8 ms·

The Majority Illusion in Social Networks

121 points by kurren 10y ago

edraferi 10y ago
We need a social network designed from the ground up to be a public square for civic discussion between people who disagree. We need mechanisms to agree on facts, and tools to create arguments supported by those facts.
- sievebrain 10y ago
  A nice ideal, but likely to be very difficult in practice, because in reality almost nobody disagrees on actual provable, scientific facts. The toughest disagreements usually arise around things which are not facts, but are presented as if they were. All human subcultures carry with them a large baggage of "facts" which the group accepts in order to promote social cohesion, avoid conflict or sometimes simply to advertise membership of the group. Try convincing a highly religious person that their religion is entirely fact-free, or that God doesn't exist using logic, and you will get nowhere: they prefer to believe things that other people don't because believing these things grants membership to a group and the benefits of that membership are perceived to outweigh the benefits of being a person of pure rationality. Indeed, a genuine belief that you are entirely rational is simply another form of group membership signalling: probably that you want to be seen as a member of the group "intellectuals" or "scientists" or possibly "educated people". Being unable to recognise the difficulty people have in being entirely rational is itself a form of irrationality. So to get back to your proposed social network, here's what would happen: it would very quickly become dominated by a particular pre-existing social subculture, probably "male internet geeks who believe themselves to be supremely rational" and their baggage of pseudo-facts would come along for the ride. This is NOT an argument against doing what you want to do. Even if the goal is unattainable, creating better discussion forums with better tools for raising the level of discussion is never a bad thing. Just don't think it'd solve the 'friendship paradox' discussed in the paper.
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    > Try convincing a highly religious person that their religion is entirely fact-free, or that God doesn't exist using logic, and you will get nowhere Lets keep religion out of HN, shall we? A lot of us actually seems to believe in some kind of deity/ies, we just dont mention it because we value HN as a common ground for technical and business discussions. If not I could tell you some stories about stupid, stubborn evil ateists as well :-P
    - hueving 10y ago
      >Lets keep religion out of HN, shall we? I think youre being a bit defensive. That statement might not apply to your religion, especially if it's one based on facts.
    - sievebrain 10y ago
      I did not mean my comments as an attack on religious people. I'm sorry you interpreted it that way. Quite the opposite: I tried to argue that despite the lack of factual evidence for the existence of gods, strongly believing in them anyway can make sense if membership of organised religion is attractive enough. I don't expect anyone who is religious to see it that way though, even though I've met many devout Christians who happily admit there is no factual proof of God and that is why they place their energies in faith instead.
      - reitanqild 10y ago
        Ok, thanks, I see. For me it was very easy to interpret as a general attack.
      - humanrebar 10y ago
        > I've met many devout Christians who happily admit there is no factual proof of God There are factual cases for God, some attempting to be proofs even. For example, many consider objective morality (race based slavery is bad, say) to be a case for absolute good, which is hard to explain by pure randomness. Faith, to a Christian, is making choices in the face of this problem. A Christian knows that everyone has to decide whether to follow God or not, and in that way, everyone has faith in some set of axioms. Many people (intelligent, kind, smart ones!) have immense faith that only matter and energy exist despite basically no proof in that metaphysical axiom. Despite how hard it is to explain this, it's actually a clear thought to a reasonably educated Christian. It's just hard to communicate since words like 'rational', 'proof', and 'facts' are overloaded and cause confusion in these sorts of conversations. In this way, the balkanization of our culture is a negative feedback loop as misunderstanding promotes division which promotes more misunderstanding. > strongly believing in them anyway can make sense if membership of organised religion is attractive enough The point of Christianity isn't being part of an organization. People who go to worship services because it's their favorite social club are actually criticized pretty heavily by Jesus in the Bible. To be fair, I think most churchgoers don't understand the implications of this.
- curiousgal 10y ago
  LessWrong, perhaps? If you can tolerate the smugness of course, but that's usually a side effect of most people who tend to be too logical, not just members of LessWrong.
  - Eerie 10y ago
    LessWrong is a self-selected community. It won't scale.
    - smallnamespace 10y ago
      > self-selected community as would be this one.
- nxzero 10y ago
  Social networks are by default designed to circumvent reasoning. True reason based system would require claims based on science - and nothing more. There would be no discussion.
  - merpnderp 10y ago
    A lot of the topics being discussed don't lend themselves to repeatable testable science. So lots of opinion and preconceived notions, or even just principles are involved in decision making. If these issues could be resolved by the scientific method, they likely would have already.
- ideonexus 10y ago
  I like science fiction author Dr. David Brin's idea of "Disputational Arenas," where issues are exhaustively and respectfully discussed in all their complex glory. http://www.davidbrin.com/disputation.html http://www.davidbrin.com/disputation.html The Economist will host something like this, where an issue is presented in an online forum and thoroughly debated until a consensus is established.
- Eerie 10y ago
  The best example of such a network is Wikipedia. Draw from that any conclusions you want.
  - brightball 10y ago
    The problem with Wikipedia is that is that it creates a huge barrier to seeing things that a regularly edited out as well as no means to verify whether things that were removed may have been verifiable.
    - jessaustin 10y ago
      That data is available. If some would find it valuable, perhaps another interface could be created to make the stream of edits more accessible? One can understand why that isn't the default focus of Wikipedia.
- bcook 10y ago
  Often though, the people who disagree are themselves the biggest hinderance to a useful conversation... right?
- internaut 10y ago
  I think you're describing a dialectic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic The problem with such a project (which I think could succeed without solving it) is that it is not merely the case that people disagree on the facts. They also disagree on the frame of reference. That may not be solvable.
  - mbrock 10y ago
    Consensus agreement would probably not be the goal of such a project, and there's no reason to expect or desire that (aside from the old idea that public reason leads to truth in political questions which by now seems rather silly).
    - internaut 10y ago
      If we were devising a government (or any other system) it would be productive to have consensus on some issues (who is the enemy) and not so on others (quantity of net redistribution). Just as there exists P space and NP space it ought to be possible to categorize questions for which there exist right and wrong answers (universal absolutes), and then a separate space for 'spectrum' questions whose answers are a matter of degree contingent on the feedback from the environment. Confusing these two types of questions when the answers are unknown is easy and can make you very wrong. I'll give a practical example that may be biased. Personally I believe moderate climatic change to be in the 2nd category* while biodiversity in the 1st category because a temperature can be ratcheted up or down (even if it took centuries or was expensive) whereas once a species is extinguished it is gone forever while the side affects are permanent. They are both serious problems but getting a category 1 question wrong makes the error baked in for the future. You'll remember numerous occasions when the government tried to defy the laws of biology or physics and this never ends well. Something I believe most politicians do not comprehend is that not every 'policy question' belongs to category 2. Something I believe most scientists do not comprehend is that not every political question belongs to category 1. > aside from the old idea that public reason leads to truth in political questions which by now seems rather silly). A public debate could be seen as a method to factor in information from the world and limit the framing of the question so something can objectively be done. Not so much leading to truth as increasing the likelihood of survival for the participants. * Yes I'm aware temp change can cause extinction events, this is a toy example to illustrate the point.
- smallnamespace 10y ago
  > civic discussion between people who disagree Unfortunately, you will find only a small minority of the population would be interested this, and therefore the network would have a strong self selection bias. You might find that people who are interested skew heavily liberal, for example, which would strongly reduce the diversity of political opinion. There's plenty of recent psychological research that suggests that people in general, and conservatives in particular, find uncertainty and disagreement to be actually threatening: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/calling-truce-political-wars/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/calling-truce-poli... "Psychologists have found that conservatives are fundamentally more anxious than liberals, which may be why they typically desire stability, structure and clear answers even to complicated questions. "
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    > You might find that people who are interested skew heavily liberal, for example, which would strongly reduce the diversity of political opinion. Let me guess you identify as a liberal? :-)
    - adrianratnapala 10y ago
      I don't identify with the left, but I suspect something like that will happen. People who will be interested in a scholarly sort of social net will be university educated, richer than most, and use computers a lot. So we will have a skew there.
    - smallnamespace 10y ago
      Sure, but I'm not dumb enough to believe that liberals know the answer to everything. Ask yourself this though -- do you consider openness to new ideas and willingness to challenge orthodoxy a more stereotypically conservative or liberal trait, given that those traits have both upsides and downsides.
      - NhanH 10y ago
        The "liberal" identity in US is a lossy projection of many different ideology axes to a single one, and is much more closely to just mean "the left" than the definition you meant. I do not believe that they are any more open to new ideas than the right. Both sides stick to the first fancy idea they knew about, and it just happens that those idea are different. "Liberal" as defined with characteristics in your question is orthogonal to whatever "liberal" is in US politics. And if you ignore children, I think it would be a rather small percentage of human.
- tunap 10y ago
  Logical discussions are hard online. We, as a species, are prone to emotional irrationality that can impair intelligent discourse w/ non-like minded viewpoints. Also, a lack of prosody[1] in text/type communications is problematic; w/o cadence, inflection & body language a simple statement can be construed a myriad of differing ways. Lastly, and I'm sure there's more, the noise on the line allows anyone to find supportive evidence to bolster their learned attachment to their personal bias. All are a helluva a hindrance to meaningful discussions that could be overcome w/ mutual diligence... until you factor the presence of paid actors assigned to sway opinions w/ more noise added to exploit their special interests. Frankly, the internet as some of us geezers knew it is already FUBAR, the rest is walled-gardens, service contracted entrapment & mouth-service to obfuscated, spurious ends. edit: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_(linguistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_(linguistics)
- kingkawn 10y ago
  Hilarious that so many here find the voices of others so intolerable to their careful cultivation of certainty that we sit about dreaming of mediums where we set the rules and all must comply to participate.
- agumonkey 10y ago
  Sometimes I think a restricted medium forces people to communicate dense and honest. It imposes more upfront thinking and reflective reading instead of shallow arguing.
  - mulcahey 10y ago
    What sort of restrictions did you have in mind?
    - agumonkey 10y ago
      Mailing lists for instance. No real time, no formatting, not even clear threading structure.
- moultano 10y ago
  I'd like to make a crowd-sourced Bayes net of all evidence, hypotheses, and policy proposals. Let people vote on the connections between nodes and their influence, but then let the Bayes net decide what is consequentially true. Most people are able and willing to follow local arguments about individual things, but discard the whole thing when the argument expands to have actual consequences for policy. The goal would be to let people keep making those local judgement calls on evidence and truth, but let the machine handle the consequent implications.
- chestervonwinch 10y ago
  It's interesting to note that the same principles discussed in the paper might also apply to the social networks necessary for the development a new social network "for civic discussion between people who disagree".
- pmorici 10y ago
  Political discourse is based as much on feeling as it is on facts. You might wish that weren't the case but ignoring that fact doesn't make it less true.
- radarsat1 10y ago
  One model that I've thought of in the past would be centered around moderators instead of direct voting like reddit/hn. Instead of a discussion being by-everyone-for-everyone, a discussion would be led by a moderator, who would be in charge of voting or banning within that conversation. People would then vote on the _moderator_ rather than on the conversation directly. Eventually I imagine we might see popular moderators who are seen as fair, and they would take their "job" quite seriously, and we would see some good discussions. Maybe. Or maybe it would be a total shit-show. :)
- taneq 10y ago
  If this helps any, Facebook's machine learning stuff seems to focus on showing you posts that you'll comment on. The effect is that it either shows you me-too type posts that agree with your already stated position, or it shows you polar opposite posts that it knows will get you to respond. Better yet, it'll sort the replies to the post it shows you by its estimation of how likely you are to respond to them (agree or disagree), which means, if you're not a me-too-er, that it deliberately shit-stirs by showing you posts that it knows you'll have to rebuke. :P
- Tiquor 10y ago
  It's not a social network design issue. It's a social issue of actual humans. Our society, currently, rewards outrage amd sensitivity as opposed to reason and the free exchange of ideas. We are essentially in a post enlightenment phase moving towards new forms of regressive authoritarianism.
- byw 10y ago
  It's essentially what https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview is. It relies heavily on moderation to maintain quality, so I'm not sure how well it scales.
n72 10y ago
My biggest fear about FB isn't regarding privacy, but its enormous ability to spread misinformation.
- Eerie 10y ago
  Why single FB? Internet in general gives anyone an enormous ability (well, potential, really) to spread misinformation.
  - curiousgal 10y ago
    FB has definitely made it easier; it's just a matter of a button click. (Share button)
    - rschuetzler 10y ago
      I was thinking about this the other day. In the pre-social network days, it was obnoxious to blast your political opinions out to your friends and family. You had to create or forward an email, and very few people did. Mostly grandparents. Now it seems that everyone can and will share their political views through a social network. Is it just that it's easier, or is there something else about the platform that invites that type of sharing?
      - snom380 10y ago
        Well, it's not only easier, but it's easy to find others that share your (obnoxious or not) opinions in various groups. So now you're in an echo chamber where your opinions will gather likes and reposts, while your friends and family might try to ignore you as best they can. And of course, the more you associate and interact with groups that fit your opinions and interests, the more Facebook and other ad-supported services will try to prioritize showing you those posts, so the echo chamber effect is amplified. And when you step out into the real world, you'll be inclined to think of others that don't share your "informed" opinion as uninformed or naive, after all you have seen all this evidence to back you your opinions and theories. [Edit:spelling]
      - 10y ago
Dowwie 10y ago
arxiv postings should feature warning sign iconography. On one hand, it offers open access to research -- awesome. On the other hand, it offers us a chance to waste our time and energy studying material that may never survive peer review. I get excited whenever I see what appears to be a really interesting, valuable piece of information gleamed through rigorous research. My immediate first emotion is excitement. However, that excitement casts a long shadow of doubt as my system 2 mode of reason kicks in and alerts me that the content of interest is the result of an arxiv posting that may fail to survive peer review. Of course, death-through-peer-review may not imply bunk science but I assume that it more often is the case (experts, please chime in). This leads me to ask whether the HN community would be better without knowing of bleeding edge research on arxiv until it's graduated peer review --What do you think: Is it better to front page bleeding edge, unverified research? I think the world would benefit by a service that indexes arxiv postings that have survived peer review. Is this feasible?
- sievebrain 10y ago
  Surely the act of people reading it is peer review? Unless you assume that nobody on Hacker News is qualified to read scientific papers, which seems like a stretch.
  - jonathankoren 10y ago
    No. Peer review is more than that. It's a vetting process. 90% if everything is crap, and so if you don't vet it, you'll get 90% crap. Also, by conflating a forum full of lay people with experts in a specific field is a bit absurd. Simply put, not everyone's opinion should be given equal weight.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - argonaut 10y ago
    For any given arxiv article, I'd wager 98% of people on HN are unqualified to critically review the article. They're not aware of prior work that might contradict the article. They're not aware of the limitations of prior work that the article cites. They've never tried the experimental or theoretical methods the article uses, and so on. Yet these are the people upvoting and commenting on implications.
deleted 10y ago
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zach 10y ago
High-engagement obsessives are another key to this. In a community where it's nobody's actual job to spread knowledge and values of the community, the highest-volume interactors – the most engaged – become standard-bearers of the community. Since they are often more obsessive and dedicated yet visible, this raises the stakes of the community to greater obsessiveness and dedication. In online scenarios, the result is that many can say, well, I am dedicated to X, but I'm not as extremely dedicated as Y... where Y may be literally one of the most X-dedicated people in the entire world. When you have this majority illusion, some high-engagement obsessives, and throw in some producers of writings (news, documents, popular literature and orientation literature such as FAQs), you have an engine for converting dedication into social goods such as a sense of belonging, friendship, and most of all, self-identification. The ability to create and sustain these communities in many forms, for any topic, worldwide, is the miracle of the internet.
- whack 10y ago
  I've always wondered why social networks like Reddit make no attempt to throttle their loudest members. If you have a small minority who upvote/downvote an extremely high number of posts, they will easily drown out any votes cast by people who are more measured in their voting behavior. It seems like there are so many fundamental ways in which the most popular social networks and discussion forums are flawed. http://www.thecaucus.net/#/content/caucus/community_blog/103 http://www.thecaucus.net/#/content/caucus/community_blog/103
  - MagnumOpus 10y ago
    Because Reddit was written by young undergrads in their college dorm who haven't had the decade of experience with vote manipulation that Slashdot had by that time, let alone experienced the rise and decline of Usenet. Indeed by 2006 the mature Slashdot moderation system - after a deluge of invasions by trolls and agenda-pushers - already had a lot of the tools that Reddit is still missing or eventually reinvented badly - limited number of upvote points, meta-moderation etc.
    - 10y ago
syats 10y ago
TL;DR: if highly connected nodes tend to have a given attribute, most nodes have the illusion that the majority has that attribute. It's an interesting statement, but not terribly insightful. I hope more research follows.

121 points by kurren 10y ago

We need a social network designed from the ground up to be a public square for civic discussion between people who disagree. We need mechanisms to agree on facts, and tools to create arguments supported by those facts.

sievebrain 10y ago
A nice ideal, but likely to be very difficult in practice, because in reality almost nobody disagrees on actual provable, scientific facts. The toughest disagreements usually arise around things which are not facts, but are presented as if they were. All human subcultures carry with them a large baggage of "facts" which the group accepts in order to promote social cohesion, avoid conflict or sometimes simply to advertise membership of the group. Try convincing a highly religious person that their religion is entirely fact-free, or that God doesn't exist using logic, and you will get nowhere: they prefer to believe things that other people don't because believing these things grants membership to a group and the benefits of that membership are perceived to outweigh the benefits of being a person of pure rationality. Indeed, a genuine belief that you are entirely rational is simply another form of group membership signalling: probably that you want to be seen as a member of the group "intellectuals" or "scientists" or possibly "educated people". Being unable to recognise the difficulty people have in being entirely rational is itself a form of irrationality. So to get back to your proposed social network, here's what would happen: it would very quickly become dominated by a particular pre-existing social subculture, probably "male internet geeks who believe themselves to be supremely rational" and their baggage of pseudo-facts would come along for the ride. This is NOT an argument against doing what you want to do. Even if the goal is unattainable, creating better discussion forums with better tools for raising the level of discussion is never a bad thing. Just don't think it'd solve the 'friendship paradox' discussed in the paper.
- reitanqild 10y ago
  > Try convincing a highly religious person that their religion is entirely fact-free, or that God doesn't exist using logic, and you will get nowhere Lets keep religion out of HN, shall we? A lot of us actually seems to believe in some kind of deity/ies, we just dont mention it because we value HN as a common ground for technical and business discussions. If not I could tell you some stories about stupid, stubborn evil ateists as well :-P
  - hueving 10y ago
    >Lets keep religion out of HN, shall we? I think youre being a bit defensive. That statement might not apply to your religion, especially if it's one based on facts.
  - sievebrain 10y ago
    I did not mean my comments as an attack on religious people. I'm sorry you interpreted it that way. Quite the opposite: I tried to argue that despite the lack of factual evidence for the existence of gods, strongly believing in them anyway can make sense if membership of organised religion is attractive enough. I don't expect anyone who is religious to see it that way though, even though I've met many devout Christians who happily admit there is no factual proof of God and that is why they place their energies in faith instead.
    - reitanqild 10y ago
      Ok, thanks, I see. For me it was very easy to interpret as a general attack.
    - humanrebar 10y ago
      > I've met many devout Christians who happily admit there is no factual proof of God There are factual cases for God, some attempting to be proofs even. For example, many consider objective morality (race based slavery is bad, say) to be a case for absolute good, which is hard to explain by pure randomness. Faith, to a Christian, is making choices in the face of this problem. A Christian knows that everyone has to decide whether to follow God or not, and in that way, everyone has faith in some set of axioms. Many people (intelligent, kind, smart ones!) have immense faith that only matter and energy exist despite basically no proof in that metaphysical axiom. Despite how hard it is to explain this, it's actually a clear thought to a reasonably educated Christian. It's just hard to communicate since words like 'rational', 'proof', and 'facts' are overloaded and cause confusion in these sorts of conversations. In this way, the balkanization of our culture is a negative feedback loop as misunderstanding promotes division which promotes more misunderstanding. > strongly believing in them anyway can make sense if membership of organised religion is attractive enough The point of Christianity isn't being part of an organization. People who go to worship services because it's their favorite social club are actually criticized pretty heavily by Jesus in the Bible. To be fair, I think most churchgoers don't understand the implications of this.
curiousgal 10y ago
LessWrong, perhaps? If you can tolerate the smugness of course, but that's usually a side effect of most people who tend to be too logical, not just members of LessWrong.
- Eerie 10y ago
  LessWrong is a self-selected community. It won't scale.
  - smallnamespace 10y ago
    > self-selected community as would be this one.
nxzero 10y ago
Social networks are by default designed to circumvent reasoning. True reason based system would require claims based on science - and nothing more. There would be no discussion.
- merpnderp 10y ago
  A lot of the topics being discussed don't lend themselves to repeatable testable science. So lots of opinion and preconceived notions, or even just principles are involved in decision making. If these issues could be resolved by the scientific method, they likely would have already.
ideonexus 10y ago
I like science fiction author Dr. David Brin's idea of "Disputational Arenas," where issues are exhaustively and respectfully discussed in all their complex glory. http://www.davidbrin.com/disputation.html http://www.davidbrin.com/disputation.html The Economist will host something like this, where an issue is presented in an online forum and thoroughly debated until a consensus is established.
Eerie 10y ago
The best example of such a network is Wikipedia. Draw from that any conclusions you want.
- brightball 10y ago
  The problem with Wikipedia is that is that it creates a huge barrier to seeing things that a regularly edited out as well as no means to verify whether things that were removed may have been verifiable.
  - jessaustin 10y ago
    That data is available. If some would find it valuable, perhaps another interface could be created to make the stream of edits more accessible? One can understand why that isn't the default focus of Wikipedia.
bcook 10y ago
Often though, the people who disagree are themselves the biggest hinderance to a useful conversation... right?
internaut 10y ago
I think you're describing a dialectic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic The problem with such a project (which I think could succeed without solving it) is that it is not merely the case that people disagree on the facts. They also disagree on the frame of reference. That may not be solvable.
- mbrock 10y ago
  Consensus agreement would probably not be the goal of such a project, and there's no reason to expect or desire that (aside from the old idea that public reason leads to truth in political questions which by now seems rather silly).
  - internaut 10y ago
    If we were devising a government (or any other system) it would be productive to have consensus on some issues (who is the enemy) and not so on others (quantity of net redistribution). Just as there exists P space and NP space it ought to be possible to categorize questions for which there exist right and wrong answers (universal absolutes), and then a separate space for 'spectrum' questions whose answers are a matter of degree contingent on the feedback from the environment. Confusing these two types of questions when the answers are unknown is easy and can make you very wrong. I'll give a practical example that may be biased. Personally I believe moderate climatic change to be in the 2nd category* while biodiversity in the 1st category because a temperature can be ratcheted up or down (even if it took centuries or was expensive) whereas once a species is extinguished it is gone forever while the side affects are permanent. They are both serious problems but getting a category 1 question wrong makes the error baked in for the future. You'll remember numerous occasions when the government tried to defy the laws of biology or physics and this never ends well. Something I believe most politicians do not comprehend is that not every 'policy question' belongs to category 2. Something I believe most scientists do not comprehend is that not every political question belongs to category 1. > aside from the old idea that public reason leads to truth in political questions which by now seems rather silly). A public debate could be seen as a method to factor in information from the world and limit the framing of the question so something can objectively be done. Not so much leading to truth as increasing the likelihood of survival for the participants. * Yes I'm aware temp change can cause extinction events, this is a toy example to illustrate the point.
smallnamespace 10y ago
> civic discussion between people who disagree Unfortunately, you will find only a small minority of the population would be interested this, and therefore the network would have a strong self selection bias. You might find that people who are interested skew heavily liberal, for example, which would strongly reduce the diversity of political opinion. There's plenty of recent psychological research that suggests that people in general, and conservatives in particular, find uncertainty and disagreement to be actually threatening: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/calling-truce-political-wars/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/calling-truce-poli... "Psychologists have found that conservatives are fundamentally more anxious than liberals, which may be why they typically desire stability, structure and clear answers even to complicated questions. "
- reitanqild 10y ago
  > You might find that people who are interested skew heavily liberal, for example, which would strongly reduce the diversity of political opinion. Let me guess you identify as a liberal? :-)
  - adrianratnapala 10y ago
    I don't identify with the left, but I suspect something like that will happen. People who will be interested in a scholarly sort of social net will be university educated, richer than most, and use computers a lot. So we will have a skew there.
  - smallnamespace 10y ago
    Sure, but I'm not dumb enough to believe that liberals know the answer to everything. Ask yourself this though -- do you consider openness to new ideas and willingness to challenge orthodoxy a more stereotypically conservative or liberal trait, given that those traits have both upsides and downsides.
    - NhanH 10y ago
      The "liberal" identity in US is a lossy projection of many different ideology axes to a single one, and is much more closely to just mean "the left" than the definition you meant. I do not believe that they are any more open to new ideas than the right. Both sides stick to the first fancy idea they knew about, and it just happens that those idea are different. "Liberal" as defined with characteristics in your question is orthogonal to whatever "liberal" is in US politics. And if you ignore children, I think it would be a rather small percentage of human.
tunap 10y ago
Logical discussions are hard online. We, as a species, are prone to emotional irrationality that can impair intelligent discourse w/ non-like minded viewpoints. Also, a lack of prosody[1] in text/type communications is problematic; w/o cadence, inflection & body language a simple statement can be construed a myriad of differing ways. Lastly, and I'm sure there's more, the noise on the line allows anyone to find supportive evidence to bolster their learned attachment to their personal bias. All are a helluva a hindrance to meaningful discussions that could be overcome w/ mutual diligence... until you factor the presence of paid actors assigned to sway opinions w/ more noise added to exploit their special interests. Frankly, the internet as some of us geezers knew it is already FUBAR, the rest is walled-gardens, service contracted entrapment & mouth-service to obfuscated, spurious ends. edit: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_(linguistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_(linguistics)
kingkawn 10y ago
Hilarious that so many here find the voices of others so intolerable to their careful cultivation of certainty that we sit about dreaming of mediums where we set the rules and all must comply to participate.
agumonkey 10y ago
Sometimes I think a restricted medium forces people to communicate dense and honest. It imposes more upfront thinking and reflective reading instead of shallow arguing.
- mulcahey 10y ago
  What sort of restrictions did you have in mind?
  - agumonkey 10y ago
    Mailing lists for instance. No real time, no formatting, not even clear threading structure.
moultano 10y ago
I'd like to make a crowd-sourced Bayes net of all evidence, hypotheses, and policy proposals. Let people vote on the connections between nodes and their influence, but then let the Bayes net decide what is consequentially true. Most people are able and willing to follow local arguments about individual things, but discard the whole thing when the argument expands to have actual consequences for policy. The goal would be to let people keep making those local judgement calls on evidence and truth, but let the machine handle the consequent implications.
chestervonwinch 10y ago
It's interesting to note that the same principles discussed in the paper might also apply to the social networks necessary for the development a new social network "for civic discussion between people who disagree".
pmorici 10y ago
Political discourse is based as much on feeling as it is on facts. You might wish that weren't the case but ignoring that fact doesn't make it less true.
radarsat1 10y ago
One model that I've thought of in the past would be centered around moderators instead of direct voting like reddit/hn. Instead of a discussion being by-everyone-for-everyone, a discussion would be led by a moderator, who would be in charge of voting or banning within that conversation. People would then vote on the _moderator_ rather than on the conversation directly. Eventually I imagine we might see popular moderators who are seen as fair, and they would take their "job" quite seriously, and we would see some good discussions. Maybe. Or maybe it would be a total shit-show. :)
taneq 10y ago
If this helps any, Facebook's machine learning stuff seems to focus on showing you posts that you'll comment on. The effect is that it either shows you me-too type posts that agree with your already stated position, or it shows you polar opposite posts that it knows will get you to respond. Better yet, it'll sort the replies to the post it shows you by its estimation of how likely you are to respond to them (agree or disagree), which means, if you're not a me-too-er, that it deliberately shit-stirs by showing you posts that it knows you'll have to rebuke. :P
Tiquor 10y ago
It's not a social network design issue. It's a social issue of actual humans. Our society, currently, rewards outrage amd sensitivity as opposed to reason and the free exchange of ideas. We are essentially in a post enlightenment phase moving towards new forms of regressive authoritarianism.
byw 10y ago
It's essentially what https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview is. It relies heavily on moderation to maintain quality, so I'm not sure how well it scales.

n72 10y ago

My biggest fear about FB isn't regarding privacy, but its enormous ability to spread misinformation.

Eerie 10y ago
Why single FB? Internet in general gives anyone an enormous ability (well, potential, really) to spread misinformation.
- curiousgal 10y ago
  FB has definitely made it easier; it's just a matter of a button click. (Share button)
  - rschuetzler 10y ago
    I was thinking about this the other day. In the pre-social network days, it was obnoxious to blast your political opinions out to your friends and family. You had to create or forward an email, and very few people did. Mostly grandparents. Now it seems that everyone can and will share their political views through a social network. Is it just that it's easier, or is there something else about the platform that invites that type of sharing?
    - snom380 10y ago
      Well, it's not only easier, but it's easy to find others that share your (obnoxious or not) opinions in various groups. So now you're in an echo chamber where your opinions will gather likes and reposts, while your friends and family might try to ignore you as best they can. And of course, the more you associate and interact with groups that fit your opinions and interests, the more Facebook and other ad-supported services will try to prioritize showing you those posts, so the echo chamber effect is amplified. And when you step out into the real world, you'll be inclined to think of others that don't share your "informed" opinion as uninformed or naive, after all you have seen all this evidence to back you your opinions and theories. [Edit:spelling]
    - 10y ago

Dowwie 10y ago

arxiv postings should feature warning sign iconography. On one hand, it offers open access to research -- awesome. On the other hand, it offers us a chance to waste our time and energy studying material that may never survive peer review. I get excited whenever I see what appears to be a really interesting, valuable piece of information gleamed through rigorous research. My immediate first emotion is excitement. However, that excitement casts a long shadow of doubt as my system 2 mode of reason kicks in and alerts me that the content of interest is the result of an arxiv posting that may fail to survive peer review. Of course, death-through-peer-review may not imply bunk science but I assume that it more often is the case (experts, please chime in). This leads me to ask whether the HN community would be better without knowing of bleeding edge research on arxiv until it's graduated peer review --What do you think: Is it better to front page bleeding edge, unverified research? I think the world would benefit by a service that indexes arxiv postings that have survived peer review. Is this feasible?

sievebrain 10y ago
Surely the act of people reading it is peer review? Unless you assume that nobody on Hacker News is qualified to read scientific papers, which seems like a stretch.
- jonathankoren 10y ago
  No. Peer review is more than that. It's a vetting process. 90% if everything is crap, and so if you don't vet it, you'll get 90% crap. Also, by conflating a forum full of lay people with experts in a specific field is a bit absurd. Simply put, not everyone's opinion should be given equal weight.
- deleted 10y ago
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- argonaut 10y ago
  For any given arxiv article, I'd wager 98% of people on HN are unqualified to critically review the article. They're not aware of prior work that might contradict the article. They're not aware of the limitations of prior work that the article cites. They've never tried the experimental or theoretical methods the article uses, and so on. Yet these are the people upvoting and commenting on implications.

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zach 10y ago

High-engagement obsessives are another key to this. In a community where it's nobody's actual job to spread knowledge and values of the community, the highest-volume interactors – the most engaged – become standard-bearers of the community. Since they are often more obsessive and dedicated yet visible, this raises the stakes of the community to greater obsessiveness and dedication. In online scenarios, the result is that many can say, well, I am dedicated to X, but I'm not as extremely dedicated as Y... where Y may be literally one of the most X-dedicated people in the entire world. When you have this majority illusion, some high-engagement obsessives, and throw in some producers of writings (news, documents, popular literature and orientation literature such as FAQs), you have an engine for converting dedication into social goods such as a sense of belonging, friendship, and most of all, self-identification. The ability to create and sustain these communities in many forms, for any topic, worldwide, is the miracle of the internet.

whack 10y ago
I've always wondered why social networks like Reddit make no attempt to throttle their loudest members. If you have a small minority who upvote/downvote an extremely high number of posts, they will easily drown out any votes cast by people who are more measured in their voting behavior. It seems like there are so many fundamental ways in which the most popular social networks and discussion forums are flawed. http://www.thecaucus.net/#/content/caucus/community_blog/103 http://www.thecaucus.net/#/content/caucus/community_blog/103
- MagnumOpus 10y ago
  Because Reddit was written by young undergrads in their college dorm who haven't had the decade of experience with vote manipulation that Slashdot had by that time, let alone experienced the rise and decline of Usenet. Indeed by 2006 the mature Slashdot moderation system - after a deluge of invasions by trolls and agenda-pushers - already had a lot of the tools that Reddit is still missing or eventually reinvented badly - limited number of upvote points, meta-moderation etc.
  - 10y ago

syats 10y ago

TL;DR: if highly connected nodes tend to have a given attribute, most nodes have the illusion that the majority has that attribute. It's an interesting statement, but not terribly insightful. I hope more research follows.