The tone is perhaps a tad melodramatic, but that keeps it fun to read!
I think there’s a question worth asking here that I don’t thing gets asked enough: what are the decisions we want to leave to humans? What decisions do we want to leave to individual humans?
This article reminded me of Neil Postman’s Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. I’ve written my thoughts on it here.[^1] His primary thesis is that all technology has a trade-off and an agenda of how it wants to be used, and more importantly, we are often blind to that trade-off and agenda.
For simple technologies, like hammers and spoons, the danger is negligible. For more powerful technologies like writing, telegraphy, and statistics, the dangers are much harder to see.
I highly recommend Technopoly if this article struck a cord with you.
People also need to think for themselves and take responsibility for their actions. Remember the case where someone got millions for spilling hot coffee on himself? Hot coffee is hot and it's the drinkers responsibility to not spill it. We can't blindly follow what we read or see. If we do that, there won't be any issue.
The other problem is that platforms try to be the arbiters of truth. That can't work because most things are in shades of gray. When platforms take sides, the other side feels slighted.
> "Stella Liebeck, a 79-year-old woman who suffered third-degree burns in her pelvic region"
> "Liebeck sought to settle with McDonald's for $20,000 to cover her actual and anticipated expenses. Her past medical expenses were $10,500; her anticipated future medical expenses were approximately $2,500; and her daughter's loss of income was approximately $5,000 for a total of approximately $18,000"
McDonald's offered $800. Liebeck retained an attorney. After continuing to refuse to settle, the jury ultimately awarded $160,000 to cover expenses, and $2.7M in punitive damages.
If you want to argue the personal responsibility angle for the $20,000, you're entitled to your opinion. The millions were not what she personally was asking for.
Yes, the common perception of this lawsuit is a prime example of an excellent PR spin. Almost everyone seems to know of this lawsuit, but almost all of them seem to have very important details wrong. There are good reasons McDonald's lost this lawsuit.
Skin grafts on your genitals are not just hot coffee. They were serving coffee 40 deg F (22 deg C) hotter than the temperature needed to fry an egg, and at least 20 deg F (11 deg C) hotter than any other tested vendor. Also, at the time, McDonald's had reports of over 700 people who had been injured to various degrees by their coffee.
>>They were serving coffee 40 deg F (22 deg C) hotter than the temperature needed to fry an egg
That right there is also PR spin, because it does not actually take that high of heat to "fry an egg", infact to cook eggs properly you often want lower heat or they become rubbery... Thus it is PR spin to phrase it in that manner because people associate "frying" with extreme high temps well over boiling point (212 degrees F / 100 deg C)
The coffee at McD's at the time was around 180 degrees F (82 deg C), their justification for that (right or wrong) was customers wanted to hotter coffee so it would still be hot when they arrived at the homes or offices after visiting the drive through.
Anecdotally, I know many people today that complaining about drinks from Drive through not being HOT enough, or cooling down too quickly
>>Also, at the time, McDonald's had reports of over 700 people who had been injured to various degrees by their coffee.
Over a 10 year span, over thousands of locations, and probably millions of cups of coffee sold, from a statistical standpoint that is very small rate
And the punitive damages were awarded because there were documents that McDonalds was aware of the danger (there were other similar cases), but did nothing.
I've also heard they deliberately kept the coffee very hot because they were promoting free refills, but wanted to discourage them to actually happen, but I don't know if it's true.
I thought that the line of thinking was that it was that hot because they didn't expect people to drink it immediately. No one is getting free refills from a drive through.
"Remember the case where someone got millions for spilling hot coffee on himself? Hot coffee is hot and it's the drinkers responsibility to not spill it. We can't blindly follow what we read or see. If we do that, there won't be any issue."
I think you pwned yourself here, repeating blindly a very distorted presentation of the actual incident. Go read up more on it, you might change your mind. There is a good reason why McD lost the case despite lawyering up.
Technopoly was floating around my fraternity's library. I picked it up randomly, and loved it. Postman didn't write the ancient Egyptian myth told in the beginning of the book, but Pharaoh being cognizant of the downside to Thoth's gift of writing to mankind was eye-opening. The rest of the book was also good. It really changed my prospective on technology, to always be on a lookout for hidden downsides to seemingly universally beneficial technologies like writing.
(MIT fraternities may be a bit different from what you'd expect. About half of MIT undergraduate men are members of fraternities.)
Everything is relative. A couple of millenia ago, powerful technologies meant plumbing, sewage, currency, postal mail. Do you want to think about any of these things? No, you just assume they work so you can move your thinking up the stack. But you absolutely want them regulated and managed by a democratic authority too... Why is Twitter different?
> you absolutely want them regulated and managed by a democratic authority too... Why is Twitter different?
If my sewage or plumbing stop working, I get sick and die. If my Twitter stops working, nothing...I am not on Twitter. Lots of countries (e.g. Japan) do fine with a private postal service. And plenty (e.g. Panama or America in the era of free banking) do fine outsourcing their currency.
I am not saying Twitter shouldn’t be regulated. Just that this isn’t the argument for it.
When social media becomes the primary driver of misinformation and anti-democratic sentiment, then it has arguably “stopped working”. While users might not be sick in the flesh, their minds will surely start to rot.
And solving it by blocking Twitter is just so... human.
The platforms aren't the problem, people are the problem. Education is piss poor, if that's not fixed/improved, we can go back to pre-industrial times and people would still vote for a moron who promises big things, never delivers and just grabs power for themselves.
Financial/civic/political education in schools? Public-sponsored articles and videos debunking conspiracies? Nah, just ban Twitter, that'll solve it.
People on either side of the fence believe they're right. Keep ignoring and belittling each other and it will lead to an even worse situation down the road.
In the end, unless we are talking about natural calamities, everything is a people problem.
Are blocked sewer is a people problem; it’s either poorly designed, poorly constructed, poorly maintained or a combination of causes. But in the end, the problem is caused by people.
Put more succinctly then: when a platform/technology becomes so successful that's used by a lot of people and/or other businesses built and depend on it, it (eventually) has to be regulated. If the prize of success is monopoly (as per Thiel), the price of success must be regulation.
Indeed. But with platforms being privately owned and centralized, the scale at which they start being problematic is fairly small.
The likes of Facebook/Twitter/YouTube have blown past this limit a long time ago.
At this point it's too late for regulation. You can't effectively break them down. Nationalizing them is pretty much unfeasible since they have so many international users. So the only solution left seems to be to shut them down completely, and let the competition do their job (it won't take long, considering Internet timescales). But maybe before consider what kind of regulations these competitors will have to live under. (Maybe a built-in time limit before they are shut down in turn, and the cycle starts all over again ?)
If it's a monopoly, it should be broken apart. This could reduce or remove the need for regulation. Although maybe not in cases like this - protecting ignorant people from themselves because they can't think for themselves or fact check social media information. I'm not sure these problems can be regulated away either.
I do think about plumbing, sewer, ect. It's good to know how it works so that you can fix it.
While moving thinking up the stack may be an option, I don't think that's really what's happening. People would rather use that time for leisure (look at digital consumption). Not to mention, knowing the basics of these services is very elementary. The people capable of thinking further up the stack would not be significantly impacted by possessing a basic understanding of simple services.
Well as I home owner I absolutely think about most of those things, and I want to understand how they work if for no other reason so I am not ripped off by a contractor should I need these systems repaired.
On a macro scale I also want to understand them so I know how badly my utility is screwing me when they propose rate hikes and other things to justify their poor management covering that poor stewardship with need for "improvements" or other explinations that will be ignorated by the masses of people that "do not want to think about any of this things"
This is known as Outsourcing your thinking, one should never do that
I also do not at all want them "regulated and managed by a democratic authority". I neither want centrally planned systems nor do I want them to be managed "democratically" which is at the end of the say 2 wolves and lamb voting on what is for dinner.
Twitter is different than plumbing, sewage, currency, etc. because it was not created in response to an urgent need of sustaining life. While it might not have been clear at its inception, Twitter has changed how we thing about public discourse and politics. In the case of simple technologies, the needs of society drove the creation, implementation, and use of such things. Now, we have Twitter, the existence of which has changed our society in ways that Jack Dorsey & al. probably didn't intend.
The big idea from Postman on this is that with simple technologies, the culture and the society drive their development and use. Whereas with bigger technologies (Internet, statistics, Twitter, etc.) start to shape society around them.
I'm doing a poor job of explaining myself; Postman has more to say on page 23 onward of Technopoly if you're curious for a better explaination.
For me it comes across as typically nihlistic, which is all too common these days, where by it's making statements that we're nothing more than survival of the fitest.
For me this is just patently false, humanity has tackled with existentialism, art, science and much more. Many of which is to better understand our position in the universe and not just to survive.
But there is a crux to it; not everyone cares. Which again can also be seen through the generations many people are just interested in surviving and have no more desire than to get to the nearest McDonalds or Starbucks, and that's fine.
I feel this is the majority of people and it's only a few exceptional individuals that have the drive and ability to push beyond; some of them are actually often quite troubled and maybe it's their very lack of contentment and happiness that drives them on.
I feel the nihlistic point of view has the greatest of troubles with this state of affairs because if the vast majority are just content to sit back and go to the nearest Yelp recommendation, and there's no real higher purpose, then it's all just rather depressing.
"... if the vast majority are just content to sit back and go to the nearest Yelp recommendation, and there's no real higher purpose, then it's all just rather depressing."
I think we're there. Many I people I know, or know of, don't care about higher purpose and don't care to understand the concepts or mechanisms underlying the technology that does stuff for them. They just want life to be easy and fun (as we all do), but they don't care about exploring meaning in life or even going in-depth into their own beliefs
This is a great example of why platforms have so much power. If you look at TFA source, it's designed by someone else. And that dev is shilling for digital ocean, so I'm assuming that's the host. The internet is specializing, and hosting is a very hard specialization.
TFA goes on to talk about how we don't think anymore, and we abdicate our choices to group think. Then they compare the social effect of telephones and FB.
Then they go on to compare social media to an extinction level event. Hyperbole aside, I understand why people are so agitated.
FB has been going for about 18 years now, I don't think this has been what's caused the unrest that we're seeing. Poor living conditions for the bottom half of society has given this legs. Yeah, we can kill of section 230 and make everyone choose from a list of pre-approved messages, but that is not a fix.
> Poor living conditions for the bottom half of society has given this legs.
Debatable. There are many conflicting explanations about the current phenomenon and some of them talk about the role of the solid and relatively secure middle class that has lost something intangible, a sense of hope for the future, identity in other words. The more I try to read and understand the less clear it seems. But it’s safe to say any single minded narrative is probably too simplistic and doesn’t fully explain the whole reality.
Killing section 230 would force social media sites to choose between censoring according to their whims but then being on the hook for everything, or delegating censorship to the law.
I think there is a valid argument to be made that Twitter is not like a TV station, but more like television itself. Suppose all television had a strong political bias into some direction, that would be an unacceptable situation.
People like to talk about their rights, but rights can only exist in a society where people fulfill their duties as citizens.
For example, you have the right to be treated with dignity, but it is also your duty to treat others with dignity.
You have the right to not be discriminated, but also the duty to not discriminate others. And so on.
As a citizen, you have freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom to vote... but it is also your duty to develop critical thinking and stay informed so you can exercise those freedoms for the greater good.
I found this taxonomy (helping you decide / helping you act) interesting, and I wonder whether there are other categories that it might naturally be extended with. Helping you deliberate, helping you discuss, helping you exercise command authority?
I was just watching some videos of mission control centers from space missions and they were interestingly different from any situations I've been in myself. They're about helping people talk to each other in a very structured way, as well as looking at information together (also in a very structured way) -- with defined scopes of authority and responsibility, and responding to a sometimes quickly-evolving situation.
It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
It is repeated because the advancement of civilization has enabled us not to think about the intermediary steps. It's a reminder to sometimes think about the process itself. It can lead to discoveries that can improve the entire process.
The 'erroneous truism' is like the saying "Don't judge a book by its cover." The meaning of the saying isn't that you must ignore the cover and judge every book by its content. Picking out a book to read from the library would be impossible. We still need to make decisions based on heuristics. The saying is simply a reminder that sometimes a poor outward appearance can have a gem hidden underneath.
This statement does not age well. Some of the worst disasters of the twentieth century relied on masses of people not stopping to think what they were doing.
Just have a look at the immediate news-headline issues happening around the world. I reckon a good number of them wouldn't be issues if people did some "thinking" and not relying on "the algorithm" to tell what's happening.
There’s a lot baked into that. It’s great that I don’t need to think about manual memory management. It’s a different class of operation than OP is talking about. I suppose google search is somewhere in the middle.
> If Yelp picks the restaurants for me enough, I stop having nuanced preferences about restaurants. That energy expenditure is no longer needed for survival and reproduction. Dump those neurons. Over time people stop caring about the tiny details of what the difference is between a good and a great restaurant. Yelp handles that.
I think there's a distinction that's being glossed over, here: people can be desirous of eating at some restaurants more than others because of the results, but no longer pay attention to what those restaurants have in common -- what the underlying reasons are for the outcome at those restaurants that they prefer. Something which helps decide where to eat would ideally highly rate restaurants you'd enjoy, while not requiring you to learn specific details about the preparation of really excellent food.
I disagree with the assertion that letting a rating service choose the restaurant (or a list of restaurants of the highest rating) will result in not having desires about the experience at that restaurant, but I think "nuanced preferences" in the initial sentence must mean "knowing a lot about the kind of restaurants I like", instead.
But the whole idea of attaching a one dimensional number to a preference seems flawed. How do you even compare movies, books, songs you enjoy? There’s a broad sense of liking or not something in general, but attaching a 4.1 stars to this and 4.3 stars to that seems delusional. And it’s not context-free either: start taking into account the time of day, state of mind, the phase of the moon or what have you, and you might as well throw the whole concept out.
The law of large numbers deals with the last issue.
A much worse issue is that the aggregated rating is going to depend on the expectations that people had of the product. And bad marketing can screw that up, especially if it attracts the kind of people that are a bad fit for the product. And the smaller you are, the more the 'marketing' is out of your hands.
Suppose "make something people want" is the North star. It's the YC strapline, of course. The issue is that the "people" concerned change.
As a startup we make something people want, and if we get it right we might choose to take on the rocket fuel that gives us a slim chance of becoming a platform. But the rocket fuel suppliers want returns, so we switch from being concerned about people, as users, and more concerned about shareholders. Andlet us not forget VCs want monopolies.
So we have a bunch of unsolved problems with monopolies maintained with the lie that Shopping, Search, Messaging, Social Interaction, Video Calls ... are solved problems.
Technology and media should help you decide what to do and help you accomplish things you have decided to do. What it shouldn't do, but does so increasingly, is stopping us thinking when we should be.
The platform is not the enemy, it's just a resource. If you choose to believe any information as it was written, without thinking about it yourself or checking with other resources, that's on you.
Personal responsibility seems to be criminally underrated, everyone would rather blame anything and anyone but themselves. That's toxic for everyone, including yourself.
But this reminded me, I don't remember the last time I solved a problem without looking for an answer online... It's really efficient, but I've lost the ability to quickly solve something by myself.
This is why I'm afraid of all the censorship and blocking, I'd have to go back to how it was. It was slow and hard, but also fun tbh.
There seems to be a general assumption that pre-internet technologies didn’t change people’s behaviour or dramatically alter the contours of their life decisions, which is of course very wrong.
There’s no possibility of a decline into an idiocracy because we’ve been in one since the dawn of civilisation. Since we have this far lacked the technology to modify ourselves directly, we’ve offloaded any of our super-human goals onto our environment in a symbiotic dance with the gifts evolution has bestowed upon us. There isn’t some inflection point where computers are a catalyst into an imagined decline: they are just part of the evolving process. Perhaps direct augmentation will change things, but that is unlikely to be available to us in the near to medium term.
People’s desires and perceptions have been shaped by–and in turn shaped–thousands of years of technology at this point; from fundamental tech like reading and writing through hygeine and mass media. Rolling back one layer is not particularly important.
Those things still exist today, they didn't vanished. And none is stopping you creating new IRC channels or Usenet groups.
Oh, wait, your problem is not that those things vanished, is that people no longer use them in large numbers. So what you want is to impose your will on others to use the technology that you want instead the one that they want, yes? I think this is called dictatorship.
Fascinating! So the old saying, "Use it or lose it" remains relevant in the computer age. Most things are invented with profit in mind, that's fine as long as the way the product is used benefits mankind. Oh wait, some of mankind are dishonest and borderline evil! We didn't see that coming! (Wow, I'm still making a profit!)
You're arguing semantics. If Yelp reduces the choices for you down to a ranked list, it introduces a huge amount of bias in your decision. And if you use it relatively deterministically, you've consequentially changed your behavior in a way such that an outside observer will eventually be able to predict your behavior with high probability, if they understand what Yelp is showing you. In that sense, "telling you" starts to be a sane thing to think, even if it's not literally telling you the exact singular place to go.
'Platforms' were derisively nicknamed in France in 2007 during a historic Libre Software Meeting as "Minitel(s) 2.0", to insist on them being a regression compared to the normal Internet / Web :
(Note that this probably predates the generalization of the term 'platform', as neither it, nor the French 'plateforme' is nowhere to be found in the transcript.)
Years ago (c. early 1980s), a friend of mine who was studying psychology quipped that one of his professors asserted that "70% of people do not engage in introspection".
I thought it was a remarkable statement and it certainly resonated with my then recently acquired hipster outlook on life.
But in the intervening years, I've seen little to indicate that he was wrong.
I’ve found that people can spend time alone only to always fill it with activities like podcasts and reading. While not bad, they tend to add more information when sometimes what is needed is time to process existing information.
I wonder if people get new understanding or ideas while in the shower because it is just a routine, manual activity where they actually have a few minutes with no additional inputs.
Man half the task of using Yelp is looking at the reviews and deciding which ones are legit and which are either a 5-star review that was paid for, or a 1-star review by some tourist who is annoyed that their feet were not immediately kissed upon walking through the door, and that they were served an authentic example of the local cuisine instead of the bastardized version from a chain restaurant in there Homeland Of No Spices.
Which I guess probably goes back into the thesis that "the platform is the enemy" in some ways but geez, people just stop at the star ratings on Yelp and don't go any further before eating?
They do not. It has taken me a long time to learn and accept. And I still struggle with it.
Many people have very different priorities and choose not to care. I am then often asked for advice for places to go and items to buy. Why? Because I do spend the time and effort it takes to go "beyond the stars".
For years I could not wrap my head around people who did not do that. I have learned (still learning) not to call them stupid, lazy or weak. They simply have different priorities.
Priorities. That is what I have chosen to call it. And I am still struggling with it... :-)
Can't really remember the last time I used or saw value in platforms like Yelp, or TripAdvisor, but generally if I'm on holiday I'm not using Google to search for 'best restaurants' in the area or whatever; I'll take a local recommendation or just experiment. Tourist traps are easy enough to identify. I might still enjoy a restaurant if the food wasn't great, because other parts of the experience more than made up for it.
I won't support a system like Yelp because the end result is that everything becomes average to serve the algorithm.
The argument taken to its extreme is that all of civilization is a mistake since civilization involves specialization which means individuals give up their decisions on things. It's a very pessimistic argument and assumes that people don't use the saved energy for productive endeavors. The fact that civilization has prospered indicates to me that they do in fact simply find other things to spend their mental energy on. Do you want Einstein spending mental energy on picking his next restaurant or solving the fundamental questions of the universe?
edit: Much has been written about how the most productive people aggressively remove having to make trivial choices from their lives. To the point of having fifty copies of a single set of clothes.
Civilization may not be a mistake, but it is clear that 90% of people in a civilization is dragged forward kicking and screaming by 10% of people into a Civilization it is not equipped to handle and unprepared for.
I think that more than anything is the underlying lesson and danger from the idiocracy documentary
We are injecting tools, and technology into civilization that we are not ready for with no concern or care for the damage it does
I think clinical trials are the most aggressive form of making sure that a new technology isn't harmful on the population. I can't even imagine what tech would look like if strict pathways like clinical trials were forced on apps and websites, but I could imagine that be possible one day.
You can't really do random testing on social products because there's no good way to segregate a social network. Too much overlap and sharing. Harm is also subjective which makes it very hard to measure. For example, tech that made people more supportive of gay rights would have been considered very harmful until fairly recently by a majority of the population.
In drawing the distinction between technologies that enable us to act on a decision we’ve already made versus those that try to make the decision for us, its interesting to note that the former is increasingly leading
to the latter.
When I started using platforms like Netflix and Uber Eats, it was because I already knew the things I wanted to watch and eat, and they provided an easy way for me to act on those desires. As they became normalized parts of my day to day, it only seemed natural that I should start following their recommendations as well. Now it feels increasingly like I go to them to give me answers, unlike when I started out.
I rejected Spotify's Discover Weekly suggestions for a really long time, but lately I've been more and more accepting of the fact that wow, I really do like Discover Weekly's suggestions every week, and I don't know how to reconcile that
We're all dealing with the same thing but its not just Spotify...its every algorithm we encounter. Its hard to reconcile that we're not unique, we're extremely predicable.
I'm surprised that the most obvious example of platforms getting in the way and real life imitating Idiocracy has not been mentioned: the Boeing 737 MAX.
This is a plane where the engineers cut corners all so the business could beat their competitor. The focus was on the short-term. They broke the fundamental abstractions that the pilot is specialized on. And the results speak for themselves: hundreds of people dead, and a multi-billion dollar fiasco.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadI think there’s a question worth asking here that I don’t thing gets asked enough: what are the decisions we want to leave to humans? What decisions do we want to leave to individual humans?
This article reminded me of Neil Postman’s Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. I’ve written my thoughts on it here.[^1] His primary thesis is that all technology has a trade-off and an agenda of how it wants to be used, and more importantly, we are often blind to that trade-off and agenda.
For simple technologies, like hammers and spoons, the danger is negligible. For more powerful technologies like writing, telegraphy, and statistics, the dangers are much harder to see.
I highly recommend Technopoly if this article struck a cord with you.
[^1]: https://lambdaland.org/posts/2020-08-16-book-review-technopo...
The other problem is that platforms try to be the arbiters of truth. That can't work because most things are in shades of gray. When platforms take sides, the other side feels slighted.
Often trotted out as an example of frivolous litigation, you're likely referring to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...
> "Stella Liebeck, a 79-year-old woman who suffered third-degree burns in her pelvic region"
> "Liebeck sought to settle with McDonald's for $20,000 to cover her actual and anticipated expenses. Her past medical expenses were $10,500; her anticipated future medical expenses were approximately $2,500; and her daughter's loss of income was approximately $5,000 for a total of approximately $18,000"
McDonald's offered $800. Liebeck retained an attorney. After continuing to refuse to settle, the jury ultimately awarded $160,000 to cover expenses, and $2.7M in punitive damages.
If you want to argue the personal responsibility angle for the $20,000, you're entitled to your opinion. The millions were not what she personally was asking for.
Skin grafts on your genitals are not just hot coffee. They were serving coffee 40 deg F (22 deg C) hotter than the temperature needed to fry an egg, and at least 20 deg F (11 deg C) hotter than any other tested vendor. Also, at the time, McDonald's had reports of over 700 people who had been injured to various degrees by their coffee.
it's important to keep reminding people of those important details.
thank you!
That right there is also PR spin, because it does not actually take that high of heat to "fry an egg", infact to cook eggs properly you often want lower heat or they become rubbery... Thus it is PR spin to phrase it in that manner because people associate "frying" with extreme high temps well over boiling point (212 degrees F / 100 deg C)
The coffee at McD's at the time was around 180 degrees F (82 deg C), their justification for that (right or wrong) was customers wanted to hotter coffee so it would still be hot when they arrived at the homes or offices after visiting the drive through.
Anecdotally, I know many people today that complaining about drinks from Drive through not being HOT enough, or cooling down too quickly
>>Also, at the time, McDonald's had reports of over 700 people who had been injured to various degrees by their coffee.
Over a 10 year span, over thousands of locations, and probably millions of cups of coffee sold, from a statistical standpoint that is very small rate
I've also heard they deliberately kept the coffee very hot because they were promoting free refills, but wanted to discourage them to actually happen, but I don't know if it's true.
I think you pwned yourself here, repeating blindly a very distorted presentation of the actual incident. Go read up more on it, you might change your mind. There is a good reason why McD lost the case despite lawyering up.
The problem is that to even ask these questions, you must already have an answer to them: you have to know who "we" is.
(MIT fraternities may be a bit different from what you'd expect. About half of MIT undergraduate men are members of fraternities.)
If my sewage or plumbing stop working, I get sick and die. If my Twitter stops working, nothing...I am not on Twitter. Lots of countries (e.g. Japan) do fine with a private postal service. And plenty (e.g. Panama or America in the era of free banking) do fine outsourcing their currency.
I am not saying Twitter shouldn’t be regulated. Just that this isn’t the argument for it.
When social media becomes the primary driver of misinformation and anti-democratic sentiment, then it has arguably “stopped working”. While users might not be sick in the flesh, their minds will surely start to rot.
The platforms aren't the problem, people are the problem. Education is piss poor, if that's not fixed/improved, we can go back to pre-industrial times and people would still vote for a moron who promises big things, never delivers and just grabs power for themselves.
Financial/civic/political education in schools? Public-sponsored articles and videos debunking conspiracies? Nah, just ban Twitter, that'll solve it.
People on either side of the fence believe they're right. Keep ignoring and belittling each other and it will lead to an even worse situation down the road.
Are blocked sewer is a people problem; it’s either poorly designed, poorly constructed, poorly maintained or a combination of causes. But in the end, the problem is caused by people.
The likes of Facebook/Twitter/YouTube have blown past this limit a long time ago.
At this point it's too late for regulation. You can't effectively break them down. Nationalizing them is pretty much unfeasible since they have so many international users. So the only solution left seems to be to shut them down completely, and let the competition do their job (it won't take long, considering Internet timescales). But maybe before consider what kind of regulations these competitors will have to live under. (Maybe a built-in time limit before they are shut down in turn, and the cycle starts all over again ?)
While moving thinking up the stack may be an option, I don't think that's really what's happening. People would rather use that time for leisure (look at digital consumption). Not to mention, knowing the basics of these services is very elementary. The people capable of thinking further up the stack would not be significantly impacted by possessing a basic understanding of simple services.
On a macro scale I also want to understand them so I know how badly my utility is screwing me when they propose rate hikes and other things to justify their poor management covering that poor stewardship with need for "improvements" or other explinations that will be ignorated by the masses of people that "do not want to think about any of this things"
This is known as Outsourcing your thinking, one should never do that
I also do not at all want them "regulated and managed by a democratic authority". I neither want centrally planned systems nor do I want them to be managed "democratically" which is at the end of the say 2 wolves and lamb voting on what is for dinner.
The big idea from Postman on this is that with simple technologies, the culture and the society drive their development and use. Whereas with bigger technologies (Internet, statistics, Twitter, etc.) start to shape society around them.
I'm doing a poor job of explaining myself; Postman has more to say on page 23 onward of Technopoly if you're curious for a better explaination.
For me this is just patently false, humanity has tackled with existentialism, art, science and much more. Many of which is to better understand our position in the universe and not just to survive.
But there is a crux to it; not everyone cares. Which again can also be seen through the generations many people are just interested in surviving and have no more desire than to get to the nearest McDonalds or Starbucks, and that's fine.
I feel this is the majority of people and it's only a few exceptional individuals that have the drive and ability to push beyond; some of them are actually often quite troubled and maybe it's their very lack of contentment and happiness that drives them on.
I feel the nihlistic point of view has the greatest of troubles with this state of affairs because if the vast majority are just content to sit back and go to the nearest Yelp recommendation, and there's no real higher purpose, then it's all just rather depressing.
I think we're there. Many I people I know, or know of, don't care about higher purpose and don't care to understand the concepts or mechanisms underlying the technology that does stuff for them. They just want life to be easy and fun (as we all do), but they don't care about exploring meaning in life or even going in-depth into their own beliefs
TFA goes on to talk about how we don't think anymore, and we abdicate our choices to group think. Then they compare the social effect of telephones and FB.
Then they go on to compare social media to an extinction level event. Hyperbole aside, I understand why people are so agitated.
FB has been going for about 18 years now, I don't think this has been what's caused the unrest that we're seeing. Poor living conditions for the bottom half of society has given this legs. Yeah, we can kill of section 230 and make everyone choose from a list of pre-approved messages, but that is not a fix.
Debatable. There are many conflicting explanations about the current phenomenon and some of them talk about the role of the solid and relatively secure middle class that has lost something intangible, a sense of hope for the future, identity in other words. The more I try to read and understand the less clear it seems. But it’s safe to say any single minded narrative is probably too simplistic and doesn’t fully explain the whole reality.
I think there is a valid argument to be made that Twitter is not like a TV station, but more like television itself. Suppose all television had a strong political bias into some direction, that would be an unacceptable situation.
For example, you have the right to be treated with dignity, but it is also your duty to treat others with dignity.
You have the right to not be discriminated, but also the duty to not discriminate others. And so on.
As a citizen, you have freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom to vote... but it is also your duty to develop critical thinking and stay informed so you can exercise those freedoms for the greater good.
Maybe there should be a class on just that throughout all school years.
I was just watching some videos of mission control centers from space missions and they were interestingly different from any situations I've been in myself. They're about helping people talk to each other in a very structured way, as well as looking at information together (also in a very structured way) -- with defined scopes of authority and responsibility, and responding to a sometimes quickly-evolving situation.
Alfred North Whitehead (1911)
The 'erroneous truism' is like the saying "Don't judge a book by its cover." The meaning of the saying isn't that you must ignore the cover and judge every book by its content. Picking out a book to read from the library would be impossible. We still need to make decisions based on heuristics. The saying is simply a reminder that sometimes a poor outward appearance can have a gem hidden underneath.
I think there's a distinction that's being glossed over, here: people can be desirous of eating at some restaurants more than others because of the results, but no longer pay attention to what those restaurants have in common -- what the underlying reasons are for the outcome at those restaurants that they prefer. Something which helps decide where to eat would ideally highly rate restaurants you'd enjoy, while not requiring you to learn specific details about the preparation of really excellent food.
I disagree with the assertion that letting a rating service choose the restaurant (or a list of restaurants of the highest rating) will result in not having desires about the experience at that restaurant, but I think "nuanced preferences" in the initial sentence must mean "knowing a lot about the kind of restaurants I like", instead.
I think the idea of attaching a one dimensional number to almost anything in computer mediated communications is wrong.
I believe we should rate things with a vector, not a scalar.
Example: Your post Is 4.5 insightful, 0.2 snark, 5.0 truthful, 0.0 political
A much worse issue is that the aggregated rating is going to depend on the expectations that people had of the product. And bad marketing can screw that up, especially if it attracts the kind of people that are a bad fit for the product. And the smaller you are, the more the 'marketing' is out of your hands.
As a startup we make something people want, and if we get it right we might choose to take on the rocket fuel that gives us a slim chance of becoming a platform. But the rocket fuel suppliers want returns, so we switch from being concerned about people, as users, and more concerned about shareholders. Andlet us not forget VCs want monopolies.
So we have a bunch of unsolved problems with monopolies maintained with the lie that Shopping, Search, Messaging, Social Interaction, Video Calls ... are solved problems.
Technology and media should help you decide what to do and help you accomplish things you have decided to do. What it shouldn't do, but does so increasingly, is stopping us thinking when we should be.
Personal responsibility seems to be criminally underrated, everyone would rather blame anything and anyone but themselves. That's toxic for everyone, including yourself.
But this reminded me, I don't remember the last time I solved a problem without looking for an answer online... It's really efficient, but I've lost the ability to quickly solve something by myself.
This is why I'm afraid of all the censorship and blocking, I'd have to go back to how it was. It was slow and hard, but also fun tbh.
There’s no possibility of a decline into an idiocracy because we’ve been in one since the dawn of civilisation. Since we have this far lacked the technology to modify ourselves directly, we’ve offloaded any of our super-human goals onto our environment in a symbiotic dance with the gifts evolution has bestowed upon us. There isn’t some inflection point where computers are a catalyst into an imagined decline: they are just part of the evolving process. Perhaps direct augmentation will change things, but that is unlikely to be available to us in the near to medium term.
People’s desires and perceptions have been shaped by–and in turn shaped–thousands of years of technology at this point; from fundamental tech like reading and writing through hygeine and mass media. Rolling back one layer is not particularly important.
He should have told this to Elohim a million years ago, when the human source code was being written. By now that ship has sailed.
Tree of the knowledge of God and evil, etc, etc...
Oh, wait, your problem is not that those things vanished, is that people no longer use them in large numbers. So what you want is to impose your will on others to use the technology that you want instead the one that they want, yes? I think this is called dictatorship.
https://www.fdn.fr/actions/confs/internet-libre-ou-minitel-2... (fr)
(Note that this probably predates the generalization of the term 'platform', as neither it, nor the French 'plateforme' is nowhere to be found in the transcript.)
I thought it was a remarkable statement and it certainly resonated with my then recently acquired hipster outlook on life.
But in the intervening years, I've seen little to indicate that he was wrong.
I’ve found that people can spend time alone only to always fill it with activities like podcasts and reading. While not bad, they tend to add more information when sometimes what is needed is time to process existing information.
I wonder if people get new understanding or ideas while in the shower because it is just a routine, manual activity where they actually have a few minutes with no additional inputs.
Which I guess probably goes back into the thesis that "the platform is the enemy" in some ways but geez, people just stop at the star ratings on Yelp and don't go any further before eating?
Many people have very different priorities and choose not to care. I am then often asked for advice for places to go and items to buy. Why? Because I do spend the time and effort it takes to go "beyond the stars".
For years I could not wrap my head around people who did not do that. I have learned (still learning) not to call them stupid, lazy or weak. They simply have different priorities.
Priorities. That is what I have chosen to call it. And I am still struggling with it... :-)
I won't support a system like Yelp because the end result is that everything becomes average to serve the algorithm.
edit: Much has been written about how the most productive people aggressively remove having to make trivial choices from their lives. To the point of having fifty copies of a single set of clothes.
I think that more than anything is the underlying lesson and danger from the idiocracy documentary
We are injecting tools, and technology into civilization that we are not ready for with no concern or care for the damage it does
https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#Distributed-Operating-...
When I started using platforms like Netflix and Uber Eats, it was because I already knew the things I wanted to watch and eat, and they provided an easy way for me to act on those desires. As they became normalized parts of my day to day, it only seemed natural that I should start following their recommendations as well. Now it feels increasingly like I go to them to give me answers, unlike when I started out.
This is a plane where the engineers cut corners all so the business could beat their competitor. The focus was on the short-term. They broke the fundamental abstractions that the pilot is specialized on. And the results speak for themselves: hundreds of people dead, and a multi-billion dollar fiasco.
Post google, people tend not to remember things anymore that can easily be searched