.

GurtTractor

"Mostly worked fine"... Yoss those words are doing some heavy ass lifting. Even if I accepted your baseless premise that it's all been hunky fucking dory and worked very well I still submit that we should at least hope for improvement, that would be progress i.e. making the world a better place.

BTW what are these solutions? You still haven't actually laid out any kind of method, previously existing or otherwise. 'Editors just figure it out'?

Also polarisation is ever increasing, modern internet communication and publication is playing a large part in that. Editors are also people, and will also be subject to the effects of that polarisation unless they apply some rigourous methodology. So again I'm asking, because I think you might actually know; how do editors determine when something is safe to be published?

Yossarian

GurtTractor wrote:

"Mostly worked fine"... Yoss those words are doing some heavy ass lifting.

Really? Before social media came along, what were the major issues in publishing? Were books being banned? Was information being suppressed to any greater extent than it is now? Sure, I accept that there may have been problems with representation, but there were still avenues for new publishers to be created to fill those gaps, and I’m sure many were. I’m not claiming it was perfect, but I think that it did, indeed, work mostly fine.

Even if I accepted your baseless premise that it's all been hunky fucking dory and worked very well I still submit that we should at least hope for improvement, that would be progress i.e. making the world a better place.

Yeah, I’d hope for that too. I’d contend that social media as it stands has done the exact opposite of that.

BTW what are these solutions? You still haven't actually laid out any kind of method, previously existing or otherwise. 'Editors just figure it out'?

I don’t know and I don’t particularly care what the solutions are, it’s not my problem to solve, I’m not the one who is profiting from publishing all this crap.

Also polarisation is ever increasing, modern internet communication and publication is playing a large part in that. Editors are also people, and will also be subject to the effects of that polarisation unless they apply some rigourous methodology. So again I'm asking, because I think you might actually know; how do editors determine when something is safe to be published?

I’m not a trained editor, but at least you would expect fact checking, potentially running by lawyers, ensuring that the language is appropriate for the situation in conjunction with the writer, all while being aware of your own biases and how those might affect your judgment and attempting to correct for that.

poprock

Gurt - I’m addressing you directly to avoid crossed streams with Yoss - I think you’re looking for an empirical method of defining information versus misinformation. And I don’t think there is one.

Deliberate misinformation is a bit like pornography or art. You know it when you see it. You con’t codify that. Possibly the only way you could even attempt to would be by aggregating it - going for a ‘wisdom of the crowd’ approach. And that’s hardly realistic for fast-moving reporting like the news (or opinion/commentary for that matter).

So … if your questions are ‘are there ways of determining what is misinformation?’ and ‘are they practical?’ then my answers would be ‘no’ and ‘hell no’. And then we fall back on education of the audience instead. Which is something you and I have both said already.

GurtTractor

Yes, that there's no practical empirical method is exactly what I've been saying, the point in asking was to try and determine if anyone had constructive disagreement with that. And the whole reason for that line of inquiry was to support the point that any attempt to adequately control an acceptable narrative is inevitably going to cause harm to reasonable exchange of ideas at some point, which it means we probably need to think carefully about our attitudes to censorship. Are you following now pop?

As for Yoss, if you don't care then I don't care to continue this discussion with you further. I've heard your very conservative point of view and I can understand why you might think that way, but it's going to be such an absurd and lengthy diversion away from what I was hoping to discuss that I'm not going to engage right now, I may come back around to address it if I come across things and feel like continuing. I don't think you are deliberately trolling though.

Yossarian

GurtTractor wrote:

Any attempt to adequately control an acceptable narrative is inevitably going to cause harm to reasonable exchange of ideas at some point

Again, this wasn’t true before the internet, so there’s nothing inevitable about it.

poprock

GurtTractor wrote:

Are you following now pop?

Yeah, and just like Yoss I disagree. I think you’re concerned about something somewhere ending up censored that maybe shouldn’t have been … and, well, good luck 100% preventing that. No society anywhere on Earth has figured out a way yet.

Have a robust legal system for appeals or complaints, I suppose. Not one that relies on high financial barriers to entry like that of the US.

Diluted Dante

Just ask Joe Rogan about it, and if he agrees with it it's misinformation.

RedDave2

Diluted Dante wrote:

Just ask Joe Rogan about it, and if he agrees with it it's misinformation.

This can also be fact checked with the Neil Young method. If Joe rogan agrees with something and it makes Neil Young remove his songs from a streaming service, it's definitely misinformation.

Yossarian

Substack’s VP of communications (not Katz, he’s a journo):

https://twitter.com/KatzOnEarth/status/1486788843332419585

hunk

Great intentions ripe for abuse imho.
It all depends on attitudes of participants whether a discussion is in good faith. If the faith's gone (conservatives' stance and decision-making corrupted by chasing profits) the discussion turns decidedly sour.

I understand Gurt's frustration but I don't see an obvious way out. I too believe in education being the solution but fuck me if conservatives aren't setting up roadblocks continuesly deliberately. The reason? To uphold the status quo. (You don't want the plebs to be too educated organised in unions, too expensive labor etc, etc..)

GurtTractor

Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

Yossarian

This is good:

https://anildash.com/2022/02/09/the-stupid-tech-content-culture-cycle/

davyK

Pilate wrote:

What is truth?

Fuck FB. It has long gone past the point where it's doing more good than harm.

I've knocked FB on the head and I won't be back. Never got into Twitter or any other shit.

Have 2 WhatsApp groups - Famalam and The Sophisticates (family and friends respectively. The latter for planning whisk(e)y and live music meetups)

There's here, a couple other retro forums, my shmup videos on YT and the few YT subs I have for shmups.

Fucked the rest into the bin.

hunk

GurtTractor wrote:

I think the key lesson here is "don't take yourself too, or even at all, seriously", especially if you claim to espouse doubt and lack of expertise informing your opinions, which you evangelically do above.

If you think I'm taking myself very seriously then I think you've severely misunderstood my posts. It's the ideas and events that I take seriously because I think they genuinely matter. I can understand why you might think this though, and I think it partly comes down to the last bit of your paragraph here which I mostly agree with -

Isn't the complaint rather that Twitter is designed to be engaging in a shitty way, influencing people in nefarious ways, but that of course people can use it critically and obtain valuable information from it, but it requires rather more care and oversight than, say, a well-sourced trusted analysis from expert or on-the-ground knowledge? That it pushes confirmation bias and outrage generation at every turn but again you can try and critically engage with that and try and filter it out, but that our brains are basically wired up to respond to this, and so it remains a harmful (overall) thing? I mean it doesn't seem very difficult to hold two ideas: that twitter, along with other tools, can provide useful links and information that can circumvent official sources quickly, but that that info can come with serious verification / truth-rating risks, and that the timeline algorithms are deliberately and expertly designed to maintain engagement and the cheapest and easiest and fastest way to do that is abusing the way our brains work - why anyone would get defensive about this is bizarre, and why anyone would think that "generational educational tools are needed to re-wire the evolved human brain" is an alternative think piece to that analysis is equally so

I won't go into detail here but it's pretty evident that our environment and education literally changes the structure of the hardware/software of our brains, just learning a single concept can lead to a tremendous shift in worldview, effectively countering hundreds of years of cultural norms. Similarly learning about how we think, cognitive biases, priors shaping perception etc, has huge benefits for media literacy. This idea that we are entirely stuck with the capabilities and limitations of this monkey brain is big lie in my opinion. Anyway I won't say any more about this here, though I think it is fairly pertinent. Happy to talk about it in another thread.

I agree with you in a Star Trek utopian kindof way.
Sadly, Big Business and conservative politics will never allow it to happen. It's just not in their interest to tackle the issue. And with the public voting increasingly rightwing we're stuck in a very vicious circle.

GurtTractor

Yeah that's why substantive changes will probably have to come from grassroots movements, I have reasons to believe there's a lot of potential still left on the table for computing and the internet to augment our intelligence though, so I have some hope.

djchump

One of the best bots ever made: https://twitter.com/PayGapApp

afgavinstan

Indeed.

GurtTractor

https://consilienceproject.org/endgames-of-bad-communication/

LivDiv

The word 'Steelmanning' has infuriated me.

davyK

Fuck off.

Fuck.

Off.

Paul the sparky

^ Disrespect included as part of disagreement

GurtTractor

LivDiv wrote:

The word 'Steelmanning' has infuriated me.

If you don't like buzzwords another way to think about it is this handy guideline I came across -

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

RedDave2

djchump wrote:

One of the best bots ever made: https://twitter.com/PayGapApp

Not going to get into a debate whether there is a pay gap - lets go with there is.

But I'm curious how you can calculate an average or median wage unless at the very least all the roles are identical.

I run 2 units. One is a restaurant and one is a production unit.

The heads of the production unit are all female so the lower level blokes are all below the female pay. So a "positive" gender gap. But thats more down to the roles then the genders.

The heads of the restaurant management are roughly split but with the Main manager being male, it tilts slightly to the men.

With the Chefs, our female sous chef left and was replaced with our male junior sous chef and tied with a male head chef and a higher male to female ratio, it tilts very much to the men now. Although we paid the female sous chef more per hour than her replacement due to her experience and time with us and the new guy needing to prove himself in the role. He will get there though.

For the waiters, because of our bonus scheme its very much down to best sellers and we have an absolute beast of a top female seller who blows most of her comrades (male or female) out of the water. So that goes to the females. (take the bonus out and that would be level)

KP is all men, and i have only ever had 2 female KPs in my 18 years in the company.

That leaves Bar - we have 2 emplyees, equal pay, equal roles.

Overall we would be seen as having a negative gap though. But I dont think it really tells the picture.

Yossarian

Gender pay gaps only need to be published if you’ve got more than 250 people in an organisation, at which point you likely will have a fair few people in similar roles.

RedDave2

Yossarian wrote:

Gender pay gaps only need to be published if you’ve got more than 250 people in an organisation, at which point you likely will have a fair few people in similar roles.

Aha, that makes a bit more sense.

As an Aside, I will pay more for an experienced Female Senior Chef or Floor Manager. Just based on experience.

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