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I thought about this a lot recently. Expecting people to spontaneously more skeptical and analytical is unrealistic. Non-shit mass media is something we despera

I thought about this a lot recently. Expecting people to spontaneously more skeptical and analytical is unrealistic. Non-shit mass media is something we desperately need these days, but it's not the only solution. We have tools to make producing and consuming information easy for an average person. It's pretty clear that we also need tools that augment our ability to analyze information. The key, I think, is to ignore the immediate issues with politics and think in higher order terms of knowledge acquisition. Douglas Engelbart talked about such things in the past and Alan Kay with Bret Victor talk about them right now. Personally, I imagine the following. Custom search bots that we control. Networks that allow users to ask questions, rather than just read and write self-contained posts. Tools for rapid modeling, record-keeping and statistical analysis. For example, being able to plot Twitter activity and connections in an easy fashion would likely reveal a lot of paid shills and bots. But it's really hard to do right now. You need to mess around with bad APIs, complex software and the data is often unavailable in the first place. But it doesn't have to be this way. (Publishing was way more complicated and we made it trivial.)

csydas 10y ago
I disagree slightly, mainly because I'm not expecting it to be spontaneous. In my mind, I see this going on for years if not decades, since no matter how many tools we add to try and assist with curation of information, the core issue comes down to this scenario: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CDj1bfTW0AAwZ2Y.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CDj1bfTW0AAwZ2Y.jpg Forgive me for linking a comic to assist in a point, but a lot of it is more that right now we still have many people used to authoritative sources; they find one source that is complimentary to their viewpoint, and the details on the source don't matter. I've seen commentaries and opinion pieces that we're in a "post-fact" era, but I think a more accurate assessment is just that the number of authoritative sources has grown while the previous ones have diminished in scope and authority. It's incredibly easy to find an authoritative seeming source for just about any opinion or item you care for at this point, be it a journal paer, a tweet or reddit post, or just a website dedicated to that subject. I guess that's my ultimate issue with the idea of provide better tools, it's that as information is liberated, you have an untrained public making use of it. I don't particularly care what conclusion they draw as long as people aren't jumping the gun on conclusions and just assuming so much. Twitter astroturfing and similar activities I think is just going to be one of those problems that continues - there are businesses, as far as I'm aware, behind these projects, and if their livelihood is threatened, it seems to me they'd just adapt. I fully expect that, if Twitter hasn't been bought out or changed drastically by the next election, that we'll see Twitter bot armies out in greater force than ever before and it will have an amazing influence as media from all varieties will happily use it for reference. Heck, we still use # of google search results as a metric as if the total number of results even means anything. That's not something you can just do away with on a tool, because it's not the fault of the tools reporting bad data - it's people latching onto irrelevant data points. This isn't a call that the world just needs that little more education and suddenly we'll all debate rationally - that is not going to happen short of major worldwide reprogramming of people. It's more just getting the idea out of how to judge a resource or realize why certain metrics just aren't a good measure of anything most of the time, like how a large number of retweets doesn't mean much more than "many accounts retweeted this message". People are still adjusting to what a completely online world means and what automation can do. You don't need IBM's Watson to make a political poopshoot or to generate a fancy looking paper, you don't need a state sponsored astroturfing group to spread an idea. A little gaming with algorithms and you can propogate just about any piece of information you want.
slavik81 10y ago
Will more analysis actually help? People post complete misinformation on their Facebook feed. I post a snoopes link thoroughly debunking it, and nobody cares. They want to believe.

csydas 10y ago

I disagree slightly, mainly because I'm not expecting it to be spontaneous. In my mind, I see this going on for years if not decades, since no matter how many tools we add to try and assist with curation of information, the core issue comes down to this scenario: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CDj1bfTW0AAwZ2Y.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CDj1bfTW0AAwZ2Y.jpg Forgive me for linking a comic to assist in a point, but a lot of it is more that right now we still have many people used to authoritative sources; they find one source that is complimentary to their viewpoint, and the details on the source don't matter. I've seen commentaries and opinion pieces that we're in a "post-fact" era, but I think a more accurate assessment is just that the number of authoritative sources has grown while the previous ones have diminished in scope and authority. It's incredibly easy to find an authoritative seeming source for just about any opinion or item you care for at this point, be it a journal paer, a tweet or reddit post, or just a website dedicated to that subject. I guess that's my ultimate issue with the idea of provide better tools, it's that as information is liberated, you have an untrained public making use of it. I don't particularly care what conclusion they draw as long as people aren't jumping the gun on conclusions and just assuming so much. Twitter astroturfing and similar activities I think is just going to be one of those problems that continues - there are businesses, as far as I'm aware, behind these projects, and if their livelihood is threatened, it seems to me they'd just adapt. I fully expect that, if Twitter hasn't been bought out or changed drastically by the next election, that we'll see Twitter bot armies out in greater force than ever before and it will have an amazing influence as media from all varieties will happily use it for reference. Heck, we still use # of google search results as a metric as if the total number of results even means anything. That's not something you can just do away with on a tool, because it's not the fault of the tools reporting bad data - it's people latching onto irrelevant data points. This isn't a call that the world just needs that little more education and suddenly we'll all debate rationally - that is not going to happen short of major worldwide reprogramming of people. It's more just getting the idea out of how to judge a resource or realize why certain metrics just aren't a good measure of anything most of the time, like how a large number of retweets doesn't mean much more than "many accounts retweeted this message". People are still adjusting to what a completely online world means and what automation can do. You don't need IBM's Watson to make a political poopshoot or to generate a fancy looking paper, you don't need a state sponsored astroturfing group to spread an idea. A little gaming with algorithms and you can propogate just about any piece of information you want.

slavik81 10y ago

Will more analysis actually help? People post complete misinformation on their Facebook feed. I post a snoopes link thoroughly debunking it, and nobody cares. They want to believe.