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This was addressed more broadly in "We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads" by Zeynep Tufekci on TED. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=

by b0rsuk 8y ago

This was addressed more broadly in "We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads" by Zeynep Tufekci on TED. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15891014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15891014 She remarked that Youtube's recommendation system invariably pushes people towards more extreme views on anything, not just politics. Interested in vegetarianism? Here's something about veganism. She has a hypothesis it works this way because the goal is to make people spend as much time on a site as possible, and feeding people progressively more extreme content works for that. My comment: what does it say about us humans that we fall for progressively more extreme stuff? Perhaps that few people actually hold balanced views and nowadays a compromise is looked down upon and a mark of a weak character?

walrus01 8y ago
I very strongly recommend watching the video of Zeynep's presentation on this subject.
TangoTrotFox 8y ago
I think the answer lay almost entirely with echo chambers. These exist not only in the digital world, but even increasingly in the real world as people connect to people through digital filtering. Vegetarianism is a good example. Many, though not all, vegetarians are going to be going in that direction due to some form of objection to how animals are treated. But when you surround them with nothing but other people who hold views that are at least as far away from the mean, they're going to suddenly seem quite trite. And this pushes people ever further down one path or another. By contrast when you have a diverse array of views, the real position of stances can be clearly seen. That is to say for one that agrees that eating meat implies inherent mistreatment of animals, vegetarians are already taking a more active stance than ~97% of Americans. The same would be approximately true for those that e.g. go for fish + veggie diets. But in a world where those 3% are surrounded by only those 3%, vegetarians are extremely 'conservative' in their views. The whole thing is people need to surround themselves with a good number of people they disagree with on things. But this is not an easy thing to do, and so most people do not. And in fact even things like voting systems on these social media sites discourage such behavior. Many people do not downvote as a matter of something being inappropriate, they downvote because of disagreement. And that pushes views that go against the plurality's grain further and further out of site to the point that people no longer even think they exist. And of course on another site the exact view bias is instead being pushed to the top with everything else being removed out of the groupthink. It's not a very dangerous problem for a democratic nation.
- BaronSamedi 8y ago
  "The whole thing is people need to surround themselves with a good number of people they disagree with on things." I agree with this sentiment. I think, however, a more fundamental problem lies with peoples' attitude toward their own ideas and towards the ideas of others. People have an apparently irresistible tendency to moralize; to consider their ideas as "good" and contrary ones as "bad". Once the moralizing starts, reasonable discussion becomes difficult if not impossible. Disagreements quickly devolve into the two sides calling each other evil. Given this I would rephrase your statement as, people need to surround themselves with those who hold their opinions more lightly and who avoid moralizing. When people acknowledge that their opinions are simply their personal preferences rather than moral truths, genuine discussion becomes possible. In your example of vegetarianism, consider the different response one might get if one says, "I prefer to avoid eating meat" versus "Eating meat is wrong". The first opens up the possibility for mutual understanding, the second is sure to launch a flamewar.
  - yesenadam 8y ago
    people need to surround themselves with those who hold their opinions more lightly and who avoid moralizing. When people acknowledge that their opinions are simply their personal preferences... Well, that sure sounds like 'moralizing' to me, and I don't think you realize it. If you don't care much about anything, well ok. But that's no virtue. It sounds close to the relativism that talks of "true for me" and "true for you". For example, I think we have no right to kill and eat animals, much less subject them to horrific lives. (So I'm vegan) This to me isn't a 'personal preference' or 'opinion'. It is a major moral and ethical issue, much like, say, slavery was/is. People disgusted by slavery didn't say it was 'simply their personal preference' not to own slaves, that it was merely their 'opinion' that slavery was wrong. That would have been ludicrous. We'd still have slavery if people had talked like that. And no doubt you had pro-slavery people in the 19th C giving the same lofty advice: "People need to surround themselves with those who hold their opinions more lightly and who avoid moralizing. When people acknowledge that their opinions are simply their personal preferences rather than moral truths, genuine discussion becomes possible..."
ddebernardy 8y ago
She recently got interviewed in Ezra Klein's show to discuss the same: https://art19.com/shows/the-ezra-klein-show/episodes/109611fa-b762-49ba-a954-0489a827ed06 https://art19.com/shows/the-ezra-klein-show/episodes/109611f... To paraphrase one of the better soundbites in the show: YouTube is like that friend in high school who always outdoes you no matter what you do. You're vegetarian, she's vegan; you're moderate left or right, she's at the more extreme end of the political spectrum; etc.
- codq 8y ago
  Thanks for using this Art19 link, I’d never heard of this company. Glad to know there are folks out there hard at work ruining podcasts.
  - ddebernardy 8y ago
    Out of curiosity, why are you writing they're ruining podcasts? (FWIW, I wasn't aware of them until today, when I searched that podcast's permalink on their site.)
    - Chickenality 8y ago
      This is my first time hearing about art19. But after a quick visit to their site, I can guess at what GP was referring to. Looks like they do listener tracking, targeted ads, dynamic ad insertion, etc.
dragonwriter 8y ago
> She has a hypothesis it works this way because the goal is to make people spend as much time on a site as possible, and feeding people progressively more extreme content works for that. While I understand the attractiveness of conspiratorial hypotheses, I think there is a simple explanation that applies to recommendation systems generally: such systems are designed, overtly, to identify content the user is likely to react positively the, based on what information it has about population-wide preferences. When it knows nothing (or nearly so) about your personal preferences, the only thing it can do is recommend the most widely accepted content. As it learns more about your preferences, it has more basis to predict things that you will find meert your preferences that are less widely supported in the population at large—so, over time, it naturally rexommwnds more content that is extreme.)
- pfisch 8y ago
  I don't really see why this is a conspiratorial hypotheses. The goal of youtube is to keep you on youtube watching videos with ads. That is what they are trying to do, and it happens to coincide with pushing extreme content as an unintended side effect.
  - pulisse 8y ago
    Exactly. No one here, least of all Tufekci, is claiming that YouTube has deliberately engineered their recommendation system to favor extreme content. The argument is that it's an unintended consequence of how the YouTube recommender's objective function interacts with human psychology: (1) YouTube trains its recommenders to maximize time on site. (2) It's a sad fact about humans that sensationalistic or extreme content is highly engaging. (3) YouTube's recommendation system thus learns to serve up sensationalistic and extreme content.
- deleted 8y ago
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- MrQuincle 8y ago
  To have an algorithm that favors extreme content above non-extreme content because it keeps people hooked is indeed unlikely to be programmed directly. I actually don't think it's learning personal preferences like you suggest either. It likely is a collaborative filtering method. You get served what people "similar to you" have watched most. Similarity is based on your watching behavior. If you watched 1,2,5,6,7 and someone else 1,2,6,7,8. You will be recommended 8 as well. It would be interesting to come up with an algorithm that suggest favorites of subgroups of viewers you don't belong to.
ben_w 8y ago
> what does it say about us humans that we fall for progressively more extreme stuff? Perhaps that few people actually hold balanced views and nowadays a compromise is looked down upon and a mark of a weak character? I was thinking about this recently. I doubt that it’s primarily an inability to compromise (though that exists when the politics are tied to tribal sense of identity), but more that each of our personal Overton windows is defined by about as many binary bits as we have slots in our working memory — if you can write an article with the title “Five Time My Side Was Epic” or “Five Times The Other Side Was Evil” then you can be blind to the mistakes of your own and the goodness of the others. Might even be less than working memory, because we sometimes double-count.
- cf498 8y ago
  I doubt that the general mass of people with "extreme" political beliefs do so out of thinking that "their side" is better. It is that some positions are so fundamentally indefensible for them that there is no middle ground, no compromise possible since they are contradicting and irreconcilable. And there are some of those fundamental issues. Basic human rights are not up for discussion or compromise for a lot of people. This comic summed it up rather well https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DHQGsnPUQAAfMgB.jpg:large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DHQGsnPUQAAfMgB.jpg:large What are you willing to compromise when it comes to the right to exist? Only some get killed? Its of course a hyperbole, but I think thats the mechanic that leads to ever increasing factions that are completely opposed with extreme positions. You always had issues you were not willing to compromise on, but you rarely came into contact with people holding the completely opposing position. Of course there was the city whack job, but he was just that. Some guy. The point of reference was on representatives of "the other side". Politicians and so on. Which had to press (ideally of course) for a position that was the middle ground of his constituency, which was generally not the most extreme one to not scare away more moderate voters. Real conflict here came from fundamentally opposing that consensus of a large group. With the death of political parties and movements you dont have that representation of the found consensus of the other side anylonger. Everyone can get a platform on the internet and the most extreme positions get the biggest coverage. If you hear often enough about extremist whackjobs in some group, you will sooner or later look for a group opposing those whackjobs. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/07/poll-americans-fear-election-clinton-trump-160715092852340.html https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/07/poll-americans-fear-e... I think we can witness that for a while now. You dont think "your side is right", its just that the perceived alternative is absolute horror.
dnomad 8y ago
> My comment: what does it say about us humans that we fall for progressively more extreme stuff? This is the fundamental question. Every YouTuber quickly figures out that the more extreme content you produce the more views you get. This is how something as silly (but harmless) as the Atheist Youtube community degenerates into idiots raging about feminists and denying 9/11. YouTube is just a market where the endless demand for extreme content can find a ready willing suppliers. What it looks like is that YouTube is just a mass demonstration of the Fundamental Law of Group Polarization [1]: low cost communities must enforce high cost penalties. The easier it is to enter a community the more extreme the community must fight outsiders and punish internal deviancy -- otherwise the community will simply dissolve. This is the logical conclusion of Iannaccone [2]. YouTube communities, being based on videos that absolutely anybody can post and watch, is as low cost to enter as it gets. Given such bare minimum entry costs, YouTube viewers rationally want "proof" that everybody else (the video creator, the paying supporters and the supporters who just watch/subscribe/like) really are dedicated and it's worth sticking around in the community. This proof comes in the form of producing and consuming more quantity of video hours and more extreme content. The genius of YouTube it that it implicitly understands the "race from zero" dynamic at work and every feature of the site is designed to exploit it. People get hung up on the algorithm but the algorithm is a very small part of it. Everything about YouTube: its anonymity, its system of subscribes and likes and the very prominent display of these numbers, the YouTube format which so often includes somebody staring directly into a camera trying to make direct eye contact with the viewer, the confessionary content, the RL social events -- invites users to prove that they are truly dedicated members of these low cost communities. (Google really missed the ball with paid donations, btw. The company is so hung up on advertising they didn't realize that YouTube viewers would leap at the chance to just give straight cash to their favorite creators.) In conclusion (1) Google could turn off the recommendation algorithm tomorrow and it would at best slow down YouTube's extremism (2) there's enormous profit to be made given the fundamental dynamics of the site because (3) there's nothing unique about YouTube here, we see the same dynamics at work in politics, religion, sports, and plenty of other free sites like reddit and Facebook. Once you have people participating in these low cost communities the communities will naturally polarize in order to preserve themselves. This is not going to change any time soon, really, it's the new norm. [2] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.475.6086&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.475... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization
sureaboutthis 8y ago
More and more I find people who have done what I do; I don't watch TV "news" anymore and ignore almost every "news" article or posting online. Unless the headline might be a topic I'm specifically interested in and think it affects me I don't give it the time.
- deleted 8y ago
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- wu-ikkyu 8y ago
  I'm in the same camp. It seems the "news", in general, is a buffer overflow of malicious information that serves to override our logical thought processes with negative emotions and irrational tendencies.
- le-mark 8y ago
  It's all tabloid news now; calf born with two heads, Grandma abducted by aliens, tells all! It a consequence of the death of journalism in my opinion. We're all worse off.
- MBCook 8y ago
  I’ve gotten to that point too. Even before things got so much worse in the last two years I had already mostly tuned out of news because it stopped being journalism. I would 100% tune out near the end of election cycles. So much of it is just straight reporting. “X said this, Y said that.” No analysis, no critical thought as to whether any of those few points worth presenting at all. Just clips of people’s claims, totally unchecked. If I wanted to know what a candidate or CEO said without any analysis, I could just read their press release.
  - repolfx 8y ago
    Seems everyone is tuning out but for different reasons. I still read a lot of news, but I don't like the dish I'm being served, exactly because it is not just straight reporting but rather is a non-stop stream of journalists' personal political opinions masquerading as analysis and news. I actually would prefer to just read their press releases unfiltered, if there was an organisation that aggregated the ones I'd happen to be interested in, in a trustworthy way.
pjc50 8y ago
As has been pointed out, in lots of areas a "balanced" view doesn't make sense. I'm reminded of the judgement of Solomon dictating that, to settle a dispute between two women as to whom a baby belonged to, it should be cut in half and they be given half each. For a lot of social issues, being given the midpoint solution is like being given half a baby. "All humans are created equal and endowed with rights" is a radical proposition which we are still working out all the implications of after several hundred years; any deviation from that (ie "some humans are intrinsically (not as a result of their actions) inferior") starts you down the road of partitioning society and justifying worse and worse treatment of those deemed inferior.
- tmorton 8y ago
  > For a lot of social issues, being given the midpoint solution is like being given half a baby. I think this cuts to the heart of the issue - and demonstrates the problem with this line of thinking. I also think you're missing the point of the Solomon story. When Solomon proposed that solution, one woman said "No, no - give her the baby." That woman was willing to compromise. She was willing to compromise all the way, to lose the entire dispute, to preserve the important thing they were fighting over. Solomon didn't actually plan to cut the baby in half. On many social issues, there is a negative-sum, "burn it all down" solution that leaves both sides worse. Which side reaches for that option? Which side is willing to sacrifice the deeper issue in order to "win"? That's the side that deserves to lose.
  - deleted 8y ago
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  - badrabbit 8y ago
    I think he got the point just fine. She was willing to compromise because half a baby is a dead baby. She would compromise on whether or not the baby was in her possesion but she could not compromise on the state of the baby. It is better to lose the whole war than to lose what you value the most. Losing could mean many things,not just loss of possession.
  - lotsofpulp 8y ago
grigjd3 8y ago
It may not be a universal result. It's an ml algorithm optimizing for engagement. If ten users watches mild entertainment for 30 minutes and one user watches conspiracy theories for five hours straight, the algorithm hones in on that case. I don't know if this is generally true or not, but I do know the algorithm regularly comes up with stuff I'm not interested in so I get bored and do something else.
cynoclast 8y ago
We want to feel better than others, and through that shore up our insecurities. Being more 'extreme' is the easiest and most obvious way to do that, even if being more extreme means virtue signalling in more ways, or being more of a victim, or being richer, or having more cars.
AJ007 8y ago
Elon Musk and Nick Bostrom were mocked for warning about the dangers of powerful future AI. I've said this here before, the primary use cases of machine learning right now, today, are hostile. That does not bode well for our future. We have very manipulative advertising, mass surveillance used to put ethnic and religious minorities in concentration camps in China, and in YouTube's case, recommending a lot of totally junk science to people who just want to learn new things. I'm afraid these four things probably impact way more people than translation systems and self driving vehicles right now. I am completely in favor of the internet as an uncensored communications platform. However, in a war of ideas, there is a giant chasm between making a propaganda video of any sort available to watch in an archive and showing the stickiest propaganda video to those who are most likely to be retained watching it. When I was at NIPS last year, the only person I heard get really angry about something, from an ethical standpoint, was relating to deep fakes. If you are a researcher or a project developer, you need to think really hard about what you are building, because soon you won't be the one building it. edit: I don't think YouTube should solely be singled out for bad recommendations. Netflix has a lot of junk science on their platform and my assumption is their algorithms are bumping it to the top. In their case they have to proactively go out and pay for licensing for those videos, which is really inexcusable.
- b0rsuk 8y ago
  If you watch the 20ish minute talk, she really doesn't limit it to youtube, but also talks about Facebook, Twitter etc.
- beefield 8y ago
  > I've said this here before, the primary use cases of machine learning right now, today, are hostile Yes. As I think that it is quite obvious the majority of current AI is only superficially designed to help me, while fundamentally they are designed quite successfully to f#ck me and get my money, I have occasionally tried to figure out ways to somehow level the playing field against the current crop of AI, but it is difficult. One of the only tools actually having any effect is adblocking. And if I engage in that, I am blamed that I strip content creators of their income. I guess the fundamental problem is that nobody has any economic incentive to fight against the current AI army, while a large bunch of people seem to actually enjoy getting manipulated (to buy unnecessary stuff or get radicalized to some fringe ideology) by our machine overlords.
CommieBobDole 8y ago
>what does it say about us humans that we fall for progressively more extreme stuff? Perhaps that few people actually hold balanced views and nowadays a compromise is looked down upon and a mark of a weak character? It says we are the way that we are. The human brain is full of little quirks and cognitive biases that unavoidably shape our behavior, at least on the large scale. Anyone who builds a system or an organization or a movement ignores them at their peril. This happens to be one of them.
b0rsuk 8y ago
I found an alternate explaination which hadn't occured to me at the time. It's not necessarily that most people don't like balanced views. It may be just most people aren't excited by balanced views. Extreme views are more emotion provoking, even if you disagree with them. But if the algorithm actually sends you nothing but extreme views, you may eventually start having doubts and become a new convert. The joke's on you. It's like the pickup advice (I smell downvotes again) that when it comes to women, it's better to be outrageous than boring.
- MBCook 8y ago
  And of course there’s another side to this cycle. More extreme stuff gets viewed more. More views means more ad revenue and a higher tier. That only incentivize people to make even more extreme stuff. When these were webpages with a handful of a handful of ads didn’t matter that much. Now one of the largest media platforms on the planet is actively pushing this stuff (unintentionally) at everyone so it’s actually having an effect.
tripzilch 8y ago
> My comment: what does it say about us humans that we fall for progressively more extreme stuff? Simply that we're biological creatures. The response to a stimulus is proportional to the strength of the stimulus. Also see: supernormal stimuli. There is no sufficient dampening factor towards the extremes because the stimulus/response mechanism evolved well before we were vertebrate. It wasn't designed for sentient beings able to manipulate their environment to such an extent that it becomes such a powerful feedback loop. For those unfamiliar with the theory of supernormal stimuli, think about super hero comic book characters. In particular the female ones. They are simultaneously both incredibly attractive and would seem grotesque if you were to encounter a real human being with the same body proportions. The fact is that our response to stimuli which are "larger than life" just keeps increasing. It's not that it stops or saturates, it's just that usually there are counteracting stimuli saying e.g. "this is deformity and thus unattractive". But the balance between these varies per person (and per moment, per instance, etc), and it basically becomes a screaming match between two opposing forces. Sometimes the opposing stimulus is too weak, can't be cranked up to eleven as much, or is simply nonexistent. Especially with abstract stimuli based on social constructs, especially inside filter bubbles or echo chambers. Sadly it is these unopposed stimuli that survive a screaming match, not the balanced ones. Which is exactly what we're seeing today. Combine this with Baudrillard's theories on simulacra and the hyperreal, and you get our current Strange Times, heading towards a breaking point until either someone gets a fucking grip on things, the collapse or possibly something even weirder.

by b0rsuk 8y ago

walrus01 8y ago

I very strongly recommend watching the video of Zeynep's presentation on this subject.

TangoTrotFox 8y ago

I think the answer lay almost entirely with echo chambers. These exist not only in the digital world, but even increasingly in the real world as people connect to people through digital filtering. Vegetarianism is a good example. Many, though not all, vegetarians are going to be going in that direction due to some form of objection to how animals are treated. But when you surround them with nothing but other people who hold views that are at least as far away from the mean, they're going to suddenly seem quite trite. And this pushes people ever further down one path or another. By contrast when you have a diverse array of views, the real position of stances can be clearly seen. That is to say for one that agrees that eating meat implies inherent mistreatment of animals, vegetarians are already taking a more active stance than ~97% of Americans. The same would be approximately true for those that e.g. go for fish + veggie diets. But in a world where those 3% are surrounded by only those 3%, vegetarians are extremely 'conservative' in their views. The whole thing is people need to surround themselves with a good number of people they disagree with on things. But this is not an easy thing to do, and so most people do not. And in fact even things like voting systems on these social media sites discourage such behavior. Many people do not downvote as a matter of something being inappropriate, they downvote because of disagreement. And that pushes views that go against the plurality's grain further and further out of site to the point that people no longer even think they exist. And of course on another site the exact view bias is instead being pushed to the top with everything else being removed out of the groupthink. It's not a very dangerous problem for a democratic nation.

BaronSamedi 8y ago
"The whole thing is people need to surround themselves with a good number of people they disagree with on things." I agree with this sentiment. I think, however, a more fundamental problem lies with peoples' attitude toward their own ideas and towards the ideas of others. People have an apparently irresistible tendency to moralize; to consider their ideas as "good" and contrary ones as "bad". Once the moralizing starts, reasonable discussion becomes difficult if not impossible. Disagreements quickly devolve into the two sides calling each other evil. Given this I would rephrase your statement as, people need to surround themselves with those who hold their opinions more lightly and who avoid moralizing. When people acknowledge that their opinions are simply their personal preferences rather than moral truths, genuine discussion becomes possible. In your example of vegetarianism, consider the different response one might get if one says, "I prefer to avoid eating meat" versus "Eating meat is wrong". The first opens up the possibility for mutual understanding, the second is sure to launch a flamewar.
- yesenadam 8y ago
  people need to surround themselves with those who hold their opinions more lightly and who avoid moralizing. When people acknowledge that their opinions are simply their personal preferences... Well, that sure sounds like 'moralizing' to me, and I don't think you realize it. If you don't care much about anything, well ok. But that's no virtue. It sounds close to the relativism that talks of "true for me" and "true for you". For example, I think we have no right to kill and eat animals, much less subject them to horrific lives. (So I'm vegan) This to me isn't a 'personal preference' or 'opinion'. It is a major moral and ethical issue, much like, say, slavery was/is. People disgusted by slavery didn't say it was 'simply their personal preference' not to own slaves, that it was merely their 'opinion' that slavery was wrong. That would have been ludicrous. We'd still have slavery if people had talked like that. And no doubt you had pro-slavery people in the 19th C giving the same lofty advice: "People need to surround themselves with those who hold their opinions more lightly and who avoid moralizing. When people acknowledge that their opinions are simply their personal preferences rather than moral truths, genuine discussion becomes possible..."

ddebernardy 8y ago

She recently got interviewed in Ezra Klein's show to discuss the same: https://art19.com/shows/the-ezra-klein-show/episodes/109611fa-b762-49ba-a954-0489a827ed06 https://art19.com/shows/the-ezra-klein-show/episodes/109611f... To paraphrase one of the better soundbites in the show: YouTube is like that friend in high school who always outdoes you no matter what you do. You're vegetarian, she's vegan; you're moderate left or right, she's at the more extreme end of the political spectrum; etc.

codq 8y ago
Thanks for using this Art19 link, I’d never heard of this company. Glad to know there are folks out there hard at work ruining podcasts.
- ddebernardy 8y ago
  Out of curiosity, why are you writing they're ruining podcasts? (FWIW, I wasn't aware of them until today, when I searched that podcast's permalink on their site.)
  - Chickenality 8y ago
    This is my first time hearing about art19. But after a quick visit to their site, I can guess at what GP was referring to. Looks like they do listener tracking, targeted ads, dynamic ad insertion, etc.

dragonwriter 8y ago

> She has a hypothesis it works this way because the goal is to make people spend as much time on a site as possible, and feeding people progressively more extreme content works for that. While I understand the attractiveness of conspiratorial hypotheses, I think there is a simple explanation that applies to recommendation systems generally: such systems are designed, overtly, to identify content the user is likely to react positively the, based on what information it has about population-wide preferences. When it knows nothing (or nearly so) about your personal preferences, the only thing it can do is recommend the most widely accepted content. As it learns more about your preferences, it has more basis to predict things that you will find meert your preferences that are less widely supported in the population at large—so, over time, it naturally rexommwnds more content that is extreme.)

pfisch 8y ago
I don't really see why this is a conspiratorial hypotheses. The goal of youtube is to keep you on youtube watching videos with ads. That is what they are trying to do, and it happens to coincide with pushing extreme content as an unintended side effect.
- pulisse 8y ago
  Exactly. No one here, least of all Tufekci, is claiming that YouTube has deliberately engineered their recommendation system to favor extreme content. The argument is that it's an unintended consequence of how the YouTube recommender's objective function interacts with human psychology: (1) YouTube trains its recommenders to maximize time on site. (2) It's a sad fact about humans that sensationalistic or extreme content is highly engaging. (3) YouTube's recommendation system thus learns to serve up sensationalistic and extreme content.
deleted 8y ago
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MrQuincle 8y ago
To have an algorithm that favors extreme content above non-extreme content because it keeps people hooked is indeed unlikely to be programmed directly. I actually don't think it's learning personal preferences like you suggest either. It likely is a collaborative filtering method. You get served what people "similar to you" have watched most. Similarity is based on your watching behavior. If you watched 1,2,5,6,7 and someone else 1,2,6,7,8. You will be recommended 8 as well. It would be interesting to come up with an algorithm that suggest favorites of subgroups of viewers you don't belong to.

ben_w 8y ago

> what does it say about us humans that we fall for progressively more extreme stuff? Perhaps that few people actually hold balanced views and nowadays a compromise is looked down upon and a mark of a weak character? I was thinking about this recently. I doubt that it’s primarily an inability to compromise (though that exists when the politics are tied to tribal sense of identity), but more that each of our personal Overton windows is defined by about as many binary bits as we have slots in our working memory — if you can write an article with the title “Five Time My Side Was Epic” or “Five Times The Other Side Was Evil” then you can be blind to the mistakes of your own and the goodness of the others. Might even be less than working memory, because we sometimes double-count.

cf498 8y ago
I doubt that the general mass of people with "extreme" political beliefs do so out of thinking that "their side" is better. It is that some positions are so fundamentally indefensible for them that there is no middle ground, no compromise possible since they are contradicting and irreconcilable. And there are some of those fundamental issues. Basic human rights are not up for discussion or compromise for a lot of people. This comic summed it up rather well https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DHQGsnPUQAAfMgB.jpg:large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DHQGsnPUQAAfMgB.jpg:large What are you willing to compromise when it comes to the right to exist? Only some get killed? Its of course a hyperbole, but I think thats the mechanic that leads to ever increasing factions that are completely opposed with extreme positions. You always had issues you were not willing to compromise on, but you rarely came into contact with people holding the completely opposing position. Of course there was the city whack job, but he was just that. Some guy. The point of reference was on representatives of "the other side". Politicians and so on. Which had to press (ideally of course) for a position that was the middle ground of his constituency, which was generally not the most extreme one to not scare away more moderate voters. Real conflict here came from fundamentally opposing that consensus of a large group. With the death of political parties and movements you dont have that representation of the found consensus of the other side anylonger. Everyone can get a platform on the internet and the most extreme positions get the biggest coverage. If you hear often enough about extremist whackjobs in some group, you will sooner or later look for a group opposing those whackjobs. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/07/poll-americans-fear-election-clinton-trump-160715092852340.html https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/07/poll-americans-fear-e... I think we can witness that for a while now. You dont think "your side is right", its just that the perceived alternative is absolute horror.

dnomad 8y ago

> My comment: what does it say about us humans that we fall for progressively more extreme stuff? This is the fundamental question. Every YouTuber quickly figures out that the more extreme content you produce the more views you get. This is how something as silly (but harmless) as the Atheist Youtube community degenerates into idiots raging about feminists and denying 9/11. YouTube is just a market where the endless demand for extreme content can find a ready willing suppliers. What it looks like is that YouTube is just a mass demonstration of the Fundamental Law of Group Polarization [1]: low cost communities must enforce high cost penalties. The easier it is to enter a community the more extreme the community must fight outsiders and punish internal deviancy -- otherwise the community will simply dissolve. This is the logical conclusion of Iannaccone [2]. YouTube communities, being based on videos that absolutely anybody can post and watch, is as low cost to enter as it gets. Given such bare minimum entry costs, YouTube viewers rationally want "proof" that everybody else (the video creator, the paying supporters and the supporters who just watch/subscribe/like) really are dedicated and it's worth sticking around in the community. This proof comes in the form of producing and consuming more quantity of video hours and more extreme content. The genius of YouTube it that it implicitly understands the "race from zero" dynamic at work and every feature of the site is designed to exploit it. People get hung up on the algorithm but the algorithm is a very small part of it. Everything about YouTube: its anonymity, its system of subscribes and likes and the very prominent display of these numbers, the YouTube format which so often includes somebody staring directly into a camera trying to make direct eye contact with the viewer, the confessionary content, the RL social events -- invites users to prove that they are truly dedicated members of these low cost communities. (Google really missed the ball with paid donations, btw. The company is so hung up on advertising they didn't realize that YouTube viewers would leap at the chance to just give straight cash to their favorite creators.) In conclusion (1) Google could turn off the recommendation algorithm tomorrow and it would at best slow down YouTube's extremism (2) there's enormous profit to be made given the fundamental dynamics of the site because (3) there's nothing unique about YouTube here, we see the same dynamics at work in politics, religion, sports, and plenty of other free sites like reddit and Facebook. Once you have people participating in these low cost communities the communities will naturally polarize in order to preserve themselves. This is not going to change any time soon, really, it's the new norm. [2] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.475.6086&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.475... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization

sureaboutthis 8y ago

More and more I find people who have done what I do; I don't watch TV "news" anymore and ignore almost every "news" article or posting online. Unless the headline might be a topic I'm specifically interested in and think it affects me I don't give it the time.

deleted 8y ago
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wu-ikkyu 8y ago
I'm in the same camp. It seems the "news", in general, is a buffer overflow of malicious information that serves to override our logical thought processes with negative emotions and irrational tendencies.
le-mark 8y ago
It's all tabloid news now; calf born with two heads, Grandma abducted by aliens, tells all! It a consequence of the death of journalism in my opinion. We're all worse off.
MBCook 8y ago
I’ve gotten to that point too. Even before things got so much worse in the last two years I had already mostly tuned out of news because it stopped being journalism. I would 100% tune out near the end of election cycles. So much of it is just straight reporting. “X said this, Y said that.” No analysis, no critical thought as to whether any of those few points worth presenting at all. Just clips of people’s claims, totally unchecked. If I wanted to know what a candidate or CEO said without any analysis, I could just read their press release.
- repolfx 8y ago
  Seems everyone is tuning out but for different reasons. I still read a lot of news, but I don't like the dish I'm being served, exactly because it is not just straight reporting but rather is a non-stop stream of journalists' personal political opinions masquerading as analysis and news. I actually would prefer to just read their press releases unfiltered, if there was an organisation that aggregated the ones I'd happen to be interested in, in a trustworthy way.

pjc50 8y ago

As has been pointed out, in lots of areas a "balanced" view doesn't make sense. I'm reminded of the judgement of Solomon dictating that, to settle a dispute between two women as to whom a baby belonged to, it should be cut in half and they be given half each. For a lot of social issues, being given the midpoint solution is like being given half a baby. "All humans are created equal and endowed with rights" is a radical proposition which we are still working out all the implications of after several hundred years; any deviation from that (ie "some humans are intrinsically (not as a result of their actions) inferior") starts you down the road of partitioning society and justifying worse and worse treatment of those deemed inferior.

tmorton 8y ago
> For a lot of social issues, being given the midpoint solution is like being given half a baby. I think this cuts to the heart of the issue - and demonstrates the problem with this line of thinking. I also think you're missing the point of the Solomon story. When Solomon proposed that solution, one woman said "No, no - give her the baby." That woman was willing to compromise. She was willing to compromise all the way, to lose the entire dispute, to preserve the important thing they were fighting over. Solomon didn't actually plan to cut the baby in half. On many social issues, there is a negative-sum, "burn it all down" solution that leaves both sides worse. Which side reaches for that option? Which side is willing to sacrifice the deeper issue in order to "win"? That's the side that deserves to lose.
- deleted 8y ago
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- badrabbit 8y ago
  I think he got the point just fine. She was willing to compromise because half a baby is a dead baby. She would compromise on whether or not the baby was in her possesion but she could not compromise on the state of the baby. It is better to lose the whole war than to lose what you value the most. Losing could mean many things,not just loss of possession.
- lotsofpulp 8y ago

grigjd3 8y ago

It may not be a universal result. It's an ml algorithm optimizing for engagement. If ten users watches mild entertainment for 30 minutes and one user watches conspiracy theories for five hours straight, the algorithm hones in on that case. I don't know if this is generally true or not, but I do know the algorithm regularly comes up with stuff I'm not interested in so I get bored and do something else.

cynoclast 8y ago

We want to feel better than others, and through that shore up our insecurities. Being more 'extreme' is the easiest and most obvious way to do that, even if being more extreme means virtue signalling in more ways, or being more of a victim, or being richer, or having more cars.

AJ007 8y ago

Elon Musk and Nick Bostrom were mocked for warning about the dangers of powerful future AI. I've said this here before, the primary use cases of machine learning right now, today, are hostile. That does not bode well for our future. We have very manipulative advertising, mass surveillance used to put ethnic and religious minorities in concentration camps in China, and in YouTube's case, recommending a lot of totally junk science to people who just want to learn new things. I'm afraid these four things probably impact way more people than translation systems and self driving vehicles right now. I am completely in favor of the internet as an uncensored communications platform. However, in a war of ideas, there is a giant chasm between making a propaganda video of any sort available to watch in an archive and showing the stickiest propaganda video to those who are most likely to be retained watching it. When I was at NIPS last year, the only person I heard get really angry about something, from an ethical standpoint, was relating to deep fakes. If you are a researcher or a project developer, you need to think really hard about what you are building, because soon you won't be the one building it. edit: I don't think YouTube should solely be singled out for bad recommendations. Netflix has a lot of junk science on their platform and my assumption is their algorithms are bumping it to the top. In their case they have to proactively go out and pay for licensing for those videos, which is really inexcusable.

b0rsuk 8y ago
If you watch the 20ish minute talk, she really doesn't limit it to youtube, but also talks about Facebook, Twitter etc.
beefield 8y ago
> I've said this here before, the primary use cases of machine learning right now, today, are hostile Yes. As I think that it is quite obvious the majority of current AI is only superficially designed to help me, while fundamentally they are designed quite successfully to f#ck me and get my money, I have occasionally tried to figure out ways to somehow level the playing field against the current crop of AI, but it is difficult. One of the only tools actually having any effect is adblocking. And if I engage in that, I am blamed that I strip content creators of their income. I guess the fundamental problem is that nobody has any economic incentive to fight against the current AI army, while a large bunch of people seem to actually enjoy getting manipulated (to buy unnecessary stuff or get radicalized to some fringe ideology) by our machine overlords.

CommieBobDole 8y ago

>what does it say about us humans that we fall for progressively more extreme stuff? Perhaps that few people actually hold balanced views and nowadays a compromise is looked down upon and a mark of a weak character? It says we are the way that we are. The human brain is full of little quirks and cognitive biases that unavoidably shape our behavior, at least on the large scale. Anyone who builds a system or an organization or a movement ignores them at their peril. This happens to be one of them.

b0rsuk 8y ago

I found an alternate explaination which hadn't occured to me at the time. It's not necessarily that most people don't like balanced views. It may be just most people aren't excited by balanced views. Extreme views are more emotion provoking, even if you disagree with them. But if the algorithm actually sends you nothing but extreme views, you may eventually start having doubts and become a new convert. The joke's on you. It's like the pickup advice (I smell downvotes again) that when it comes to women, it's better to be outrageous than boring.

MBCook 8y ago
And of course there’s another side to this cycle. More extreme stuff gets viewed more. More views means more ad revenue and a higher tier. That only incentivize people to make even more extreme stuff. When these were webpages with a handful of a handful of ads didn’t matter that much. Now one of the largest media platforms on the planet is actively pushing this stuff (unintentionally) at everyone so it’s actually having an effect.

tripzilch 8y ago

> My comment: what does it say about us humans that we fall for progressively more extreme stuff? Simply that we're biological creatures. The response to a stimulus is proportional to the strength of the stimulus. Also see: supernormal stimuli. There is no sufficient dampening factor towards the extremes because the stimulus/response mechanism evolved well before we were vertebrate. It wasn't designed for sentient beings able to manipulate their environment to such an extent that it becomes such a powerful feedback loop. For those unfamiliar with the theory of supernormal stimuli, think about super hero comic book characters. In particular the female ones. They are simultaneously both incredibly attractive and would seem grotesque if you were to encounter a real human being with the same body proportions. The fact is that our response to stimuli which are "larger than life" just keeps increasing. It's not that it stops or saturates, it's just that usually there are counteracting stimuli saying e.g. "this is deformity and thus unattractive". But the balance between these varies per person (and per moment, per instance, etc), and it basically becomes a screaming match between two opposing forces. Sometimes the opposing stimulus is too weak, can't be cranked up to eleven as much, or is simply nonexistent. Especially with abstract stimuli based on social constructs, especially inside filter bubbles or echo chambers. Sadly it is these unopposed stimuli that survive a screaming match, not the balanced ones. Which is exactly what we're seeing today. Combine this with Baudrillard's theories on simulacra and the hyperreal, and you get our current Strange Times, heading towards a breaking point until either someone gets a fucking grip on things, the collapse or possibly something even weirder.