6 ms·

>I feel the same way about cancel culture on twitter -- it is bad in the short term, but if it incentivizes people like Yann Lecunn to leave it -- it reduces th

by Tenoke 6y ago

>I feel the same way about cancel culture on twitter -- it is bad in the short term, but if it incentivizes people like Yann Lecunn to leave it -- it reduces the importance of the medium itself. Given that Twitter is the only platform where interesting ML discussions happen daily with a large amount of actual researchers and practitioners talking about their work directly I'm not sure in what way it's better to have people leave without an alternative. The value just decreases for everyone.

derefr 6y ago
I feel like we need domain-specific Twitter-alike services, that anyone can read (and send DMs on), but only people "in" that domain can make public tweets on. Not a community-specific service, precisely; I'm not talking about the sort of partitioning StackExchange does. I wouldn't want a CS-people-only Twitter. (Cross-pollination of ideas between fields is important!) Nor am I talking about individual independent forums that have their own specific (rivalrous) memberships, where you can't expect network effects to guarantee that J Random Peer-in-your-domain will definitely already be a member. Everyone you wish would be there, should already be there. Like Twitter. But different domains of discourse have different standards/norms, and it'd be helpful to keep each such domain separate, such that people don't try to interact using conflicting standards/norms; but rather will know what the primary set of norms are for their current domain, and will "mode-switch" to using those when they're in that domain. For example, all of "academia" is one domain of discourse, with its own social norms. So we could have one domain-specific Twitter-alike where, to join (and not get banned), you'd have to obey the rules of academic conduct; and to get verified (and so to make public tweets), you'd have to be actively in academia in some way (e.g. maybe you'd need to submit proof-of-identity in the form of the DOI of an academic paper you've written.) Then you could have a separate domain for politicians and talking-heads, where the rules of discourse to follow are those of a political debate, and where user verification happens through a petition of non-verified users, proving that the user has "constituents." I would imagine a blended app where one user account could be active on multiple domains at once, perhaps even with new posts from them collected onto a merged timeline for easy reading; but it'd be important to make clear, for each post, which domain it's in (e.g. by embedding the post within a background theme that represents that domain.) I'd also imagine that getting verified in a second domain after already being verified as something else, would be harder, requiring a manual audit of your specific case. (Sort of like how multi-classing in Dungeons & Dragons is something you're supposed to have a long talk with the DM about.) Not every economist is both a professional academic and a professional political commentator; most are a professional at one and an amateur at the other.
- dogfoods 6y ago
  You've just invented forums, but worse in some ways.
  - derefr 6y ago
    There is no single forum that contains as participants all of academia (and nobody else), with public viewership and the ability to DM the participants. (One might say that Usenet did, at one point, contain all of academia within a few of its hierarchy-roots; but there's nothing stopping random quacks from posting to those. Imagine a version of the 80s where Usenet's sci. hierarchy would only accept posts from actual science departments in universities and research institutions—but where it was still mirrored for reading everywhere else—and you'd be closer.) Really, what I badly re-invented here, was scientific journals, but with a 140-character publication limit ;) Or IRC channels in +v mode, but where there's only 10 of them, and each one has millions of unvoiced members and thousands of voiced members.
- dkonofalski 6y ago
  This seems great in theory but how do you "verify" these types of domains without also instituting some kind of gatekeeping? What's stopping someone from setting up or putting together a "medical" domain where that domain promotes anti-vax ideals. All it takes is for the first person to get verified to hold that ideal and then gatekeep all the other approvals through that lens. Additionally, to use your example, someone could be verified in "academia" by submitting proof of identity or an academic paper but does that then mean that "academia" also needs sub-domains to prevent people like Ben Carson from being leaders in certain fields while also being, arguably, off the deep end in other areas? He's a well-respected doctor in a specific field but also completely ignorant in other medical fields. I don't have a solution but am mostly just curious if this kind of platform is even possible with the number of people online now. It's not like the early days of the internet where there were technical challenges that you had to overcome to make your voice heard. Now, it's so easy to say whatever anyone wants but also so easy to take ownership of the platforms for people to say what's accurate. Case in point: There are 12 users that make up the moderators for something like the top 200 sub-reddits on Reddit where 80%+ of the userbase is.
dogfoods 6y ago
> is the only platform where interesting ML discussions happen daily with a large amount of actual researchers and practitioners talking about their work directly arxiv.org
- Tenoke 6y ago
  There aren't quite that many discussions especially from practitioners rather than almost only researchers.
mft_ 6y ago
If only that group of people was tech-savvy, and could find some other medium or platform to facilitate their discussions.
- Tenoke 6y ago
  Yes, if only it was so easy to solve coordination problems to be able to freely abandon mostly working solutions before we've even done so. Sadly, that's not the world we live in.

by Tenoke 6y ago

derefr 6y ago

I feel like we need domain-specific Twitter-alike services, that anyone can read (and send DMs on), but only people "in" that domain can make public tweets on. Not a community-specific service, precisely; I'm not talking about the sort of partitioning StackExchange does. I wouldn't want a CS-people-only Twitter. (Cross-pollination of ideas between fields is important!) Nor am I talking about individual independent forums that have their own specific (rivalrous) memberships, where you can't expect network effects to guarantee that J Random Peer-in-your-domain will definitely already be a member. Everyone you wish would be there, should already be there. Like Twitter. But different domains of discourse have different standards/norms, and it'd be helpful to keep each such domain separate, such that people don't try to interact using conflicting standards/norms; but rather will know what the primary set of norms are for their current domain, and will "mode-switch" to using those when they're in that domain. For example, all of "academia" is one domain of discourse, with its own social norms. So we could have one domain-specific Twitter-alike where, to join (and not get banned), you'd have to obey the rules of academic conduct; and to get verified (and so to make public tweets), you'd have to be actively in academia in some way (e.g. maybe you'd need to submit proof-of-identity in the form of the DOI of an academic paper you've written.) Then you could have a separate domain for politicians and talking-heads, where the rules of discourse to follow are those of a political debate, and where user verification happens through a petition of non-verified users, proving that the user has "constituents." I would imagine a blended app where one user account could be active on multiple domains at once, perhaps even with new posts from them collected onto a merged timeline for easy reading; but it'd be important to make clear, for each post, which domain it's in (e.g. by embedding the post within a background theme that represents that domain.) I'd also imagine that getting verified in a second domain after already being verified as something else, would be harder, requiring a manual audit of your specific case. (Sort of like how multi-classing in Dungeons & Dragons is something you're supposed to have a long talk with the DM about.) Not every economist is both a professional academic and a professional political commentator; most are a professional at one and an amateur at the other.

dogfoods 6y ago
You've just invented forums, but worse in some ways.
- derefr 6y ago
  There is no single forum that contains as participants all of academia (and nobody else), with public viewership and the ability to DM the participants. (One might say that Usenet did, at one point, contain all of academia within a few of its hierarchy-roots; but there's nothing stopping random quacks from posting to those. Imagine a version of the 80s where Usenet's sci. hierarchy would only accept posts from actual science departments in universities and research institutions—but where it was still mirrored for reading everywhere else—and you'd be closer.) Really, what I badly re-invented here, was scientific journals, but with a 140-character publication limit ;) Or IRC channels in +v mode, but where there's only 10 of them, and each one has millions of unvoiced members and thousands of voiced members.
dkonofalski 6y ago
This seems great in theory but how do you "verify" these types of domains without also instituting some kind of gatekeeping? What's stopping someone from setting up or putting together a "medical" domain where that domain promotes anti-vax ideals. All it takes is for the first person to get verified to hold that ideal and then gatekeep all the other approvals through that lens. Additionally, to use your example, someone could be verified in "academia" by submitting proof of identity or an academic paper but does that then mean that "academia" also needs sub-domains to prevent people like Ben Carson from being leaders in certain fields while also being, arguably, off the deep end in other areas? He's a well-respected doctor in a specific field but also completely ignorant in other medical fields. I don't have a solution but am mostly just curious if this kind of platform is even possible with the number of people online now. It's not like the early days of the internet where there were technical challenges that you had to overcome to make your voice heard. Now, it's so easy to say whatever anyone wants but also so easy to take ownership of the platforms for people to say what's accurate. Case in point: There are 12 users that make up the moderators for something like the top 200 sub-reddits on Reddit where 80%+ of the userbase is.

dogfoods 6y ago

> is the only platform where interesting ML discussions happen daily with a large amount of actual researchers and practitioners talking about their work directly arxiv.org

Tenoke 6y ago
There aren't quite that many discussions especially from practitioners rather than almost only researchers.

mft_ 6y ago

If only that group of people was tech-savvy, and could find some other medium or platform to facilitate their discussions.

Tenoke 6y ago
Yes, if only it was so easy to solve coordination problems to be able to freely abandon mostly working solutions before we've even done so. Sadly, that's not the world we live in.