9 ms·

How Facebook makes us dumber

135 points by zabramow 11y ago

zappo2938 11y ago
Reddit too. I just wrote 500 words without using any logical fallacies backing up my assertions with scientific studies from trusted sources, why does my comment have -12 points without a single person taking the time to refute my position in a comment? I believe managed, licenced hunting in Africa supports conservation efforts, there is no reason ever to spank or hit a child, all children should be vaccinated, and pitbulls are dangerous. So, most people have unfriended and/or blocked me on Facebook. Now I live in a bubble. I'm not bothered by people who don't agree with me. I'm bothered by people who can't debate these topics without getting riled up. The African hunting topic ended with someone threatening my little sister. I can understand the business decision behind letting people live in a bubble.
- tim333 11y ago
  >why does my comment have -12 points Some views are unappealing at an emotional level without much reasoning coming in to it?
- danieltillett 11y ago
  Just out of curiosity why do you think children should never be spanked? Do you have children?
  - DanBC 11y ago
    It's always a failure of parenting. It's abusive - it's an abuse the the rights of the child. It's ineffective. You always hear some fucking idiot saying "my child ran out into the street, so I hit him". Hear the useless parent put their child at risk of harm by not teaching the child about road safety, by not providing adequate supervision in a dangerous situation, and then punishing the child for the parent's lack of skill. "I hit my children" is no different from "I hit my spouse" or "I hit my employees".
    - danieltillett 11y ago
      It is not ineffective. I don't have to smack my children now they are older, but when they were very young reasoning with them was not an option. I think we can avoid false emotional comparisons between spanking a young child and beating your wife.
  - zappo2938 11y ago
    I'm not going to say that spanking isn't an effective way to discipline a child. I can also understand if a 3 year old walks into a street to feel like spanking the child. There is overwhelming scientific evidence that other forms of discipline for small children are more effective at correcting behavior and children who are spanked are often more violent towards other children with other developmental and learning problems in school. Also, what we can do is look at how adjusted, happy, and successful people are in life, whether they are a doctor or lawyer with their own practice, divorced, in jail for violent crimes, or if they have a drug or psychological problems and compare that to whether they were spanked or worse as children. What we discover is that people who were not spanked or spanked very sparingly for example only in the case they walked out into the street do much, much better in life. So if you have children and want to play the numbers game, it might be worth while to explore other ways of disciplining your child. Not only do they work, but they have better long term effects on the child.
    - dash2 11y ago
      Just out of interest, what is the overwhelming scientific evidence? Is it causal or just correlational? Because I can imagine tons of reasons why children who are often spanked have more problems in school - not least, reverse causality - that would not imply you should never spank your child.
      - danieltillett 11y ago
        I actually don’t think that there is any evidence of mild smacking being a major problem. Child abuse (beating of children is very bad), but measuring the effects of a rare and relatively minor event in a child’s life is very hard.
    - danieltillett 11y ago
      OK it sounds like you are actually of the belief that spanking should be rare, rather than never. In this I agree, but I do think from personal experience that spanking is a useful "thermonuclear" option to stop dangerous behaviour in young children. To give you an example, I once caught one of my children at the age of two inserting objects into electrical power points. I gave him a good spank on the bottom and he never did it again. It is possible that another solution would have worked, but when you are dealing with a two year old playing with electricity do you really want to take the chance with another options? If spanking is rare children quickly learn that to get a spank means they have crossed a no-go threshold. My limited personal experience of the results of disincline (of all kinds) is that inconsistent or random discipline from a parent is worse than almost all others. Children who live in fear of being disciplined for what appears to them to be for no reason, or where their actual behaviour plays very little role in affecting the discipline they experience, fair far worse. It is really hard as a parent, but being consistent is critically important. No means no.
  - warkid 11y ago
    Imagine there are giant creatures(like 5-6 meter tall) and they are proportionally stronger than you. They follow you everywhere and(though they wash and feed you) they also sometimes hit you with their huge palms?
    - danieltillett 11y ago
      I have quite a good memory of my childhood and my complaints about it are not over the occasional smack I received, but of the arbitrary and inconsistent nature of the punishment I received. Like the powerless everywhere, children are strong advocates of justice and rules and they absolutely hate inconsistent and arbitrary displays of power.
- pjc50 11y ago
  I just wrote 500 words without using any logical fallacies backing up my assertions with scientific studies from trusted sources This is why you're getting downvoted. That's not how you convince people.
  - askafriend 11y ago
    I think that might be the crux of the issue. Convincing people and making a logical argument aren't the same thing and are only tangentially related. The former requires a level of emotional intelligence and coercion in addition to any logical arguments. Why? Because people are people and they will only resent you if you just mechanically present arguments even if you're 100% right. They will look for any reason to say you're wrong even if it doesn't make sense. That's why sometimes, it's just not worth participating in some arguments. Context matters.
    - lorenzhs 11y ago
      The candidates in the current US election cycle demonstrate this quite well.
- eaandkw 11y ago
  Most people argue and make appeals to emotion not logic. I have noticed this myself. I think it mostly comes from not knowing what or how to make an argument. For instance if I state a argument such as Premise 1: All men are mortal. Premise 2: Socrates is a man. Conclusion: Therefore, Socrates is a mortal. To refute my argument someone would have to demonstrate how my first two premises or my conclusion was wrong. Usually everyone just bashes the conclusions but never refutes the premises of the argument.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  It's charitable to assume, like other commenters did, that your comment was totally fine, but I have to ask - what was the tone of it? And how did it happen that people actually unfriended you on Facebook? The other potential reason is that you posted it to the wrong community. There are, unfortunately, groups of people who get the more angry the more you try to back up your point with science. Best to avoid those. They can be convinced, but it requires a lot of work and careful dancing around their egos. > The African hunting topic ended with someone threatening my little sister. What the hell. Who are these people? :o. I'm sorry this happened to you and I totally support staying away from such groups.
  - zappo2938 11y ago
    The problem is that my ideas through the Reddit algorithm sink to the bottom and RES will automatically hide them if they fall below a threshold. This is another case of an algorithm creating an opinion bubble. As for being unfriended on Facebook, people are passionate about not getting their children vaccinated. I lost a couple friends over that. One woman posted a picture with text that said, "My parents spanked me and I turned out fine." I donated money and time to do Facebook marketing for a charity concert for a local homeless non-profit last year. They do awesome work getting people off the streets where I live, but they are weird. I didn't know the women well but my response about her being a recovered heroin addict and not being fine ruffled a lot of people's feathers. That ended with a bunch of people unfriending me too.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      Uh, I see. Yeah, Reddit has this problem; I've noticed new subreddits often changing the top-level comment sorting order to counter exactly that effect. I can see how the issue with that woman could cause some opposition - if I understand it correctly (she told she turned out fine, you pointed her out that in fact she didn't), I can see myself being in disagreement (depending on the full context). But unfriending over things like that? This surprises me. Their loss, sadly, they chose to form a bubble around themselves. Thanks for responding with details!
- arca_vorago 11y ago
  I wrote a long comment with some questions, but decided it was too wordy and wanted to just say this: I have some ideas about addressing some of these issues, and one of the things I haven't been able to figure a way around is in the differences in user ability or desire for interaction or level of effort. Therefore, I think that a good next-gen social media website is going to have to offer multiple levels of interaction depending on the level of the user themselves. For example, some users want twitter level interaction. <200 character headlines, <200 character comments Others want a bit of expansion, maybe some commentary, but nothing too cumbersome or technical. Another group wants citations for everything, but may not want discussion too extensively. Yet another group wants extensive discussion that flows ideas back and forth, and educates all participants. Another group wants both citations and discussion (I know it's hard to seperate, but bear with me). To me, the fundamental mistake is that we are throwing all users of all types into a pool of mediocrity, to the point where perhaps trolling is somewhat limited, but excellence in discussion is also limited due to interuptions of the limited trolling. The troll doesn't want to and generally can't participate in the lengthy discussion. So my proposed social media site works in two ways: 1) Stories are segmented into expected level of complexity. Eg, there is a twitter version of a story, a short paragraph version of story, an article version of story, and an extensive version with citations version of story. Any user can access whichever level they choose at any time... but... 2) Posting, instead of arbitrary points which tend to be about liking vs disliking arguments despite things like reddiquette, is about two factors.. quality of comment (upvotes but no downvotes for comment quality) and logical strength regardless of position, handed out in a slashdot style random mod distribution to those who opt in to participate in logical analysis of comments... Users all start with limited commenting and submission capabilities. As a user shows they are adding value though, they get more priviledges, and conversely, as trolls troll, they get temp and perma-bans based on level. (so a troll can still troll the twitter level comments, but not the citation level comments) What do you think about a system like this, or do you have any other ideas on how to defeat this kind of warping of the social media world without excluding the users who just want to make pun threads all day? The bottom line is that I want a way to encourage and reward logical and rational discussion and debate for all levels of users, but allow users who wish to remain stagnant to at least participate in the way they so desire.
dest 11y ago
As a search provider, DuckDuckGo tries to prevent the "gated community" syndrom: http://dontbubble.us/ http://dontbubble.us/
- tim333 11y ago
  I tried their test of googling for "guns" as usual, in incognito mode and using another browser. Identical results. Dunno if I'm doing it wrong?
  - jstanley 11y ago
    If you're not into guns, it probably won't make any difference.
    - tim333 11y ago
      Ah that might be it. I tried 'singularity' and there was a slight difference.
    - andrey-g 11y ago
      Same results and I'm way too much into guns.
  - pferde 11y ago
    It just might mean that they saw through your "It's not me, it's someone else" charade.
- raverbashing 11y ago
  Yeah, too bad it fails at some searches and falling back to google is needed For controversial stuff, the bubble is definitely a minus. For factual queries, it just makes things easier (yes, when I type 'python' I don't mean the reptile)
  - eggie 11y ago
    How does it fail for you? I persisted and find that although the results are different, they are often just different. Once I became used to DDG it's started to seem like Google is the broken one. It did take a while for me to switch, maybe 3 tries before it was working right.
secondtimeuse 11y ago
That's a ridiculous headline to derive from analysis of published article with title "The spreading of misinformation online". Sure the idea that Facebook makes us dumber might have some truth in it. But it cannot be fairly evaluated unless one proves that the alternative Network Television or Grandma email forwards were not making us even more dumber before Facebook rose to prominence.
- lubos 11y ago
  I think the problem with the article is that it doesn't dig deep enough. For example, Facebook news feed is driven by an algorithm to push posts you are likely to be interested in. Liking an anti-vaccination post or anti-immigration post will surely result in more similar content in your news feed. So Facebook inadvertently might be reinforcing confirmation bias more than anything else due to content being filtered and personalized to you only.
v4n4d1s 11y ago
Facebook makes smart people smarter and dumb people dumber. Same as with every other technology / medium.
- seanhandley 11y ago
  And it doesn't make dumb people smarter and smart people dumber?
  - mseebach 11y ago
    It doesn't do either of those; as always, reality is complex and doesn't boil down to soundbite slogans. Hacker News is making us dumber.
  - amelius 11y ago
    It makes dumb people look smarter, to the chagrin of smart people.
- tim333 11y ago
  Not Wikipedia.
venomsnake 11y ago
Being extreme in a group is signalling. Which explains the echo chambers that form.
tomp 11y ago
Hm... the alternative explanation is, people were always dumb, Facebook (and internet in general) just makes it more apparent by giving us more oportunities to display our stupidity.
- JulianMorrison 11y ago
  Or: people were always tribal and concerned more with shibboleths identifying the in-group than truth. Facebook (and Tumblr and Reddit, etc, even HN) just automates it.
  - arama471 11y ago
    I disagree with Tumblr and Reddit being compared with Facebook in this regard, and completley disagree that HN is in anyway similar in this regard. Facebook will automatically stop showing you things you disagree with, whilst it has to be a conscious choice on your part on Reddit and Facebook. On HN you don't actually get to choose the content in any meaningful way, and therefore have no means of creating an echo chamber for yourself through other means then down voting.
    - humanrebar 11y ago
      I agree with your assessment of things other than to point out that HN is already an echo chamber to some degree.
- ajuc 11y ago
  > Before I used internet for the first time I had no idea how many stupid people there are [Stanisław Lem]
  - kaybe 11y ago
    That was supposed to be up, not down..
amelius 11y ago
Actually, I've noticed that when people post misinformation in the form of a link to an article, FB often has some "See also" items posted below it that debunk the story.
ilitirit 11y ago
It would be interesting to study Simulacra and Simulation when it comes to social media and memes. People tend to align themselves with other people and communities who share similar beliefs. You can often see this where people Like and Share these meme images with some "profound" message (eg. "A real man/woman ...") when they like, agree with or find interesting for some or other reason. So, what IMO would be interesting to see is how these things changes their world view and self-image. Are they replacing the reality of life with a simulacra (the meme; Social Media "friends" I supposed can be argued to be another simulacra)? How much more likely are they to like/share to share posts from others who they perceive to have similar world-views, even if they know very little about the topic? How likely are they to defend ideas which they only have by virtue of their social connection to other people? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation
DanielBMarkham 11y ago
Yes, everybody has always been like this, but tech has changed the social nature of interaction. It's not just Facebook. Any online community (including HN) has a desire to limit conflict -- you want people enjoying themselves and contributing. That means "Don't show me stuff that I disagree with" There's a natural conflict of interest. In the real world, we are forced to live with and confront those of widely varying opinions. Many times this is a huge pain in the ass. But it's good for the species overall. Over time, initially unpopular and ugly opinions get vetted: about one in a 100/1000 turn out to be a critical evolution in the way all of us think about ourselves. In the virtual world, no such limits exist. We cannot afford to have the 1% folks who destroy discourse, so we just magically make them not exist. People share and promote emotional things which the vast majority can agree on. Instead of the outliers driving change, we begin to norm down those farther and farther out on the bell curve. So people turn inward to their phones and tribes. We physically live next to each other, but we don't actually live with each other. Instead of a diverse and accomplished species, we are slowly becoming one large, comfortable mob.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Call me biased, but pretty much every on-line community I've seen in the past 15 years had no desire to limit disagreements. All they wanted is to get rid of assholes. It's the same on HN and on your Facebook feed, as it was on the old topical boards and mailing lists. You can argue for any controversial position you like as long as you do this in a civil and substantial way. What ends up happening is people getting split into two camps - those who can discuss things in a detached way and learn from them, and assholes who just want to call people names. Or, in terms of pg's hierarchy of disagreement[0], groups tend to split somewhere around DH3-DH4 level. Which is totally fine, IMO. Unfortunately most Internet denizens seem to be in the "DH3 and below" group. What we need to figure out is how to make them abandon their ways and join the civilized world. [0] - http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html
  - spydum 11y ago
    While I agree with you, this did have me giggling a bit: > and assholes who just want to call people names.
cronjobber 11y ago
> Can anything be done? Should anything be done? Entertain the possibility that what is observed is not really about the "facts," but intragroup signalling serving to maintain group cohesion. But yeah, since we all hate those groups...
deleted 11y ago
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- golergka 11y ago
  No, people are not dumber. Their dumbness is just more visible is all.
- tastycw 11y ago
  Careful not to cut yourself on that edge
sly_foxx 11y ago
What I don't get is dumb companies who post a link to their FB(or some other social media) page on their site: 1. You're advertising another company for free. Is Facebook paying you to put their logo on your site? No. 2. When people like/follow your page, they are trapped by FB(or some other social media) and you can only reach them there. If you're banned or they pull bait-and-switch on you, like Facebook did, you've wasted all this time building user base for Facebook and not building your business. 3. You can't even reach them on Facebook, because you now have to pay Facebook to reach people that have already liked your page. 4. Posting on social media wastes a lot of time and money(tools + people). - Compare this to getting an email address from your visitors: 1. You are in control of your list. 2. You can reach them anywhere & anytime almost for free.
- geocar 11y ago
  People are much less likely to enter in their email address and join a mailing list about dishsoap, than they are to click a "like" button next to an advertisement for dishsoap. That you can pay Facebook to reach those people again has value, that's why people do it.
  - randycupertino 11y ago
    Huh. I do the opposite. I might sign up for direct emails about dishsoap, but I'd be too embarrassed to let facebook spam all my friends that I like melonball cotton candy dishsoap, so I'll NEVER publicly "like" it. I'm really meticulous about only liking things that I don't mind if people know I support the company/product. So, basically I like my coffeehouse and my dive bar and that's about it.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      Note: Facebook is quite inconspicuous about displaying fanpage likes; i.e. your friends will probably miss the information that you've liked some fanpage. Each of your friends most likely has hundreds of books, movies and commercial venues liked (you can check that in their profile), and you probably haven't seen a single one of them popping up on your timeline.
DominikR 11y ago
> Once people discover that others agree with them, they become more confident -- and then more extreme. And then the example plus explanation. > Arriving at these judgments on your own, you might well hold them tentatively and with a fair degree of humility. But after you learn that a lot of people agree with you, you are likely to end up with much greater certainty This mechanism is considered extreme? Why? When a lot of people agree with me on some issue then naturally I'll be more confident in expressing my views. So what if Facebook pairs tin foil hat wearers together so they can share their views? I doubt that they'll start believing that they are now the mainstream. I suspect that the writer of this article just deeply resents the fact that persons with out of the norm beliefs or thoughts can now effectively organise and exchange ideas which in turn directly threatens the journalists monopoly on creating the mainstream narrative. It is a good thing that ideas and views from other perspectives are now widely available online. You now can watch RT and then CNN or FOX and conclude that basically all of these channels are just feeding us propaganda crap with different goals.
ThomPete 11y ago
What most people forget about networks like Facebook (or twitter for that matter) is that just a misinformation can spread quickly, corrections of that information can to. What FB have helped with is to make sure that neither newspapers nor politicians will be able to communicate in a vacuum. What we see now is the first steps of a more enlightened society not a dumber one because dissent both gets normalized and much better access to minds it didn't before. Of course there is going to be people who think alike or people who only befriend people who think exactly like them. But the second they want to spread their gospel outside their groups they are going to be met with a lot of other perspectives and thats a good thing.
lugus35 11y ago
What social networks bring is the explosion of the hierarchy of information that mainstream media and politicians imposed on us for decades. That's why a lot of media/politics criticizes social networks because it questions their role and place in the society.
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stn 11y ago
I guess it's also amplified by the fact that people tend to accept things as true by default, until it's proven otherwise. In other words, insertion of data is the way cheaper then its invalidation and probably happen much more frequently thanks to social media.
- deepvibrations 11y ago
  Agree- I think an anonymous dislike button might help catch some of the bs posts- I know I would certainly use it a lot on my feed! At the very least, it would make the poster consider what they have posted in some cases and realise that people do not agree with or trust the content within that post.
y04nn 11y ago
Few years ago Facebook was supposed to work with media to improve the activity feed. But from my perspective it is just became as bad as it can be, it gives me no relevant information and 80% of it is garbage. When close friends post something interesting, it does not get promoted and rapidity falls in the bottom. Filtering out noise in annoying so I end up not using Facebook as I used to. What describe the article is not a Facebook problem, it's an Internet problem, Google and Youtube make you as dumb as Facebook does.
- mercer 11y ago
  In a broader sense I'd say it's also a societal problem. Growing up in a more traditional society as well as a Christian community, I had to deal with a huge variety of people and opinions on a regular basis, whereas nowadays the default is to associate with 'people I like', which tend to be people I agree with. And because others do likewise, it's difficult to actively counteract that, much as I try. Of course there were some strong biases in these 'older' communities too (views on sexuality, abortion, etc.), but generally speaking people inside them varied greatly in political views, social class, upbringing, lifestyle, habits, and so on. It gave a face to many opinions that I would consider offensive or dangerous, and by extension an understanding and empathy that is much more difficult to have these days (for me). I fear for the future of our societies (and social safeties) in part because of this. Changing views often starts with mutual respect, and that's much more difficult to do when opinions get separated from those who hold them, and when interaction is increasingly opt-in.
rdlecler1 11y ago
I'm generally curious whether or not most people on HN still actively use their Facebook account.
- krisdol 11y ago
  I rarely participate in commenting/sharing/liking like I used to years ago, and I don't click any links on it anymore, but I do still check it several times a week.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Make a poll? I use mine actively, but from the discussions here it sems I'm in the minority.
- swiley 11y ago
  I use it for events.
- neogodless 11y ago
  Of course the members of this tribe would certainly enjoy believing that we are above that tribe.
nkozyra 11y ago
Probably not a small nitpick, really, but the article explains not that we're dumber by using Facebook, but that we are less informed. I think that's an important distinction not only because people tend to conflate knowledge and intelligence/aptitude, but because we should worry as much about spending long amounts of time doing things that provide not even nominal information to keep our brains pliable and receptive to new knowledge and new ways of thinking.
- neogodless 11y ago
  I think I disagree. We actually spread lots and lots of "information" via Facebook. In other words, we're "very informed" (whether it's arguably correct information is another story.) But we are, really, becoming more rigid in opinions due to this "information" which means, we are less receptive to new knowledge and new ways of thinking. (I think, in the big picture, our opinions on this overall point do align, so please don't completely disregard my comment :).)
hellofunk 11y ago
There have already been studies showing that frequent visits to FB make a person more unhappy in their overall life. Now this. So, a major worldwide internet power -- that is, a single company -- that is trying to disrupt so much of global life (India, anyone?), with the interesting side effect that it makes people unhappy and less intelligent. If you had heard this "reality" 20 years ago, you wouldn't believe the future could be so dark.
- cryoshon 11y ago
  Yep, a major worldwide internet power has vested interest in mining data from its billions of users via its product, which is broadly detrimental to those users. To be honest, it seems a lot like the oil companies: major worldwide energy powers with vested interest in extracting fossil fuels from the earth then selling them to billions of users to burn, which is detrimental to everyone. A lot of these mega-scale corporations manage to get away with mass-scale detrimental effects because of a general state of addiction to their product, which was legitimately new and useful at an earlier point in time. That, and after a certain point they become too powerful for any one country to stop.
  - hellofunk 11y ago
    Also, because laws are only a subset of the many ways a society handles, judges, and distinguishes detrimental actions. Laws can only do so much.
meeper16 11y ago
I've never used facebook/AOL, never plan to. I use the Internet.
petke 11y ago
For all its faults, old fashioned broadcast media was better in a way. It spread information to you whether you agreed with it or not. Having a strong opinion on anything was rare, because for all you knew you where alone with your views. You where not exposed to as many like-minded people. There wasn't this feedback loop where you decided what information to spread on to that group of people, and they decided what to spread back to you.
sjclemmy 11y ago
Facebook annoys me so much, I've stopped using it. It really is like an addiction. We've outsourced our feelings of belonging to Facebook. We want to be careful with that.
meeper16 11y ago
This was made true by the founder of facebook calling his own users "dumb fucks" https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=mark%20zuckerberg%20dumb%20fucks https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...
meeper16 11y ago
The founder fecesbook called his own users "dumb fucks" He knew that mostly idiots would user facebook similar to AOL users.
- dang 11y ago
  Please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10880034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10880034 and marked it off-topic.
hussong 11y ago
In Germany, vast parts of Facebook have become one big ugly hate fest. I've read so much utterly terrible crap in the past few days (in the aftermath of the NYE events in Germany), that I'm still sick to the stomach. People are completely resistant to any facts contradicting their favorite narrative and flagging is useless (moderation is a joke). Same for YouTube btw. edit: typos
things 11y ago
I'm not a facebook user but this just seems to be another article on the filter bubble.
div0 11y ago
So the study confirms that people naturally trust what their friends are posting, which then confirms that trust is what bonds friends together. I view Facebook as a means to strengthen existing "physical" friendship, rather than a place to get unbiased information. So in that sense this is neither surprising, nor detrimental. Imagine what will happen if your friends start correcting your political views... For less biased information, please refer to twitter. And please don't mix Facebook friends with twitter followings.
mcs_ 11y ago
I understood I have less than 10 contacts in my life after closing fb 5 years ago.

135 points by zabramow 11y ago

Reddit too. I just wrote 500 words without using any logical fallacies backing up my assertions with scientific studies from trusted sources, why does my comment have -12 points without a single person taking the time to refute my position in a comment? I believe managed, licenced hunting in Africa supports conservation efforts, there is no reason ever to spank or hit a child, all children should be vaccinated, and pitbulls are dangerous. So, most people have unfriended and/or blocked me on Facebook. Now I live in a bubble. I'm not bothered by people who don't agree with me. I'm bothered by people who can't debate these topics without getting riled up. The African hunting topic ended with someone threatening my little sister. I can understand the business decision behind letting people live in a bubble.

tim333 11y ago
>why does my comment have -12 points Some views are unappealing at an emotional level without much reasoning coming in to it?
danieltillett 11y ago
Just out of curiosity why do you think children should never be spanked? Do you have children?
- DanBC 11y ago
  It's always a failure of parenting. It's abusive - it's an abuse the the rights of the child. It's ineffective. You always hear some fucking idiot saying "my child ran out into the street, so I hit him". Hear the useless parent put their child at risk of harm by not teaching the child about road safety, by not providing adequate supervision in a dangerous situation, and then punishing the child for the parent's lack of skill. "I hit my children" is no different from "I hit my spouse" or "I hit my employees".
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    It is not ineffective. I don't have to smack my children now they are older, but when they were very young reasoning with them was not an option. I think we can avoid false emotional comparisons between spanking a young child and beating your wife.
- zappo2938 11y ago
  I'm not going to say that spanking isn't an effective way to discipline a child. I can also understand if a 3 year old walks into a street to feel like spanking the child. There is overwhelming scientific evidence that other forms of discipline for small children are more effective at correcting behavior and children who are spanked are often more violent towards other children with other developmental and learning problems in school. Also, what we can do is look at how adjusted, happy, and successful people are in life, whether they are a doctor or lawyer with their own practice, divorced, in jail for violent crimes, or if they have a drug or psychological problems and compare that to whether they were spanked or worse as children. What we discover is that people who were not spanked or spanked very sparingly for example only in the case they walked out into the street do much, much better in life. So if you have children and want to play the numbers game, it might be worth while to explore other ways of disciplining your child. Not only do they work, but they have better long term effects on the child.
  - dash2 11y ago
    Just out of interest, what is the overwhelming scientific evidence? Is it causal or just correlational? Because I can imagine tons of reasons why children who are often spanked have more problems in school - not least, reverse causality - that would not imply you should never spank your child.
    - danieltillett 11y ago
      I actually don’t think that there is any evidence of mild smacking being a major problem. Child abuse (beating of children is very bad), but measuring the effects of a rare and relatively minor event in a child’s life is very hard.
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    OK it sounds like you are actually of the belief that spanking should be rare, rather than never. In this I agree, but I do think from personal experience that spanking is a useful "thermonuclear" option to stop dangerous behaviour in young children. To give you an example, I once caught one of my children at the age of two inserting objects into electrical power points. I gave him a good spank on the bottom and he never did it again. It is possible that another solution would have worked, but when you are dealing with a two year old playing with electricity do you really want to take the chance with another options? If spanking is rare children quickly learn that to get a spank means they have crossed a no-go threshold. My limited personal experience of the results of disincline (of all kinds) is that inconsistent or random discipline from a parent is worse than almost all others. Children who live in fear of being disciplined for what appears to them to be for no reason, or where their actual behaviour plays very little role in affecting the discipline they experience, fair far worse. It is really hard as a parent, but being consistent is critically important. No means no.
- warkid 11y ago
  Imagine there are giant creatures(like 5-6 meter tall) and they are proportionally stronger than you. They follow you everywhere and(though they wash and feed you) they also sometimes hit you with their huge palms?
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    I have quite a good memory of my childhood and my complaints about it are not over the occasional smack I received, but of the arbitrary and inconsistent nature of the punishment I received. Like the powerless everywhere, children are strong advocates of justice and rules and they absolutely hate inconsistent and arbitrary displays of power.
pjc50 11y ago
I just wrote 500 words without using any logical fallacies backing up my assertions with scientific studies from trusted sources This is why you're getting downvoted. That's not how you convince people.
- askafriend 11y ago
  I think that might be the crux of the issue. Convincing people and making a logical argument aren't the same thing and are only tangentially related. The former requires a level of emotional intelligence and coercion in addition to any logical arguments. Why? Because people are people and they will only resent you if you just mechanically present arguments even if you're 100% right. They will look for any reason to say you're wrong even if it doesn't make sense. That's why sometimes, it's just not worth participating in some arguments. Context matters.
  - lorenzhs 11y ago
    The candidates in the current US election cycle demonstrate this quite well.
eaandkw 11y ago
Most people argue and make appeals to emotion not logic. I have noticed this myself. I think it mostly comes from not knowing what or how to make an argument. For instance if I state a argument such as Premise 1: All men are mortal. Premise 2: Socrates is a man. Conclusion: Therefore, Socrates is a mortal. To refute my argument someone would have to demonstrate how my first two premises or my conclusion was wrong. Usually everyone just bashes the conclusions but never refutes the premises of the argument.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
It's charitable to assume, like other commenters did, that your comment was totally fine, but I have to ask - what was the tone of it? And how did it happen that people actually unfriended you on Facebook? The other potential reason is that you posted it to the wrong community. There are, unfortunately, groups of people who get the more angry the more you try to back up your point with science. Best to avoid those. They can be convinced, but it requires a lot of work and careful dancing around their egos. > The African hunting topic ended with someone threatening my little sister. What the hell. Who are these people? :o. I'm sorry this happened to you and I totally support staying away from such groups.
- zappo2938 11y ago
  The problem is that my ideas through the Reddit algorithm sink to the bottom and RES will automatically hide them if they fall below a threshold. This is another case of an algorithm creating an opinion bubble. As for being unfriended on Facebook, people are passionate about not getting their children vaccinated. I lost a couple friends over that. One woman posted a picture with text that said, "My parents spanked me and I turned out fine." I donated money and time to do Facebook marketing for a charity concert for a local homeless non-profit last year. They do awesome work getting people off the streets where I live, but they are weird. I didn't know the women well but my response about her being a recovered heroin addict and not being fine ruffled a lot of people's feathers. That ended with a bunch of people unfriending me too.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Uh, I see. Yeah, Reddit has this problem; I've noticed new subreddits often changing the top-level comment sorting order to counter exactly that effect. I can see how the issue with that woman could cause some opposition - if I understand it correctly (she told she turned out fine, you pointed her out that in fact she didn't), I can see myself being in disagreement (depending on the full context). But unfriending over things like that? This surprises me. Their loss, sadly, they chose to form a bubble around themselves. Thanks for responding with details!
arca_vorago 11y ago
I wrote a long comment with some questions, but decided it was too wordy and wanted to just say this: I have some ideas about addressing some of these issues, and one of the things I haven't been able to figure a way around is in the differences in user ability or desire for interaction or level of effort. Therefore, I think that a good next-gen social media website is going to have to offer multiple levels of interaction depending on the level of the user themselves. For example, some users want twitter level interaction. <200 character headlines, <200 character comments Others want a bit of expansion, maybe some commentary, but nothing too cumbersome or technical. Another group wants citations for everything, but may not want discussion too extensively. Yet another group wants extensive discussion that flows ideas back and forth, and educates all participants. Another group wants both citations and discussion (I know it's hard to seperate, but bear with me). To me, the fundamental mistake is that we are throwing all users of all types into a pool of mediocrity, to the point where perhaps trolling is somewhat limited, but excellence in discussion is also limited due to interuptions of the limited trolling. The troll doesn't want to and generally can't participate in the lengthy discussion. So my proposed social media site works in two ways: 1) Stories are segmented into expected level of complexity. Eg, there is a twitter version of a story, a short paragraph version of story, an article version of story, and an extensive version with citations version of story. Any user can access whichever level they choose at any time... but... 2) Posting, instead of arbitrary points which tend to be about liking vs disliking arguments despite things like reddiquette, is about two factors.. quality of comment (upvotes but no downvotes for comment quality) and logical strength regardless of position, handed out in a slashdot style random mod distribution to those who opt in to participate in logical analysis of comments... Users all start with limited commenting and submission capabilities. As a user shows they are adding value though, they get more priviledges, and conversely, as trolls troll, they get temp and perma-bans based on level. (so a troll can still troll the twitter level comments, but not the citation level comments) What do you think about a system like this, or do you have any other ideas on how to defeat this kind of warping of the social media world without excluding the users who just want to make pun threads all day? The bottom line is that I want a way to encourage and reward logical and rational discussion and debate for all levels of users, but allow users who wish to remain stagnant to at least participate in the way they so desire.

dest 11y ago

As a search provider, DuckDuckGo tries to prevent the "gated community" syndrom: http://dontbubble.us/ http://dontbubble.us/

tim333 11y ago
I tried their test of googling for "guns" as usual, in incognito mode and using another browser. Identical results. Dunno if I'm doing it wrong?
- jstanley 11y ago
  If you're not into guns, it probably won't make any difference.
  - tim333 11y ago
    Ah that might be it. I tried 'singularity' and there was a slight difference.
  - andrey-g 11y ago
    Same results and I'm way too much into guns.
- pferde 11y ago
  It just might mean that they saw through your "It's not me, it's someone else" charade.
raverbashing 11y ago
Yeah, too bad it fails at some searches and falling back to google is needed For controversial stuff, the bubble is definitely a minus. For factual queries, it just makes things easier (yes, when I type 'python' I don't mean the reptile)
- eggie 11y ago
  How does it fail for you? I persisted and find that although the results are different, they are often just different. Once I became used to DDG it's started to seem like Google is the broken one. It did take a while for me to switch, maybe 3 tries before it was working right.

secondtimeuse 11y ago

That's a ridiculous headline to derive from analysis of published article with title "The spreading of misinformation online". Sure the idea that Facebook makes us dumber might have some truth in it. But it cannot be fairly evaluated unless one proves that the alternative Network Television or Grandma email forwards were not making us even more dumber before Facebook rose to prominence.

lubos 11y ago
I think the problem with the article is that it doesn't dig deep enough. For example, Facebook news feed is driven by an algorithm to push posts you are likely to be interested in. Liking an anti-vaccination post or anti-immigration post will surely result in more similar content in your news feed. So Facebook inadvertently might be reinforcing confirmation bias more than anything else due to content being filtered and personalized to you only.

v4n4d1s 11y ago

Facebook makes smart people smarter and dumb people dumber. Same as with every other technology / medium.

seanhandley 11y ago
And it doesn't make dumb people smarter and smart people dumber?
- mseebach 11y ago
  It doesn't do either of those; as always, reality is complex and doesn't boil down to soundbite slogans. Hacker News is making us dumber.
- amelius 11y ago
  It makes dumb people look smarter, to the chagrin of smart people.
tim333 11y ago
Not Wikipedia.

venomsnake 11y ago

Being extreme in a group is signalling. Which explains the echo chambers that form.

tomp 11y ago

Hm... the alternative explanation is, people were always dumb, Facebook (and internet in general) just makes it more apparent by giving us more oportunities to display our stupidity.

JulianMorrison 11y ago
Or: people were always tribal and concerned more with shibboleths identifying the in-group than truth. Facebook (and Tumblr and Reddit, etc, even HN) just automates it.
- arama471 11y ago
  I disagree with Tumblr and Reddit being compared with Facebook in this regard, and completley disagree that HN is in anyway similar in this regard. Facebook will automatically stop showing you things you disagree with, whilst it has to be a conscious choice on your part on Reddit and Facebook. On HN you don't actually get to choose the content in any meaningful way, and therefore have no means of creating an echo chamber for yourself through other means then down voting.
  - humanrebar 11y ago
    I agree with your assessment of things other than to point out that HN is already an echo chamber to some degree.
ajuc 11y ago
> Before I used internet for the first time I had no idea how many stupid people there are [Stanisław Lem]
- kaybe 11y ago
  That was supposed to be up, not down..

amelius 11y ago

Actually, I've noticed that when people post misinformation in the form of a link to an article, FB often has some "See also" items posted below it that debunk the story.

ilitirit 11y ago

It would be interesting to study Simulacra and Simulation when it comes to social media and memes. People tend to align themselves with other people and communities who share similar beliefs. You can often see this where people Like and Share these meme images with some "profound" message (eg. "A real man/woman ...") when they like, agree with or find interesting for some or other reason. So, what IMO would be interesting to see is how these things changes their world view and self-image. Are they replacing the reality of life with a simulacra (the meme; Social Media "friends" I supposed can be argued to be another simulacra)? How much more likely are they to like/share to share posts from others who they perceive to have similar world-views, even if they know very little about the topic? How likely are they to defend ideas which they only have by virtue of their social connection to other people? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation

DanielBMarkham 11y ago

Yes, everybody has always been like this, but tech has changed the social nature of interaction. It's not just Facebook. Any online community (including HN) has a desire to limit conflict -- you want people enjoying themselves and contributing. That means "Don't show me stuff that I disagree with" There's a natural conflict of interest. In the real world, we are forced to live with and confront those of widely varying opinions. Many times this is a huge pain in the ass. But it's good for the species overall. Over time, initially unpopular and ugly opinions get vetted: about one in a 100/1000 turn out to be a critical evolution in the way all of us think about ourselves. In the virtual world, no such limits exist. We cannot afford to have the 1% folks who destroy discourse, so we just magically make them not exist. People share and promote emotional things which the vast majority can agree on. Instead of the outliers driving change, we begin to norm down those farther and farther out on the bell curve. So people turn inward to their phones and tribes. We physically live next to each other, but we don't actually live with each other. Instead of a diverse and accomplished species, we are slowly becoming one large, comfortable mob.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
Call me biased, but pretty much every on-line community I've seen in the past 15 years had no desire to limit disagreements. All they wanted is to get rid of assholes. It's the same on HN and on your Facebook feed, as it was on the old topical boards and mailing lists. You can argue for any controversial position you like as long as you do this in a civil and substantial way. What ends up happening is people getting split into two camps - those who can discuss things in a detached way and learn from them, and assholes who just want to call people names. Or, in terms of pg's hierarchy of disagreement[0], groups tend to split somewhere around DH3-DH4 level. Which is totally fine, IMO. Unfortunately most Internet denizens seem to be in the "DH3 and below" group. What we need to figure out is how to make them abandon their ways and join the civilized world. [0] - http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html
- spydum 11y ago
  While I agree with you, this did have me giggling a bit: > and assholes who just want to call people names.

cronjobber 11y ago

> Can anything be done? Should anything be done? Entertain the possibility that what is observed is not really about the "facts," but intragroup signalling serving to maintain group cohesion. But yeah, since we all hate those groups...

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

golergka 11y ago
No, people are not dumber. Their dumbness is just more visible is all.
tastycw 11y ago
Careful not to cut yourself on that edge

sly_foxx 11y ago

What I don't get is dumb companies who post a link to their FB(or some other social media) page on their site: 1. You're advertising another company for free. Is Facebook paying you to put their logo on your site? No. 2. When people like/follow your page, they are trapped by FB(or some other social media) and you can only reach them there. If you're banned or they pull bait-and-switch on you, like Facebook did, you've wasted all this time building user base for Facebook and not building your business. 3. You can't even reach them on Facebook, because you now have to pay Facebook to reach people that have already liked your page. 4. Posting on social media wastes a lot of time and money(tools + people). - Compare this to getting an email address from your visitors: 1. You are in control of your list. 2. You can reach them anywhere & anytime almost for free.

geocar 11y ago
People are much less likely to enter in their email address and join a mailing list about dishsoap, than they are to click a "like" button next to an advertisement for dishsoap. That you can pay Facebook to reach those people again has value, that's why people do it.
- randycupertino 11y ago
  Huh. I do the opposite. I might sign up for direct emails about dishsoap, but I'd be too embarrassed to let facebook spam all my friends that I like melonball cotton candy dishsoap, so I'll NEVER publicly "like" it. I'm really meticulous about only liking things that I don't mind if people know I support the company/product. So, basically I like my coffeehouse and my dive bar and that's about it.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Note: Facebook is quite inconspicuous about displaying fanpage likes; i.e. your friends will probably miss the information that you've liked some fanpage. Each of your friends most likely has hundreds of books, movies and commercial venues liked (you can check that in their profile), and you probably haven't seen a single one of them popping up on your timeline.

DominikR 11y ago

> Once people discover that others agree with them, they become more confident -- and then more extreme. And then the example plus explanation. > Arriving at these judgments on your own, you might well hold them tentatively and with a fair degree of humility. But after you learn that a lot of people agree with you, you are likely to end up with much greater certainty This mechanism is considered extreme? Why? When a lot of people agree with me on some issue then naturally I'll be more confident in expressing my views. So what if Facebook pairs tin foil hat wearers together so they can share their views? I doubt that they'll start believing that they are now the mainstream. I suspect that the writer of this article just deeply resents the fact that persons with out of the norm beliefs or thoughts can now effectively organise and exchange ideas which in turn directly threatens the journalists monopoly on creating the mainstream narrative. It is a good thing that ideas and views from other perspectives are now widely available online. You now can watch RT and then CNN or FOX and conclude that basically all of these channels are just feeding us propaganda crap with different goals.

ThomPete 11y ago

What most people forget about networks like Facebook (or twitter for that matter) is that just a misinformation can spread quickly, corrections of that information can to. What FB have helped with is to make sure that neither newspapers nor politicians will be able to communicate in a vacuum. What we see now is the first steps of a more enlightened society not a dumber one because dissent both gets normalized and much better access to minds it didn't before. Of course there is going to be people who think alike or people who only befriend people who think exactly like them. But the second they want to spread their gospel outside their groups they are going to be met with a lot of other perspectives and thats a good thing.

lugus35 11y ago

What social networks bring is the explosion of the hierarchy of information that mainstream media and politicians imposed on us for decades. That's why a lot of media/politics criticizes social networks because it questions their role and place in the society.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

stn 11y ago

I guess it's also amplified by the fact that people tend to accept things as true by default, until it's proven otherwise. In other words, insertion of data is the way cheaper then its invalidation and probably happen much more frequently thanks to social media.

deepvibrations 11y ago
Agree- I think an anonymous dislike button might help catch some of the bs posts- I know I would certainly use it a lot on my feed! At the very least, it would make the poster consider what they have posted in some cases and realise that people do not agree with or trust the content within that post.

y04nn 11y ago

Few years ago Facebook was supposed to work with media to improve the activity feed. But from my perspective it is just became as bad as it can be, it gives me no relevant information and 80% of it is garbage. When close friends post something interesting, it does not get promoted and rapidity falls in the bottom. Filtering out noise in annoying so I end up not using Facebook as I used to. What describe the article is not a Facebook problem, it's an Internet problem, Google and Youtube make you as dumb as Facebook does.

mercer 11y ago
In a broader sense I'd say it's also a societal problem. Growing up in a more traditional society as well as a Christian community, I had to deal with a huge variety of people and opinions on a regular basis, whereas nowadays the default is to associate with 'people I like', which tend to be people I agree with. And because others do likewise, it's difficult to actively counteract that, much as I try. Of course there were some strong biases in these 'older' communities too (views on sexuality, abortion, etc.), but generally speaking people inside them varied greatly in political views, social class, upbringing, lifestyle, habits, and so on. It gave a face to many opinions that I would consider offensive or dangerous, and by extension an understanding and empathy that is much more difficult to have these days (for me). I fear for the future of our societies (and social safeties) in part because of this. Changing views often starts with mutual respect, and that's much more difficult to do when opinions get separated from those who hold them, and when interaction is increasingly opt-in.

rdlecler1 11y ago

I'm generally curious whether or not most people on HN still actively use their Facebook account.

krisdol 11y ago
I rarely participate in commenting/sharing/liking like I used to years ago, and I don't click any links on it anymore, but I do still check it several times a week.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
Make a poll? I use mine actively, but from the discussions here it sems I'm in the minority.
swiley 11y ago
I use it for events.
neogodless 11y ago
Of course the members of this tribe would certainly enjoy believing that we are above that tribe.

nkozyra 11y ago

Probably not a small nitpick, really, but the article explains not that we're dumber by using Facebook, but that we are less informed. I think that's an important distinction not only because people tend to conflate knowledge and intelligence/aptitude, but because we should worry as much about spending long amounts of time doing things that provide not even nominal information to keep our brains pliable and receptive to new knowledge and new ways of thinking.

neogodless 11y ago
I think I disagree. We actually spread lots and lots of "information" via Facebook. In other words, we're "very informed" (whether it's arguably correct information is another story.) But we are, really, becoming more rigid in opinions due to this "information" which means, we are less receptive to new knowledge and new ways of thinking. (I think, in the big picture, our opinions on this overall point do align, so please don't completely disregard my comment :).)

hellofunk 11y ago

There have already been studies showing that frequent visits to FB make a person more unhappy in their overall life. Now this. So, a major worldwide internet power -- that is, a single company -- that is trying to disrupt so much of global life (India, anyone?), with the interesting side effect that it makes people unhappy and less intelligent. If you had heard this "reality" 20 years ago, you wouldn't believe the future could be so dark.

cryoshon 11y ago
Yep, a major worldwide internet power has vested interest in mining data from its billions of users via its product, which is broadly detrimental to those users. To be honest, it seems a lot like the oil companies: major worldwide energy powers with vested interest in extracting fossil fuels from the earth then selling them to billions of users to burn, which is detrimental to everyone. A lot of these mega-scale corporations manage to get away with mass-scale detrimental effects because of a general state of addiction to their product, which was legitimately new and useful at an earlier point in time. That, and after a certain point they become too powerful for any one country to stop.
- hellofunk 11y ago
  Also, because laws are only a subset of the many ways a society handles, judges, and distinguishes detrimental actions. Laws can only do so much.

meeper16 11y ago

I've never used facebook/AOL, never plan to. I use the Internet.

petke 11y ago

For all its faults, old fashioned broadcast media was better in a way. It spread information to you whether you agreed with it or not. Having a strong opinion on anything was rare, because for all you knew you where alone with your views. You where not exposed to as many like-minded people. There wasn't this feedback loop where you decided what information to spread on to that group of people, and they decided what to spread back to you.

sjclemmy 11y ago

Facebook annoys me so much, I've stopped using it. It really is like an addiction. We've outsourced our feelings of belonging to Facebook. We want to be careful with that.

meeper16 11y ago

This was made true by the founder of facebook calling his own users "dumb fucks" https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=mark%20zuckerberg%20dumb%20fucks https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

meeper16 11y ago

The founder fecesbook called his own users "dumb fucks" He knew that mostly idiots would user facebook similar to AOL users.

dang 11y ago
Please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10880034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10880034 and marked it off-topic.

hussong 11y ago

In Germany, vast parts of Facebook have become one big ugly hate fest. I've read so much utterly terrible crap in the past few days (in the aftermath of the NYE events in Germany), that I'm still sick to the stomach. People are completely resistant to any facts contradicting their favorite narrative and flagging is useless (moderation is a joke). Same for YouTube btw. edit: typos

things 11y ago

I'm not a facebook user but this just seems to be another article on the filter bubble.

div0 11y ago

So the study confirms that people naturally trust what their friends are posting, which then confirms that trust is what bonds friends together. I view Facebook as a means to strengthen existing "physical" friendship, rather than a place to get unbiased information. So in that sense this is neither surprising, nor detrimental. Imagine what will happen if your friends start correcting your political views... For less biased information, please refer to twitter. And please don't mix Facebook friends with twitter followings.

mcs_ 11y ago

I understood I have less than 10 contacts in my life after closing fb 5 years ago.