To his points about low and high-information people, I think this is exactly where social media could do an awful lot to help people by more easily presenting information in a way that is cross referenceable with other articles and points of view. Again this is a complicated UI thing that I should go into another time, I'll just say that there's plenty of reason to be hopeful for technological improvements that could provide some kind of a solution to these societal problems, or at least limit the potential for damage.1:14:14.4 SC: And so if you’re someone who is the target of this, if you are listening to people on the other side of the political aisle, not just disagree with you about policy, but undercut your very humanity, right? To really question your right to exist or your right to be counted as a full citizen, and sometimes this is very indirect, right?
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And so, that can be something that is very personal and very central to your identity, and it can be hard to then say, “Well, even though these other people don’t even think of me as a full human being, I have to sit down and govern with them or work with them and compromise them and reach out across the aisle.”
1:15:25.9 SC: So my suggestion is, yes, we do, we do have to do all of that. This is what it means to live in a democracy. You don’t have to like the people who you disagree with. You don’t have to invite them over to dinner, but in some sense, you have to work with them, you have to live with them, that’s what it means to be in a democracy. So your choices are, treat those people as people, and this is completely… The idea of both sides-ism is a terrible bad thing because it leads to false equivalencies when one side is being bad and the other side is not, but this is not a both sides issue, but in every side issue, it doesn’t matter what your specific views are. The ideal of democracy demands of us that we work with the other side, that we accommodate them, that we sometimes compromise with them, and this has become harder to do because of political polarization.
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1:23:12.3 SC: There are people who are absolutely set in their ways, and nothing you will say to them or nothing you can do to them will ever change their minds, and other people who maybe you can work with a little bit or who are a little bit less intransigent. That matters. That distinction matters a little bit. So, again, this is very wishy-washy and also it’s easy for me to say, look, if you wanna accuse me of being in a comfortable position where I can say things like this. Yeah, you’re right. I know that what I’m asking is especially difficult to ask of black people. They have been spat on not just for the last four years, but for the last 400 years. And to say, “Okay, well, turn the other cheek, be the better person, try to build a better country by working with the people who have treated you like crap for centuries now,” that’s something that is a big ask and it’s not anyone asking me that. I don’t need to do that.
1:24:03.8 SC: So nevertheless, it’s an ask that I would make. And I think it’s difficult, and I think that we need to try to do it anyway. I can’t really say any more wisdom than that. Except the last question I wanted to address here is this issue of, what can we programmatically do constructively to try to make things better, to try to change the minds of people, of those people who we don’t agree with? So as I just said, it’s easy to brush off this question, How do we reach across the aisle? How do we try to change people’s minds by saying, “Look, have you met these people? They’re crazy.” And again, both sides can say this, “They’re completely Looney Tunes, they have completely lost the plot. There’s no reaching them.”
1:24:48.1 SC: Of course, that’s true for some people out there, and I think this is one of the times when I completely buy the critique of social media and our fractured information ecosystem, that it amplifies the crazies on any individual side. It is so much easier these days not just to find like-minded people and live in a bubble and hear only people we agree with, it’s also so much easier to be exposed to the worst of the other side, right? We see pictures of them, we read their tweets, it’s impossible to not be exposed to them. So, we can easily get the idea that there’s only two groups of people, people who agree with me and complete lunatics. And if that’s what you think, then it’s easy to lose motivation for trying to change things at all. You just shrug and you say, “Well, it’ll never happen. These people are not changeable.” But I think that’s a misimpression of the actual facts on the ground. There are crazies out there, there are extremists, there are people who’ll never change their minds, but there are also people in the middle. And like most people, most Americans, anyway, the problem is not that they’re rigid ideologues on one extreme of the spectrum or the other, is that they’re medium to low information voters who don’t care that much.
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But I think that I’m very skeptical of these studies, to be honest. For one thing, I think that they misrepresent how minds work, how people’s opinions work. People are not perfect Bayesian reasoners as much as we would like to aspire to be. People do not have a set of priors that are well delineated and then collect new data and update them according to Bayes’s formula, that’s not what people do. But that doesn’t mean that people don’t change their minds, people change their minds all the time.
1:29:48.7 SC: What often happens is something that can be very familiar to physicists who know about phase transitions, the thing that causes someone to change their mind might not be, and in fact, rarely is the straw that broke the camel’s back. There can be a little thing that they get, the little piece of information and experience, whatever it is, that is associated in time with the moment they change their mind. But the actual cause of them changing their mind is a set of many, many things stretching back in time, okay? You have a person with an opinion, with a belief, a credence in a certain proposition, and they get data that is against that proposition, and data in the very broadest sense, it’s not like they’re being physicists, but they get information, experiences, new stories, conversations with friends, that cause them to think about that particular proposition, and then they don’t change their mind immediately, ’cause that’s not how people work, but that has an effect on them. Even if the effect is invisible at the level of their actual beliefs in propositions, hearing that thing can nevertheless affect them at a deeper level.
1:30:56.8 SC: And if they hear something else, and something else, and something else over a period of time, they can eventually be led to change their mind without it ever being possible to associate the reason for that change with a particular piece of information that they got. Not to mention the fact that often, this data in a very, very broad sense is not data. In other words, the thing that is causing people to change their minds is not some piece of information or some rational argument, but something much more visceral, something much more emotional. Realizing that this person who is a member of a group that they have hated and denigrated for years, they meet a member of that group and become friends with them, suddenly maybe their minds change, right? You are against gay people getting married and then you have a child who turns out to be gay and wants to get married, maybe you change your mind, right? For no especially good reason epistemically, rationally, but you realize that, “I wasn’t really that devoted to that opinion in the first place.”
1:31:55.4 SC: There are many ways to change people’s minds, and it really does happen, and all of this is just to say it’s worth trying. It’s not worth trying reaching out to the extremists, to the crazies, but there are plenty of people who are not like that. There are plenty of people who are just not that devoted. And those people might not be wedded to the views that they very readily profess to believe in right now. This is part of the challenge of democracy, those people count, just as much as the most informed voters count. And of course, there are hyper-informed voters who are extremists on both sides, so it’s not just a matter of information levels, but there are people who are, in principle and in practice, reachable and people who are not, and we should try to reach the ones who are reachable. And again, I would give that advice to the other side as well, if the other side thinks that they wanna reach some people who are on the opposite side, they can try to reach me and I’m here to be reached, right?
GooberTheHat wrote:Regulation and education. That's the only way.
Yossarian wrote:It’s only because these companies managed to argue that they’re platforms rather than publishers that they’ve managed to shirk this responsibility.
poprock wrote:GooberTheHat wrote:Regulation and education. That's the only way.
The gig economy, social media, dropshipping, the lot. Hold them all to the same standards as traditional organisations and companies. The whole lot of ’em rely on loopholes and get-out clauses to force profit (or at least investment) from exploitative practices which shouldn’t generate any.
Armitage_Shankburn wrote:It's because he follows that Russian lex guy, who's a néolibéral /libertarian who's a slave to the YT algorithm and a bounder. That lex guy is trying to keep his libertarian subs and the rest, so he's triangulating. It's not the first time he's mentioned him, hence this post.
Yossarian wrote:I don’t know why you’re dismissing regulation here, it’s the obvious answer. Make the social media companies responsible for what’s published on their sites, it’s only holding them to the same standards as publishers have been held to for centuries, and even today, including in their comment sections. That hasn’t had any adverse effects on free speech. It’s only because these companies managed to argue that they’re platforms rather than publishers that they’ve managed to shirk this responsibility. We’d probably end up with very different looking social media platforms at the end of it, but that’s probably better than what we’ve currently got.
poprock wrote:Yep. For all ‘disruptive’ tech companies, from startup to behemoth.Regulation and education. That's the only way.The gig economy, social media, dropshipping, the lot. Hold them all to the same standards as traditional organisations and companies. The whole lot of ’em rely on loopholes and get-out clauses to force profit (or at least investment) from exploitative practices which shouldn’t generate any. At the same time, invest time and money in properly rounded educations for all. Media criticism, social studies, history and the arts. Critical thinking has been deprioritised and bringing it back would help.It’s only because these companies managed to argue that they’re platforms rather than publishers that they’ve managed to shirk this responsibility.
Brooks wrote:It's been in the interest of soc meeja platform capital to stoke sensation and drama for yonks, and the algos have been tuned accordingly. Until that gets dealt with...
SpaceGazelle wrote:The thing is the algos were not designed to do anything specifically bad, they were just asked to keep people engaged. This is why the free but advert model sucks balls. The algo picked up that humans are more engaged when they're angry, with the bonus that it's really easy and quick to get people angry, especially when it comes to the views of strangers on the internet. The danger with AI isn't Terminator, it's the unintended consequences of asking it to do something seemingly unrelated. Zuckerberg and Dorsey didn't program them to be awful but that doesn't disguise the fact they've let it carry on regardless. I genuinely think they think social media is a force for good, as do people whom I know and respect, but the state of the world says otherwise.Brooks wrote:It's been in the interest of soc meeja platform capital to stoke sensation and drama for yonks, and the algos have been tuned accordingly. Until that gets dealt with...
Brooks wrote:I mean, if you know human beings on the internet are prone to being hooting maniacs you probably should calibrate for that if you're not actually evil. If you didn't know this rather plain truth you're bad at your job.
GurtTractor wrote:Yossarian wrote:I don’t know why you’re dismissing regulation here, it’s the obvious answer. Make the social media companies responsible for what’s published on their sites, it’s only holding them to the same standards as publishers have been held to for centuries, and even today, including in their comment sections. That hasn’t had any adverse effects on free speech. It’s only because these companies managed to argue that they’re platforms rather than publishers that they’ve managed to shirk this responsibility. We’d probably end up with very different looking social media platforms at the end of it, but that’s probably better than what we’ve currently got.
There's a lot more that I need to read up on regarding this debate, so I won't make any strong statements just yet. I'm just a little shocked that people aren't more concerned about government regulation of what is acceptable speech. I've heard that these regulations may affect small companies that run forums and the like, if they become legally responsible for what people post on their sites then it could become practically impossible for them to operate. I don't know if that is likely to be true or not, I've yet to do the deeper research but it's enough to worry me at this point. I'm also concerned about the wording of what counts as hate speech etc being slippery and definitions sliding to a point that could hurt the freedom for dissent. Again, I'll be reading up on this stuff to hopefully make a more concrete statement, but would love some good references for laws, articles etc if you know of any.
Brooks wrote:It's been apparent from the earliest days of webfora. Christ we certainly saw those dynamics play out here in eras.
nick_md wrote:I'm still here, buddy
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