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The following part of his answer deserves much more discussion. (If you disagree, but please say so why, rather than just downvoting.) We are allowing a very p

The following part of his answer deserves much more discussion. (If you disagree, but please say so why, rather than just downvoting.) We are allowing a very powerful system called capitalism to drive large multinational corporations that increasingly use simplistic objective functions to satisfy greed and often just greed alone. (Greed has its place, no doubt, but it should not be the overpowering force driving the world.) Capitalism and many corporations have often been major forces for progress for a great many people but as they grow so powerful as to overwhelm other counterbalancing institutions--governments (often through means behind the scene), nonprofits, civic organizations--more should be asked of them than mostly profit maximization. (We may not want these corporations to determine the veracity of information; those implementation issues need to be figured out. The larger point is that the corporations and the algorithms should take into account more than economic objectives.) "There is no law detailed enough to compete with the complexity of things that algorithms can do. What can be regulated, though, are the dangers that come from overly crude objective functions such as Facebook's algorithms maximizing the time you spend on their site. These can be regulated by saying: OK, you have these business elements in your objective function because you need to make money. But you should also have these societal goals like, for example, the truth value of the things that are being said."

Eridrus 9y ago
Ok, I'll bite. I think the issue with the quote from Domingos and your substitution is that regulation is a very blunt instrument. He says he would like Facebook's algorithm to maximise not only engagement (which isn't how these systems actually work, but ok), but also the how truthful it is. Now you're left with the question of how to measure how truthful something is, and we don't know how to do that, so usually you come up with some metric that you do know, maybe you decide that authoritative news sources are truthful and things by your friends that talking about non-controversial things are ok, and maybe you throw in a few more heuristics and you get some ugly proxy for truth, how much weight do you put on it vs engagement? The same question could be asked of how some regulation on capitalistic greed should work; though I would argue that the regulation we have on greed is taxes, where we can let companies optimize their profits, but then tax the profits (either at the company level, or at the individual level when the profits becomes real(ized) gains), and then we provide a whole host of institutions that are the ones we want. I would say the challenge with regulation is not saying whether we should have any or not, but figuring out what good regulation would look like. Maybe the real regulation we need for Facebook is what we did to Microsoft (the other network effects behemoth) and force them to be interoperable with other platforms so that users could migrate without having to migrate all of their friends.

Eridrus 9y ago

Ok, I'll bite. I think the issue with the quote from Domingos and your substitution is that regulation is a very blunt instrument. He says he would like Facebook's algorithm to maximise not only engagement (which isn't how these systems actually work, but ok), but also the how truthful it is. Now you're left with the question of how to measure how truthful something is, and we don't know how to do that, so usually you come up with some metric that you do know, maybe you decide that authoritative news sources are truthful and things by your friends that talking about non-controversial things are ok, and maybe you throw in a few more heuristics and you get some ugly proxy for truth, how much weight do you put on it vs engagement? The same question could be asked of how some regulation on capitalistic greed should work; though I would argue that the regulation we have on greed is taxes, where we can let companies optimize their profits, but then tax the profits (either at the company level, or at the individual level when the profits becomes real(ized) gains), and then we provide a whole host of institutions that are the ones we want. I would say the challenge with regulation is not saying whether we should have any or not, but figuring out what good regulation would look like. Maybe the real regulation we need for Facebook is what we did to Microsoft (the other network effects behemoth) and force them to be interoperable with other platforms so that users could migrate without having to migrate all of their friends.